What if you could get all the potential benefits of ketamine without the "trip"? For part two of our series on psychedelics, we look at how some researchers are trying to disentangle the "trip" from the drugs' effects on the brain — and why the answer could help direct the future of psychedelic research. (Spoiler alert: People generally know if they're tripping or not.) This episode: a researcher navigating this challenge by putting his patients to sleep. Catch the rest of this series on psychedelics and related drugs this week by following us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Have other questions about psychedelics and the brain? Let us know by emailing [email protected]! Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
What are the challenges in studying psychedelics?
He saw this patient a couple days after her surgery.
She was almost like dancing. This is, you know, someone who had like a lot of stuff in their belly, like still had drains, bandages. She was like, you know, it was infectious. I thought to myself at the time, like, if she didn't get ketamine, like I'm quitting. Like, I don't know, like, or even, I mean, in retrospect, it was more like, I want to know what, like what we did so we could do it again.
And?
She was in the placebo group.
So statistically, there was no difference between people who got ketamine and people who got placebo.
Boris told me the people who got placebo... They got so much better, they were indistinguishable from the patients who got ketamine.
And even Cindy, who did get ketamine and did feel like it helped her depression symptoms, told me she thought about whether it was really the drug that helped her or other parts of the study. Like what was it that really made her feel better?
I was so stripped raw emotionally that I was so grateful for everybody's participation in my wellness journey. You know, even now, a little bit of love leaks out of my eyes, but it's because of gratitude.
So you're saying that even though she got ketamine, her feeling better could also have been like related to these other parts of the experience, like working closely with Boris and like feeling like people are actually like listening to her.
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