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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> I think everyone should be aware that it’s very likely that each MDMA dose is incurring some level of damage that is either long-term or potentially permanent.

In school, I knew a very smart person who got into drugs, especially MDMA. They later got clean, but when they got brain imaging done for some reason, a doctor who looked at it said they could tell the patient had done a lot of MDMA. Reportedly, the damage was visible on the imaging, and it was characteristic.

I'm sorry that my friend had to learn the hard way, and I'm glad that I was always too scared of drugs to try any myself.

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What is your friend doing now?

They're doing OK now, and working in tech.

They seemed potentially on a less-common career trajectory before they got derailed. But of course people's lives take turns for all kinds of reasons, so who knows whether they could've had a different life.

Not to be rude but gunna have to call BS on this.

I don’t think MDMA usage shows up like this on brain scans, it’s not even like brain scans are that accurate and that nothing else could cause a scan to look bad.

This smacks of very anecdotal “this is your brain on drugs” energy.

Sounds a lot like the "LSD orange" story that gets told over and over

I relayed what my friend said that the doctor said.

I'm sure that a doctor commenting on imaging knows vastly more about the topic than I do. And probably more than you do.

Or are you asserting that I'm BSing, friend was BSing, doctor was BSing, or doctor had been fed BS?

So at this point there is a chain of three people who we have to believe and honestly you’ve left out whatever doctor was doing the imaging - usually a radiologist looks at the imaging and interprets it.

Unless they were doing a scan for “does my brain look like I took a bunch of ecstasy” the probability of the radiologist saying “it looks like the patient did a shit ton of ecstasy is close to zero” .

Secondly there is no characteristic markers for ecstasy use - it doesn’t leave a big X on the brain. This idea is like thinking somebody could look at an xray of a broken bone and name the person who caused the damage.

Lastly the story has the characteristics of a normal BS anecdote , with the allusion to authority (a doctor told me!) and it just so happens to dovetail really well with your life choices and validates you. So yea whiff of BS off this one.

To me, my friend (who's always been sincere) saying that a doctor told them something, is more credible than some random person saying that the chance a doctor actually told them that is close to zero.

This is why using anecdotes to determine truth is not reliable.

do you need to make a study to know if your teenager hasnt showered when they smell bad?

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