The Frontier Psychiatrists is a daily health-themed newsletter. Today: a psychedelic compound, well on its way to becoming a medicine. The African shrub Iboga has roots, and those roots contain the following compound:
Ibogaine may be the farthest thing from a “fun club drug” you can find. The experience of consciousness alteration and “psychedelic trip” is very stereotyped. It’s also all in your head—people are around to help you physically if you need to get to the bathroom, but, as Nolan R. Williams, M.D. explains:
the ibogaine trip itself is essentially internal and self-directed. People often experience a life review that appears in their mind almost like a slideshow, Williams says. “It somehow drives a particular sort of psychological phenomenon that you don’t achieve through guidance,” he adds.
People describe a similar experience, in which they are in a room, and get to watch a slide show or movie of challenging experiences, with the ability to take a new perspective. For example, this journalist:
During the treatment, I was able to analyze that voice, slow it down, really listen to it, and for the first time, uncover where it came from. It turns out that the voice was based in some deep childhood trauma, as well as genetic experiences passed down through my DNA that weren’t even mine.
The most powerful moment of my experience was when I got to see myself as a little girl, who, because of some things that happened, didn’t feel safe in the world. And I got to hold her, stroke her, tell her I love her, and really help her feel safe.
Through that process, as I came out of the ibogaine treatment, I felt like my whole nervous system had been rewired. And when I listened for the negative voice in my head, it was gone.
I felt this new sense of calm, deep peace, and lightness that I probably haven’t felt since I was two years old. And the lasting effects have been truly remarkable for me.
Lasting effects is the crucial phrase, there. It’s actually beyond lasting—the impact seems to improve outcomes over time for individuals.
Let's look at the paper by Cherian et al.1
Start with table one, but it's a different kind of table one assessment that we usually do in this newsletter because nobody was randomized. Everybody got the active treatment, so there's no difference between groups, everyone is the Study group. So we want to know who is in the group so we know what to think of the study, not randomization succeeded because there was no randomization.
as we can see, in the study of veterans from the special operations community, these are very high intensity operators with extreme degrees of trauma, both physically and emotionally. The average was 5 1/2 deployments, with dozen to 100+ traumatic injuries to the brain.
Most of them had PTSD, half of them had depression, half of them had thought about suicide, and seven had attempted suicide. This is a very high acuity sample. This is suffering like most of us will never know. These are the men who protected our country, our lives, from things so dark that we can never know about them. These are heroes who have suffered for their heroism. The protocol, which they are referred to as MISTIC, leads to remission of anxiety, depression, and trauma, as well as improvements in neurocognitive functioning and all caused disability improvements. These men are less disabled after this treatment.
Let's take a look at the neurocognitive assessments:
Virtually everything improved, the ability to react faster, the ability to continue paying attention, processing speed…
This is taking brains that have been traumatized both emotionally and with literal explosions and making them work all over again.
The people in this research study are heroes, who have been suffering for years after their service to all of us. This is a crucial treatment that heals their wounds, even though we can't see. This needs to be more thoroughly researched, and brought to market, that people can have access to this treatment. People who desperately need people who have served us, and people who we love and respect.
This is a treatment so potentially potent that— for people I hate—I would feel reticent to withhold it from them.
It's worth noting that this is an extremely hard study to do, and it will be extremely hard to blind, if impossible. It's just really hard to make people unaware of whether they've had a life-changing experience like this, so we may need to look at design that look at within subjects controls, because of the challenge of doing a blind control trial comparing between subjects, and not within subjects.
I want to see more.
Cherian, K. N., Keynan, J. N., Anker, L., Faerman, A., Brown, R. E., Shamma, A., ... & Williams, N. R. (2024). Magnesium–ibogaine therapy in veterans with traumatic brain injuries. Nature Medicine, 1-9.
I have made two documentary films about the healing power of Ibogaine, both are available free on YouTube.
The Reality Of Truth with actress Michelle Rodriguez
https://youtu.be/glNJHVJgI2Y?si=t9aVIGoUM7olZqSK
Lamar Odom Reborn
https://youtu.be/6Arr7NlEk_g?si=TWstnc5QrFgkR7Ah
I did Ibogaine myself in 2015, it was a life changer!
Peace. Zappy