Doing research on shrooms is hard, because they're mostly illegal and there are a lot of restrictions in most places Much of the research is simply observational, asking people who already take shrooms what they think of the experience
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So what did the researchers do? They asked people who were already going to microdose shrooms to BLIND AND RANDOMIZE THEMSELVES Super cool idea, and impressively sound methodologypic.twitter.com/5Hf2SYSXcv
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Basically, they got people to put the drug and a placebo into opaque pills, then randomize the selection of the drug so that they didn't know what they were taking over the course of 4 weeks
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Is this open to some bias? Yes, absolutely Is it a genius idea that allows you to conduct really difficult research on illegal drugs cheaply and ethically? Also yes
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Each participant had 4 weeks of randomly taking either a placebo or psilocybin, then recording their mood and mental health on a dozen questionnaires. A slightly modified randomized-crossover trial
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And at the end of the study, the researchers found that there was no meaningful difference between people randomly allocated to take shrooms compared to those who had taken a placebopic.twitter.com/JRNMmqBmoF
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Now, there are drawbacks to this methodology. Firstly, you can only run a study like this on people who were already planning on microdosing psilocybin and who are easy to find online, which it turns out is a somewhat specific grouppic.twitter.com/hccTGek1eE
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There's also definitely potential for unblinding bias - as the researchers note, it's likely that some people checked to see which pills they were takingpic.twitter.com/c2Q1NAePLV
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But all in all, this is not only a really interesting study answering a useful question, it's also a research innovation that's going to be invaluable for the future of research into illegal drugs
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Huxley worked with LSD as a psychedelic for mental health. I'm old enough to remember that era and all the not so scientific research that was going on everywhere with LSD.
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