The life-changing effect of LSD for me was a profound shift in the clarity of my thinking, like gaining a new superpower (compared to my prior, foggy brain) overnight. I'll always be thankful for that first trip.
As one start onto the trail of established science on the phenomenon, here’s a review paper from 2015: Psychedelics and immunomodulation: novel approaches and therapeutic opportunities – https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2015.0035...
https://tim.blog/2022/07/27/matt-kaeberlein-life-extension/
There's a transcript linked if you'd rather read/skim it.
It’s super interesting to just stuff the names of the cytokines into Google Scholar and see what pops out. IL-6, IL-10, and TNF-alpha are some of the ones with a lot of papers out. There’s so much more knowledge out there than I could have imagined. It’s like almost nobody reads these papers. It’s wild.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergotamine#Medical_uses
(Many years ago I remember a reddit post of a college student who used his school's lab to convert Ergotamine tablets into LSD and lay blotter. The comments were mostly of people congratulating him for his skill and then telling him to remove his post before he was discovered.)
Chronic activation of sigma-1 receptor evokes nociceptive activation of trigeminal nucleus caudalis in rats – https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbb.2014.06.023
My extremely speculative guess wrapped in hunch clad in doubt is that, well, as a premise, 5-HT2A activation due to psychedelics causes downregulation of that same receptor (5-HT2A). This is known and accepted afaik. And: The 5-HT2A receptor seems to be intimately related to the Sigma-1 receptor – and the Sigma-1 receptor is inside cells – so potentially it is the downregulation of the “outside” 5-HT2A receptor that then allows the Sigma-1 receptor set to get a bit of a break?
Edit: Thing is, word on the street for literally decades has been that LSD and psilocybin help with migraine and cluster headaches. Finally there has been a study on it, which confirms the effect (to a certain degree; it’s a small preliminary study): Exploratory Controlled Study of the Migraine-Suppressing Effects of Psilocybin (2020) – https://doi.org/10.1007/s13311-020-00962-y
Edit: Please note that “immunomodulation” can mean immunosuppression! Take care!
There’s lots of science on this stuff. Surprising amounts. I strongly advocate for reading it. It’s surprisingly readable once some key elements of the jargon are picked up!
The papers do outline some mechanisms that at least don’t exclude the possibility •shrug•
MS is in my family so, yeah. It’s no small thing.
I also feel immensely thankful for it. I nearly dropped out of high school and I bounced around manual labor jobs for a few years. I'm so far away from that fate now it's sometimes hard to reconcile internally.