Suresh Muthukumaraswamy

Great work for psychedelic research to overcome RCT-based epistemic authoritarianism, led by @sdmuthu.bsky.social and @tehseennoorani.bsky.social 👏👏👏.

Thankful for the invite to to collaborate, together with @trpwolff.bsky.social, @mattbagg.bsky.social and others.

osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧪🧠💊

Yet another pointless (scientifically speaking) study of psychedelics. With no placebo response the design is clearly a mess. I guess you can juice your stock price but you’ll never see this get published …

and if you don’t publish your participant information sheets then don’t bother ….

Please god. No more systematic reviews of psychedelics .... (at least for a while 😅)

An open-label pilot trial assessing tolerability and feasibility of LSD microdosing in patients with major depressive disorder (LSDDEP1) Globally, an estimated 260 million people suffer from depression [1], and there is a clear need for the development of new, alternative antidepressant therapies. In light of problems with the tolerabi...

Full study protocol here:

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Fair enough. You’ll note that I wrote that “as a clinical trialist” I wasn’t sorry to see it go. “As a consumer” you are right I am worse off now. We all have many hats we can don ….

I did but nothing changed in my area so I gave up. Also I had deep concern that the loads more regulation it would have introduced is only as useful as the funding that is put into the regulatory system itself… case in point is the the current slashing of the public service.

This won’t be a popular view on the left but as a clinical trialist I am not sad to see the TPA go.

The current clinical trial system works pretty well actually but the TPA had lots of uncertainty/undefined things in it - definitions that could have been really bad….

I’m extremely curious to see more details on this one …

Always exciting to receive the investigational product for a new clinical trial. First time I’ve had one go through a ceremonial blessing process (karakia and waiata) though … (see below for details).

We’ve done this is humans. Paper in submission …

Human Hallucinogen Research: Guidelines for Safety There has recently been a renewal of human research with classical hallucinogens (psychedelics). This paper first briefly discusses the unique history of human hallucinogen research, and then reviews ...

Start here:

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

An investigation of acute Physiological and Psychological Moderators of Psychedelic-induced Personality Change among Healthy Volunteers This study investigated the effects of a single high-dose of psilocybin on personality traits in psychedelic-naïve healthy volunteers. These data orig…

Interesting new study on "personality" change due to psilocybin administration. Lots in here, but just focusing on one element, they found that psilocybin in the lab reduced neuroticism, but not any other aspect of the Big 5. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #psychedelicscience

There is that. The administrative overhead of doing lab /compliance paperwork across 20 sites would be a pain in the balls. I barely have the patience to do it for a single site 😂.

Yeh this struck me as weird as well and I think is intentional and perhaps reflects a negativity bias.

Also hallucinogen is a bit of a weird one. More often than not they are “Pseudo-hallucinogens” as it’s much rarer for the person to actually believe the “hallucinations” are actually real …

Difficult to believe it was costs. I know stuff is expensive in the States but a blood panel here (CNC/LFT/Renal/Thyroid) costs me less than the equivalent of $100 US pp. Scales (DEQ) etc basically free.

Following in the footsteps of lanicemine (AZD6765) and memantine (and PCN-101) as it were ….

Can you elaborate? 🙏

Complexity in MEG/EEG. My prediction is that a good number of results are not actually showing changes in brain “complexity” but reflect spectral power changes - failing to use surrogate data properly.

Some bright PhD/PostDoc should do this. Will make a great paper. I’m too time poor else I would…

Becoming a Marihuana User on JSTOR Howard S. Becker, Becoming a Marihuana User, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Nov., 1953), pp. 235-242

I’m not a sociologist but was introduced to this fabulous paper - Becker (1953) “Becoming a marihuana user”.

Sometimes the archives of academia are amazing!

www.jstor.org/stable/2771989

Yes that is interesting. A lot to think about there.

Honestly I’m still grappling/learning about this type of research. I’m just interested to find out more and muse.

I would be concerned that since the trials can’t be blinded that the estimands can’t uniquely identify treatment effects from placebo/expectancy effects.

The same theoretical issue applies to psychopharmacology and psychotherapy trials but the latter seems to get a pass. I don’t understand why.

Awesome thanks -- will read :D

Ok fair. I'm curious Do people ever try to do the equivalent of a dose/exposure response study as we do in pharmacology ? For example, in this case you could time limit App time in this case.....

💯 agree. I've read your tweets on the other place. I'll send you an email next week ... 😀

Ok so a wait list control. Could you use a dummy app without the key therapeutic ingredients as control (dismantling).

If you get a significant result how will you know it’s not all driven by expectancy effects ?

Some kind of dismantling control condition. But really no idea without reading protocol.

Also curious why 1 is impossible ?

Thanks. Can you send me the link to the protocol ?