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Comment by acetoxy | Hacker News Reader

4 months of working with ayahuasca with some of the best shamans in the amazon cured my depression, anxiety and panic attacks. During that time I have seen so many people get cured from all sorts of different issues. It's an amazing medicine.

If you decide to do it, make sure you do some proper research on which centers are good before you go.

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How can someone effectively research which centers are good? It seems really vulnerable to hucksters putting on a good show.

For those wanting to go down this road, where do you even start?

I have never taken ayahuasca, but I have seen many videos on youtube, and read many articles about to understand the nature of an "ayahuasca shaman ritual", as I might call it. I would start with diligent research, and you will probably naturally discover the next steps "down this road" yourself. I understand that the "sanctity" of ayahuasca is revered by many people that are privy to it's "powers", and is not to be taken with any sort of cavalier attitude, as one might see with other psychedelics.

Can YouTube videos be considered research? Are they build on empirical data and peer reviewed?

Don’t get me wrong, go right a head and drink the funky tea, just don’t call monetized experiences of random content producers “research”. If you do that, then you’ll be telling me weed cures broken bones next, or warn me not to vaccinate my children.

Yes, YouTube videos can be considered research, because that word itself does not imply peer review. You may have misunderstood how the word research is being used in this thread.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/research

Definitions 1 "careful or dilligent search" and 3 "the collecting of information about a particular subject" are the forms that were being used in this thread. When @acetoxy suggested doing some research on which centers are good, the idea was to get some info in advance, not to perform perform and publish double blind peer reviewed studies of their effectiveness.

I feel like adding, only because it seems funny & totally apropos to this thread & article on LSD, not to patronize you: try to open your mind to the alternative possibilities.

I don’t think watching YouTube videos qualifify as gathering information, even if it fits within the definition of the word research.

Feel free to do it though, and I take no offense if you disagree with me, but I’d be careful trusting strangers on the internet, especially if you’re considering going to South America to do drugs.

Sure, I totally agree one should be careful about their info & travel & drugs. But, that's what both @acetoxy and @cbluth were already saying.

I assume what you meant to say is that you personally wouldn't trust YouTube as a source of high quality or trustworthy information about drugs in South America, because it's demonstrably and absolutely true that YouTube videos contain information. Millions and millions of people successfully use YouTube to share and gather information on a wide variety of topics.

If you actually wanted to help someone who's trying to be careful, perhaps suggest some more trustworthy sources, or how to find them? What makes a book or person or pamphlet or phone call or any other source any more trustworthy than YouTube? Even if there were scientific research, what makes it trustworthy? Peer reviewed papers are proven wrong all the time. How does one go about being careful?

Start with Erowid.org's overview of it:

https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/ayahuasca/ayahuasca.shtml

Read the Experience reports [1]. These will be the only way you know what to expect: emotional state, temperament, bodyweight, gender and personal pharmacodynamics are all variables.

Trust me, from there you can figure out the rest.

[1] - https://www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Ayahuasca.shtml

Buy ticket to Ecuador / Peru. Head towards Amazon basin. Is advertised around.

Ecuador shaman / healers / dealers whatever you want to call them are government licensed (san pedro / ayuascaha. Peru they are not. You can find good places in both, but more cowboy outfits abound in Peru

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