Dr. Craig Slattery

The heart is going to speed up.

So tachycardia, your heart rate will go through the roof to try and basically keep the circulation going.

Your blood pressure will drop dramatically because there's now less fluid in the system to keep the pressure up.

And as you said, the kidneys are at risk of long-term damage.

But

Acutely, you can cause cardiac arrhythmias and potentially heart attacks, and unfortunately,

people around the world have have died as a direct result of the treatment well you'd wonder why anybody would want to do this but it is being promoted as you said as a detox because people are having these physical symptoms and then they're having understandably hallucinations as a result so people are saying well this is why we should do it because it's connecting with your chakras it's cleansing body and mind you say that's all claptrap yeah i mean it's

I suppose it's, and I'm not drawing an equivalence, but you could liken it to people undertaking physically challenging sports, even an extreme sport, and a lot of people will challenge the body by going through, effectively,

mid-level trauma you know you go out and you run a marathon that's putting that system under stress and when you go through something like that there's kind of a you know a lot of neurotransmitters are released endorphins and the system and people will talk about the buzz that they get from kind of challenging themselves and going through that so there's

I suppose the psychological journey of going through this traumatic event and coming out the far side, there is a natural kind of high associated with that.

But also, as you say, there has been some analysis done on this poison from the secretion from the tree frogs.

There are agents in there.

There are molecules that look a lot like opioids, so things that interact with the opioid receptors in the brain.

they do cause or could cause altered mental state.

Those effects are going to be very real, but the problem is that the physiological stress you're putting the body under, that is very problematic and it's very risky.

I read about a similar sort of a detox called ayahuasca, which people might be familiar with.

I know when I was reading Will Smith's autobiography, he had done it about nine times.

Is that equally as risky?

I suppose where I would come from, and I think a lot of my colleagues would come from, would be a place of anything that is going to put the body under stress like that.

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