Sometimes excited The benefits of microdosing – regularly using small amounts of psychedelic drugs like lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) – can be overstated, new research suggests this week. The study found that people who took microdosing experienced psychological benefits, including a greater sense of well-being, but that those benefits were not substantially different from how other people felt when they took a placebo. The findings of the experimental study indicate that at least some of the positive aspects of microdosing can be attributed to the placebo effect, but the study has its own caveats.
Treatment with psychedelic drugs has emerged as a promising approach to improving people’s mental health in recent years. Some studies have suggested that drugs like LSD and psilocybin – the main ingredient in magic mushrooms – may help treat anxiety and depression, especially when combined with therapy. Another survey found evidence of positive changes in the brain cells of animals or people when exposed to psychedelics, further reinforcing the case of a real biological benefit. One method of using these drugs is microdosing, which occurs when people take doses much lower than those used for recreational purposes, on a regular schedule.
Much of the evidence for the benefits of microdosing was based on real-world observations or anecdotal experiences, however, which comes with its limitations. The symptoms reported by some people while taking a medication will improve, for example, even if the medication does not treated the underlying disease that causes these symptoms. A clear way to overcome the limitations of anecdotal evidence is through a placebo-controlled study, but these studies are often expensive and require a lot of time and resources to perform. This is especially true for microdosing studies, as these drugs are still illegal in many countries and scientists have to overcome obstacles to using them in research.
The authors behind this new study, Published at eLife Tuesday, he decided to take a unique approach to conducting his placebo-controlled study. They enlisted the help of people who already made microdoses regularly and then helped them to conduct the experiment on their own.
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These citizen scientists were instructed on how to do the placebo-controlled experiment, so they didn’t know whether they were taking a placebo or the real drug (mostly LSD, but some also took psilocybin). This included placing the drug, which was in powder form, inside opaque gel capsules and then placing those capsules and placebo capsules in envelopes that contained the supply of four doses for one week. Some envelopes would contain nothing but placebo, others would contain a mixture of placebo and the drug.
All envelopes had a QR code attached that would allow researchers to know the contents of each envelope and the specific order of the pills taken that week, but not the volunteers. Some of the study subjects were randomly assigned to microse two of the four weeks and received placebo for the other two weeks, and some were receiving the placebo all the time. During the study, all volunteers regularly completed surveys on their ongoing psychological status.
In all, 191 people completed the experiment, making it the largest placebo-controlled study of its kind, according to the authors. Volunteers with microdosing reported psychological improvements from their baseline, including reduced anxiety and a greater sense of well-being, but so did the people taking the placebo, and in general, there were no significant differences between the three groups.
“The findings suggest that the anecdotal benefits of microdosing can be explained by the placebo effect,” wrote the authors.
There are some important caveats to these findings. On the one hand, the study found a small but statistically significant difference in certain results when comparing the placebo group to the microdose group; these included improvements in mood, energy and creativity. But the researchers argue that there is a mundane explanation for this, too. About 72% of the time, better than chance, the volunteers were able to accurately guess whether they were taking a placebo or a medication. Therefore, it is possible that their expectations of feeling better would increase when they correctly suspected that they had taken the drug instead of the placebo, which means that their blindness was not entirely infallible.
The study was also unable to control variables such as the purity or actual dosage of the microdosing, since it relied on the typical medications that the volunteers were already using (on average, users reported taking 13 micrograms of LSD per dose, but the authors were unable to test how much of the active ingredient people were taking). And while they tried to ensure that people followed the instructions they were given, the very nature of the study meant that they had less control over whether everything was followed correctly. As for the ethics of this research, the authors said that they contacted only self-identified microdosers and that they did not collect any personally identifiable information from them other than their email (the study was released by an external committee).
It is also worth mentioning that psychedelic drugs are being studied and used for mental health in different ways, and microdosing is just one of the approaches. Some researchers have argued that it is the intensive experience of taking psychedelics (in relatively high microdoses or macrodoses), along with guided therapy, that really provides the clearest benefits for people, for example. In 2019, the drug ketamine was adapted in an FDA-approved treatment for depression. This is taken in smaller doses than when taken recreational and under medical supervision, but it can also be a higher dosage than people would take on their own during microdosing.
It is important to note that the authors also note that the study volunteers were generally healthy, with only 7% with a current mental health diagnosis. Therefore, they do not rule out the possibility that microdosing may still be useful for people who experience mental disease.
Of course, no single study should be seen as the final word on any topic, especially when it is based on an experimental approach. Still, the authors hope that their unique study design can be used in the future for other complicated areas of research in which it is difficult to include a placebo control. An immediate benefit could be the cost, as this study required only about 1% of the funding normally used to run a clinical trial. Other possible applications for this approach include the study of CBD, nootropics and nutrition, they wrote.