5 ms·

> Research papers on it, like https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01336-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01336-3, are appearing in the top sc

> Research papers on it, like https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01336-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01336-3, are appearing in the top science journal in the world and are no less enthusiastic than a press release. The article actually discusses that very paper: > While we’re here, it’s worth talking about the MAPS MDMA-therapy trial itself. In May 2021, to much media fanfare, they published their Phase III clinical trial in Nature Medicine. The trial reported enormous, nearly unbelievable effect sizes: 0.91 of a standard deviation difference in score on a PTSD questionnaire between an MDMA and a placebo group (both groups got therapy). That’s the kind of effect medical researchers fantasise about. > Are these effect sizes plausible? Nature Medicine also published two critical commentaries on the paper. The first one points out the issue we discussed above: that the blinding was almost certainly compromised in the study, since the control group got a completely inert placebo and the treatment group surely could tell whether they’d been given ecstasy. Expectations could have played a major role, and might explain at least some of the huge difference between groups (the commentary also makes the interesting point that researchers used to be required to collect data on which condition patients thought they were in, but since 2010 this is no longer the case. It might be time to bring back this rule). The second commentary asked for studies with more relevant control groups and longer follow-up periods to check the safety of the treatment. The MAPS researchers also responded, somewhat limply. > The journal also published an entirely uncritical commentary co-authored by Imperial College London’s David Nutt. Remember him? He was Fired4Truth as a drugs adviser by the UK Labour government in 2009 for criticising government policy on drug classification; he’s now a major psychedelics researcher who co-authored the psilocybin trial we encountered above. The commentary calls MDMA “remarkable” three separate times in about 1,000 words (it’s true the effect sizes in the study are remarkable, but what if they’re due to expectancy bias?). It also says it’s likely that MDMA “will be an approved medication within a few years”. > So there’s a final potential harm that stems from the breathless hyping and cheerleading of psychedelic treatments way beyond the evidence: it could mean that therapies—which come with their own rare but real dangers—are approved and rolled out to large numbers of patients when we need a lot more evidence that they really are beneficial in the long term.

mountainriver 5y ago
It feels like they actually mostly overlook this study in favor of their thesis that psychedelic research is bogus. The Nature critiques are less than convincing, either way they are doing another phase 3 trial so we will know. My guess is if this scientist did psychedelics he wouldn't have written this article.
- hosh 5y ago
  > My guess is if this scientist did psychedelics he wouldn't have written this article. That was my thought too, though that also runs into the author's argument that psychedelic research is heavily biased by people who have tried it. On the other hand, I think people who have not tried psychedelics have never experienced how much of what they think of as objective, rational mind is actually fairly fluid, and how much the referential frame of experience informs and influences what we'd consider objectivity.
  - uoaei 5y ago
    Psychedelic research is heavily biased by people who have tried it. Physics research is heavily biased by people who live in reality. Oncology research is heavily biased by having study participants who have cancer. Am I missing something?
    - hosh 5y ago
      I think you are missing the referential frame. I don’t know if someone who has never taken psychedelics can adequately understand what it is like, unless they have experienced something similar without taking psychedelic substances. (That is, spontaneous, visionary experiences). There’s an intellectualization of what the person thinks this experience is about, as a substitute for direct experience. A physicist might study physical phenomena, but what they work with are models about those physical phenomena, and then call that “reality”. That isn’t reality. Those are models of physical phenomena with high degree of predictive ability. Rather, if you want to use an example of someone who attempt to directly experience reality, we’re talking about Zen practitioners or one of those non-dual teachers. If you hear them talk, they spend a lot of time saying very plainly, you don’t really experience reality directly. But people hearing it pretty much nod their head and think that they do. As far as oncology research goes, you are right. It is biased towards study participants with cancer. Not only do the _researchers_ themselves are not experiencing cancer themselves (unless they got cancer), but what is _not_ being studied is what health and wholeness looks like and contextualizing cancer that way. Instead, we’re getting to know a lot about the mechanisms of cancer, and the various causal chains of cancer, and this limits our view to that of the body as a machine. That by somehow understanding all the fiddly bits, we would understand the whole, and we won’t.

mountainriver 5y ago

It feels like they actually mostly overlook this study in favor of their thesis that psychedelic research is bogus. The Nature critiques are less than convincing, either way they are doing another phase 3 trial so we will know. My guess is if this scientist did psychedelics he wouldn't have written this article.

hosh 5y ago
> My guess is if this scientist did psychedelics he wouldn't have written this article. That was my thought too, though that also runs into the author's argument that psychedelic research is heavily biased by people who have tried it. On the other hand, I think people who have not tried psychedelics have never experienced how much of what they think of as objective, rational mind is actually fairly fluid, and how much the referential frame of experience informs and influences what we'd consider objectivity.
- uoaei 5y ago
  Psychedelic research is heavily biased by people who have tried it. Physics research is heavily biased by people who live in reality. Oncology research is heavily biased by having study participants who have cancer. Am I missing something?
  - hosh 5y ago
    I think you are missing the referential frame. I don’t know if someone who has never taken psychedelics can adequately understand what it is like, unless they have experienced something similar without taking psychedelic substances. (That is, spontaneous, visionary experiences). There’s an intellectualization of what the person thinks this experience is about, as a substitute for direct experience. A physicist might study physical phenomena, but what they work with are models about those physical phenomena, and then call that “reality”. That isn’t reality. Those are models of physical phenomena with high degree of predictive ability. Rather, if you want to use an example of someone who attempt to directly experience reality, we’re talking about Zen practitioners or one of those non-dual teachers. If you hear them talk, they spend a lot of time saying very plainly, you don’t really experience reality directly. But people hearing it pretty much nod their head and think that they do. As far as oncology research goes, you are right. It is biased towards study participants with cancer. Not only do the _researchers_ themselves are not experiencing cancer themselves (unless they got cancer), but what is _not_ being studied is what health and wholeness looks like and contextualizing cancer that way. Instead, we’re getting to know a lot about the mechanisms of cancer, and the various causal chains of cancer, and this limits our view to that of the body as a machine. That by somehow understanding all the fiddly bits, we would understand the whole, and we won’t.