> A more holistic approach to health care would be beneficial. I've commented on this elsewhere, but with psychedelics in particular we wind up in a weird spac

> A more holistic approach to health care would be beneficial. I've commented on this elsewhere, but with psychedelics in particular we wind up in a weird space around our normal approaches to health - for instance, there's a lot of effort right now on finding the chemical mechanisms by which psychedelics affect mood, with the goal of creating substances which have the same impact on depression without the phenomenology of the trip. My suspicion is the trip is the treatment, or at least part of it - that the experience of being in an entirely different mindstate, of reacting to the world in a fundamentally different way using different mental pathways for several hours - is a core part of the treatment. Medicine has a bad habit of ignoring the patient's lived experience - to look at the patient broadly as a mechanism, and particularly as a collection of mechanisms, and to see things like hypertension* as something to be treated with a chemical offset and not a reflection of the full factors of a person's life. My hope is that the psychedelics will help us recognize a paradigm shift here (like, in data leading to changes in practice, not just in their normal way), but I think they've still got too much of the taint of the hippie on them to really be taken seriously. * I'm using hypertension as just an example of a particular ailment, I'm not making a statement on the treatment hypertension in particular.