It's wild that there was a part of this study in which people were told that they weren't taking a psychadelic, but they were taking a psychadelic.
> This study used a ‘self-blinding’ citizen science initiative, where participants were given online instructions on how to incorporate placebo control into their microdosing routine without clinical supervision. The study was completed by 191 participants, making it the largest placebo-controlled trial on psychedelics to-date.
So everyone in the study presumably was interested in microdosing and, given that they would have sourced the drugs themselves, knew what they could have been taking.
Unless I’m misunderstanding. Either way, the methodology here seems really suspect to me.
It devised a so-called self-blinding process, in which participants filled opaque capsules with drugs or a placebo. The capsules were then placed in envelopes with a QR code and shuffled, meaning researchers could later track what participants had taken, while they themselves could not.The study heavily builds on self-reported belief about group membership (placebo or treatment [microdose]) for each trial day. If someone believes they are on shrooms all the time while not, and their psychological parameters improve, it's placebo. If someone produces some arbitrary pattern of on-off while actually not on anything, that's just noise for the study. That's why there's statistical significance testing.
I’m going to say few to none.
This study seems very unreliable, and I wouldn’t count out the possibility that it is junk science published to drive down stock prices of psychedelic health companies.
One one hand I'm inclined to believe the study because it confirms the placebo effect. (Which is very well established, plus the theory and the data are simple. The result is completely in concordance with the regular ineffectiveness of most low-dose not-really-psychoactive medications - meaning how SSRIs and other anti-depressants are about as effective as placebo.) On the other hand it's also possible that the study is junk, like most studies.
> How many of the participants tested that their drugs actually contained the correct amount of the correct compound?
https://elifesciences.org/articles/62878
"The inclusion criteria were: >18 years of age, good understanding of English, intention to microdose with psychedelics, previous experience with psychedelics (either micro- or macrodosing), no use of psychedelic drugs from a week before the start until the completion of the post-regime timepoint (other than the study’s microdoses), and willingness to follow the study protocol."
Of course it's still citizen science. So who knows really.