Psychedelics: Podcast with Ira Byock
episode
GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
37 min
4 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 10 hours ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Who is Dr. Ira Byock and why is he discussing psychedelics on the podcast?
Welcome to the Jerry Powell Podcast. This is Eric Quadera. This is Alex Smith. And Alex, I spy someone in our studio office.
We have a guest host with us. This is Josh Biddle, who's one of our palliative care fellows at UCSF, who's graduating shortly. Welcome to being a
uh guest host. Thank you very much. Very excited. Love the podcast and happy to be here.
And we we have somebody skyping in.
We have a distinguished guest who's Skyping in from Southern California. This is will be well known to many of our listeners, maybe all, Ira Bayok, who's uh famous author, physician, advocate for better care. He's a director, founding founder and director and CMO of the Institute for Human Caring. Um and uh we're gonna talk to him bait today about psychedelics. Alex. Welcome to the JerryPow
podcast, Ira. It is a pleasure to be here, gentlemen. Really good to be with you.
Uh I gotta admit, Ira, I I ha I'm uh your your number one fan.
How did Dr. Byock become interested in psychedelics and what was his early experience?
Uh I'm such a fan of you that I'm kinda gonna nerd out on this podcast, I gotta
say. Thank you very much. It's you know, it's nice to have I have a a very small fan base, but I'm glad you're one.
Well, we start every podcast with a song. Do you have a song request for Alex?
Absolutely. I I would go with White Rabbit uh by Jefferson Airplane.
Uh I don't need to ask why you're choosing that song, but Alex, do you can you give us a little a little try.
Oh one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small And the ones that mother gives you Don't do anything at all Go as calus When she's ten feet tall. Yeah.
There's a snippet with my cold. As best I could do.
Well th that that song feels very apt for our discussion today on uh psychedelics. And th this um came from a JPSM article titled Oh what was the title again? It was Uh taking psychedelics seriously. Taking psychedelics seriously. How how did you get interested in this as a subject?
I'm Um child of the seventies, right? I was a hippie in uh college and had plenty of experience with the non prescription use of psychedelics. Some of it in your own town, right? That's right. And part of my association with Wright Rabbit is it's a very San Francisco song, uh in in m you know, so this it was an obvious choice by the way. Who's Alice? Alice is Alice in Wonderland. Oh, okay. All right. Okay. I mean she goes down the rabbit hole, right? And and uh has transformative experience where perspectives change a lot. Right. Right. Right. So it's all very very relevant. That song was was about LSD, basically. Mm-hmm. But it was about Alice in Wonderland, of course, as well.
Mm-hmm.
Anyway, I ha so I had experience with psychedelics and it was genuinely transformative. We'll talk about this, but it was not a recreational drug experience by any means whatsoever. I knew early on from the very first m moments of the psychedelic experience that this was something else. And it really for me and I think for many of the people who are associated with that whole hippie thing. This was more important and more profound than it appeared to the rest of the public and probably the way it appears in retrospect. So it was an important experience that I long understood would have potential therapeutic value, as it has for millennia, of course, in indigenous peoples around the world. various types of psychedelics in various cultures uh have been have been used for eons.
So that period of time in my life came and went, partly because of the insights I had. I ended up in medical school and being very interested in working with seriously ill people, whether it be in emergency medicine or critical care or in what has become the field of palliative medicine. I was very aware of the research in the nineteen fifties and sixties. At the time, if you were interested you could find articles about this from time to time in the Atlantic or in Harper's or in various other Look magazine I think Look or Life did a a a big story about it. And so it was really fascinating that there was this psychiatric aspect to it and it seemed to be aucurrent among some of the even literate at the time uh and their therapies.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Dr. Ira Byock and why is he discussing psychedelics on the podcast?
0:00–1:00
2
How did Dr. Byock become interested in psychedelics and what was his early experience?
1:00–5:57
3
What therapeutic benefits do psychedelics offer for seriously ill patients?
5:57–12:45
4
How can psychedelics be safely administered to vulnerable, end‑of‑life patients?
12:45–19:22
5
What are the ethical concerns about clinicians using psychedelics before prescribing them?
19:22–26:39
6
Which agencies control psychedelic drug scheduling and how can policy be changed?
26:39–32:56
7
What research designs does Dr. Byock propose for psilocybin in palliative care?
32:56–37:18
8
How can listeners advocate for more psychedelic research and access?
37:18–37:32
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast
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