I've been pretty interested in the nootropics community, and I've learned that it seems like the vast majority of effects people experience with nootropics are placebo. It doesn't surprise me that microdosing might be the same.
Dosing acid every morning will do absolutely nil for you if you're just going to continue doing what you always did. You're going to do it with a little bit of an expanded mind, have comparably better creative and abstract thought streams, maybe get to see small glimpses of how your subconscious works during your daytime routine, and appreciate details and life itself more. You might also start interpreting too much into your experience or experience placebo effects.
Nothing of that is permanent, and nothing will change, until you actually start to use it with clear intent as a tool to accelerate forming of new habits and thought patterns for yourself, which is MUCH harder than it sounds like. What LSD is really good at is opening up the flood barriers of your subconscious mind and removing filters off your perception, which then leads to exactly the effects you can use for benefit - that every experience you make while under the influence is immediately ingrained into your neural pathways 100x stronger than usually, and your stream of thought and inner monologue is very.. "clear" and accessible, so you can also apply this effect to your own inner unconscious monologue. This is for example where trauma is continued within yourself. You might have noticed that, if you let your mind chat and run unchecked and unwatched, sometimes it will start to form thoughts and inner monologue that resembles closely how you were treated by your parents in early childhood.
Coupled with downsides of microdosing (and yes, there are downsides), it is a really delicate venture to undertake and you will need good knowledge and experience of psychedelics, psychology and a clear and direct intent, plan and motivation, or you are bound to end up just routinely microdosing for no purpose whatsoever and fuck up your brain chemistry for a while.
Would recommend to some, but definitely not as a routine activity. Max 1 week.
I hear you, but "a few weeks" and N of 1 isn't enough to determine that something isn't placebo.
> Coupled with downsides of microdosing (and yes, there are downsides)
Yeah - I feel like every drug user on hacker news is like the pinnacle of mental health or something because there's a whole batch of people called the mentally ill for whom I can never recommend microdosing, lest they have a panic attack or manic episode.
But sure! Psychedelics are all upside! /s
Sure do. The immediate effects are anything but a placebo, but there is.. gigantic room for interpretation left open regarding actual persistent long-lasting benefits. It's a little bit like the hen and egg problem with psychedelics.. if there's anything that probably always holds true to some extent, it's that you will gain more insight into yourself - whether that is helpful then again depends on what you make out of it.
Intent... if you have none, you leave the room for interpretation open to delusions.
People who experience a placebo effect also think whatever they're given is definitely effective.
If we want to talk about placebo, we really need to define the original purpose. I've heard countless of reasons to microdose by now, most of them are hokum to begin with. I think I did a pretty good job at describing what microdosing is actually useful for: Speeding up the forming of new habits and thought patterns, which is really really difficult and simply taking a small dose of LSD with your morning coffee isn't going to do anything and not going to produce immediate favorable and persistent effects, unlike for example Adderall would, aside of gaining a little bit of a deeper understanding on subconscious processes during your daytime routine.
If you're going to do it, it has to have a very, very clear purpose that also matches the effective profile of LSD, and even then the outcome is not guaranteed. A close friend of mine did not heed these warnings and now suffers from an, arguably, microdosing-induced panic disorder. Is this still a placebo? Possibly, but the effects of psychedelics are anything but a placebo, and their potential power is absolutely insane - but the utility, or harm potential, is directly correlated to what you do with it. Psychedelics are unlike any other substance class. The effects are not predictable like e.g. coffee is, they will send your deepest subconscious workings straight up into aware consciousness and you may not like what you see.
Physical effects of LSD are well documented: More physical endurance, for example.
100%.
> I.e. if your friend took sugar water that you told them had LSD, would they have the same panic disorder?
I see what you're saying. Extremely unlikely, because the effects of psychedelics are not caused by simple knowledge of ingestion. I know this, because I once got sold bad LSD, with close to zero active ingredient, yet I assumed it was a very strong dose, and there were no effects whatsoever. Generally, adding to this, the effects of psychedelics are so extremely strong and all-encompassing this is completely out of the question. Don't take my word for it, ask anyone with experience or read experience reports.
> And also not just the one friend of course, but repeated across many trials.
Sorry, I'm not an expert in this field, I'm a software engineer. Just wanted to share my subjective experiences.
FYI I have microdosed and it felt great but I wasn’t trying to tease out an effect. I think there’s a decent chance that the lift I got was because I felt mischevious, like, i just took some fing acid this morning and here I am at work. Solid lift.
If there is some effect, then a blinded study should show a response. It doesn’t come down to ‘magic’ that works only if you know you’re taking the actual thing and have the right set and setting. By your own example, a blinded study that was run without the important steps you mention should correspondingly show people with both positive and negative effects which would appear in results. If you don’t have these results, then you have a bunk field that is just pseudoscience. Now this study may or may not be of that good a quality, but it goes in the evidence pile.
> Sorry, I'm not an expert in this field, I'm a software engineer. Just wanted to share my subjective experiences.
It’s clear that you’re sharing your subjective experiences, but that is not at all how you presented it, you presented it as though the study is wrong because of your experience. The study could be wrong, but the study is (at least ostensibly) attempting to follow the scientific method. Your dogmatic defence of a technique you clearly believe in (and to be clear, I don’t want to invalidate the benefit you say you have received from it) does not in any way contribute positively to what the objective of science is - to get to the truth.
The broader picture here is that if there are high quality studies that demonstrate that micro dosing has some minor, or even significant effects on subjective experience when appropriately blinded, then it is a field for further study and potential adoption into therapy or other areas in controlled situations. If it shows nothing, then it is like the whole field of pseudoscience where the labours and efforts of people and mis allocation of resources to something that provides no benefit (and, on a re-run of history may never be developed, as opposed to science, which would come out the same way)
Absolutely not. To be clear, I'm not arguing against this study. In fact I absolutely believe the results to be conclusive and am trying to offer a possible explanation based on my experiences.
I very well understand what a placebo is (or, at least, sufficiently enough), maybe the misunderstanding of my intentions behind commenting made it seem like I didn't. With the knowledge that I am arguing for the study and not against it, maybe my comments will make sense in a different way now.
Approaching microdosing as you mention (and as I did) - with a clear goal and very intentionally is the key. But I could never really tell if I made the choices I wanted (not eating a candy bar or something) because the LSD was affecting my thinking or because I had taken the time to set my intentions clearly for the day. Would doing the ritual of microdosing but not taking the LSD have the same effect? I'm not sure. I found the LSD acts as a symbol and a way to signify the day as meaningful and keep my intentions top of mind. Parsing out what part of "success" was attributable to the chemicals and what was attributable to the ritual is very difficult. But in the end, does it matter how it works if it helped change habits?
Me neither. All I know is that the substance is extremely powerful, and beneficial if applied correctly.
> But in the end, does it matter how it works if it helped change habits?
:)
People claim ketamine + "integration therapy" is harmless but it makes the therapy so much more expensive if you have to sit in a room with a medical professional paid by the hour. And a lot of depressed people are not rich.
I was talking about microdosing LSD, although now I wonder if there is such a thing with Ketamine as well. You might like to hear that the country I live in is taking steps to have Ketamine therapy for depression covered by universal basic healthcare soon.
This term disturbs me. Is there really an encoded idealism that says, "just start taking a dose of X" and forget about it? Or am I just misunderstanding this?
No follow up therapy? No behavior modification? No treatment protocol? When do you ever get to a point where you're no longer consuming therapeutics, or is that the end game? Just find the right one and take it forever?
> with Ketamine as well
A known side effect is long term bladder damage. This is precisely the reason I find the logic of "fire-and-forget" around these drugs disturbing.
Regarding your other statements, they mirror very closely what I've also described.
After my first trip I became capable of discerning and understanding lyrics in songs. I am on the spectrum and had a lot of trouble with that prior, but it's as if a path was unblocked.
When I microdosed sclerotia I found that many of my ADHD symptoms were gone. In particular it was far easier to get things done because I didn't feel that I was inertial i.e. prior to that I felt that I needed to put a lot of effort to change my trajectory and start doing things but after that I could "just do it". I know that time moved a lot more slowly and I got things done significantly faster than otherwise.
You can't know 100% unless someone actually swaps your stuff with a placebo, especiall with something that is so hard to measure.
There’s this thing called the placebo crisis going on at the moment, which is making it harder and harder to validate drug candidates: because medicine is improving, people’s faith in it is increasing, which in turn increases the strength of the placebo effect, which raises the bar for drug candidates.
What downsides did you find?
There is no way someone can know if a drug is placebo when self dosed. I have attempted to do placebo tests on my self with some high dose supplements and it means I blind myself to what I am taking by having someone else give me the supplements not telling me if it is the real thing or the placebo. After you do that get back to us.
> Psychedelics bring up your subconscious processes into aware consciousness, and do so to lesser extent even at microdoses.
I would say this is a fantasy born in the sixties. How do you know something was brought up from your subconscious or a delusion created from the medication. You would have to know what was in your subconscious to know it came from there. So this to me is just more woo woo talk.
> Coupled with downsides of microdosing (and yes, there are downsides), it is a really delicate venture to undertake and you will need good knowledge and experience of psychedelics, psychology and a clear and direct intent, plan and motivation, or you are bound to end up just routinely microdosing for no purpose whatsoever and fuck up your brain chemistry for a while.
That does not seem workable for depression. I have to say I am currently struggling with suicidal thoughts and can barely get out of my van do to anything.
Might there be some neurogenesis with LSD, possibly through increasing BDNF https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00099 But can all depression be cured with neurogenesis and therapy? Who knows.
Ketamine has this same property of neurogenesis, as does prozac https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4360216/
There are definitely performance enhancing drugs out there - effects and side effects might not make them viable/worthwhile for everyone - but saying it's mostly placebo is just plain wrong.