> the case highlights the need to educate the public on the dangers of using drugs in ways that they are not prescribed.
Over 5,000 people died last year from antidepressant overdoses thanks to the medical establishment. I view people like mushroom guy as heroes who risk their lives to pursue leads and try and save millions while the medical establishment stumbles it's way around, being careful never to stray too far from the bank.
There are ways to self experiment that make some sense and there are a lot of ways to self experiment that are a good way to get harmed with little hope of upside and describing people who get badly messed up this way as "heroes" is probably a good way to increase the odds of more people getting badly messed up.
I wish there was more support for reasonable self experimentation as an alternative to "You are so completely and thoroughly fucked and no one will help you" but I really don't want to see something like this glorified as heroics because that will tend to get a lot of pushback against more reasonable methods of self experimentation and make it harder to find a constructive path forward.
This would not be the first time that fungus or other plants grew inside the human body. I remember reading about a boy who had a seed get blown into his eye and it sprouted.
When I used to be active on CF lists, someone got the bright idea to inhale some kind of oil using their nebulizer and ended up with pneumonia. You can readily google "oil induced pneumonia" and get articles about lipoid pneumonia. It's a well known phenomenon that inhaling fats or oils blocks the lungs and can cause pneumonia.
The reason we don't like people doing self experimentation is because a lot of people know shockingly little about how their body works and do damn little in the way of due diligence to look stuff up beforehand. I have difficulty imagining that I would inject any kind of fungus into my body for any reason.
That's just not a good way to extract the active ingredient he was looking to ingest, which can be ingested orally just fine from what I gather.
And I don't think we would be calling him a hero. Most likely, we would be claiming "He got lucky" and "It's a wild coincidence -- stranger things have happened" and wouldn't even bother to commission a study to see if it is replicable.
> because a lot of people know shockingly little about how their body works
I agree with this. It took me a solid year of significant studying to get to the point where I could comfortably read a medical research paper, and that was coming from an engineering background.
However, when I look back at my life, some of my most impactful contributions have come from doing dumb risky things in fields I knew nothing about. I think the Kay quote "A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points" applies here. Novices have a different perspective, which sure can be dangerous, but also gives them an 80 IQ point advantage.
Anyway, I agree with your point that it would be nice to make it safer to do biohacking, but at the same time I think we shouldn't be too quick to discourage it, as it's actually a smart strategy for society to have outsiders try things that would seem dumb from an insider's perspective.
Oh I agree 100% we should not be calling him a hero. I'm just saying that ex ante claims about heroism in general (for or against) make little sense if you think heros are determined to be as such only based on the consequences of their actions.
The fundamental issue here is that we only know the medical details because this went so badly that he was taken to a hospital. If it had worked and he felt miraculously better, there would probably be no "official" documentation because he would get on with his life and not see a doctor about it.
I can speak firsthand as to what that gets you. And being labeled a "hero" is not what that gets you.
Pretty sure I'm doing the opposite. Now I think there should be a safer, collaborative way to do biohacking, but BigPharma and the medical establishment is absolutely awful at making us healthier, so turning to them is not the answer. Source: spent a couple years in medical research.
Over 5,000 people died last year from antidepressant overdoses thanks to the medical establishment. I view people like mushroom guy as heroes who risk their lives to pursue leads and try and save millions while the medical establishment stumbles it's way around, being careful never to stray too far from the bank.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/895959/antidepressant-ov...