I think the researchers don’t understand how it works.
It’s not that you take mushrooms and suddenly your anxiety decreases. It doesn’t give you anxiety immunity either…
I think it gives you the opportunity to see things from another perspective. If you can make use of this opportunity you can break down your conditioning and maybe free yourself from your anxiety.
It all depends on where you go with it in your head.
Indeed people tend to define microdosing as a dose without a mind-altering trip. The benefits largely come from the trip itself, rather than the trip being a side-effect, so this could be a fruitless venture. I think it is obviously silly that people expect to be able to divorce the effects from the trip. It is still an extremely interesting question to ask what effects come from small sub-perceptual doses of psychedelics.
>The benefits largely come from the trip itself, rather than the trip being a side-effect
Well, that hasn't really been scientifically established, has it? It could simply be an illusion - just because I had a transcendental experience, then I woke up the next day feeling amazing, doesn't necessarily mean the transcendental experience caused me to feel amazing. No doubt there is some truth to it, as people report all kinds of life-affirming revelations that persist when sober, but we shouldn't exclude the possibility of psilocybin as a therapeutic drug in the traditional mould.
An experiment I would like to see is whether the positive after-effects of a macrodose are still measurable if the subject is unconscious the entire time. Helpfully, this would also blind the study, although a possible confounding factor is that medically rendering someone unconscious has after-effects of its own.
I do understand that they are talking about micro dosing. I suppose I don't really know what the definition of micro dosing is. Is it taking something and not crossing the threshold for it to have any effects? If so what would the point of that be... Is it taking the minimum amount to pass the threshold?
I have experienced the effects I talked about above with 300-500 mg doses of raw mushrooms. I don't know the amount of psilocybin... But that is a relatively small dose of mushrooms.
Hey btw sorry I changed my message last minute. I realized I sounded like an asshole so I edited it.
I would say microdosing should allow for the placebo to be effective. So yes, no visible effects. However, it doesn’t seem like they succeeded 100% on that.
“Another caveat is that many people in our study broke blind and they figured out what condition they were assigned to,” van Elk added. “This is a more generic problem for this type of research: the effects of psychedelics are so obvious — even at lower doses — that it is difficult to prevent people from figuring out what condition they are assigned to. If people subsequently figure out that they are in the active/experimental condition (e.g., based on subtle side-effects), this in turn can contribute again to the placebo response.”
It's not hard to figure out you've taken actual mushrooms.
Also
The study included a carefully screened sample of 75 participants who attended a microdosing workshop.
They are apparently testing people with normal levels of depression and anxiety, people who are functional enough to attend a microdosing workshop. Perhaps normal people won't benefit from microdosing, but I don't think this study is conclusive.
I took from the title they were attempting to treat people with clinical or major depression and anxiety where the actual therapeutic research interest lies., but that's not the case.
I'm not advocating microdosing, but it's interesting.
A few weeks doesn't seem like a long enough test period, as they've mentioned.
Psilocybin creates new neural pathways in your brain. It would have been interesting too see if those pathways were better maintained in the active group, months after the experiment.
Different dosing schedules would be interesting if this is the case. Maybe a large dose to start and then small regular doses to reinforce. If that shows promise, then look at tapering off and what the minimal amount would be to maintain the pathways.
It’s not that you take mushrooms and suddenly your anxiety decreases. It doesn’t give you anxiety immunity either…
I think it gives you the opportunity to see things from another perspective. If you can make use of this opportunity you can break down your conditioning and maybe free yourself from your anxiety.
It all depends on where you go with it in your head.