What Went Wrong? MDMA-AT on the Carlat Psychiatry Podcast
The field of psychiatry wasn't engaged by MAPS, and should have been
The Frontier Psychiatrists is a daily-enough health-themed newsletter…that tries to have a laugh while exploring serious topics.
Every once in a while, Owen Muir, M.D., also gets to crank out serious academic work. Much of that has been on topics of neuromodulation, Ai diagnostics, and psychedelic medicine. For new readers, there is a bar at the top of the website version that lets you visit my Google Scholar publications. Or just click here.
I was recently interviewed for the Carlat Psychiatry Podcast about some of these articles, and some of that tape appears in the two-part series they did on what went wrong in the MAPS/Lykos trials, as reviewed by an FDA Advisory Committee recently.
Part 1:
Part 2:
This is not the last word on MDMA-AT, MDMA, or any other psychedelic medicine. It is a reminder that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We have been here before in the medical discipline of psychiatry. Clozapine was a radically different medicine that was both killing people with rare but deadly side effects and appeared more effective than prior treatments.
In the case of clozapine, the FDA required a high bar for approval—it had to be monitored for safety, it needed to be better than existing treatments, and it needed to work in treatment-resistant patients.
I reviewed some of that history in a prior article.
Thanks for reading, listening, and joining the future of psychiatry as we, in a very clumsy manner, try to get to the future without the house of medicine burning down in the process.
I’ll remind readers they can access my prior writing on the topic here—but some of it is behind a paywall. PAY TO SUBSCRIBE. It encourages me :)
Prequels.
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I was hopeful for mdma and disappointed with this news (on many levels)...