Shrooms to cure headaches
An individual who suffers from cluster headaches thinks he may have finally found a treatment that works: psychedelic mushrooms. The man, who goes by the name Flash, found no relief at the doctor's office, read that in the 1960s LSD had been tested to relieve migraines. So he decided to eat some psilocybin mushrooms. From The Independent:
He was thrilled to find that the "shadows" evaporated – and stayed away. He began taking a light, sub-hallucinogenic dose of 12 to 20 mushrooms approximately once every three months, and found that he remained symptom-free for nearly a year. "I started to tell people about it," he says, "but they thought I was mad..."Psilocybin to cure cluster headaches (via Further)
A handful of CH sufferers thought there was truth in Flash's unorthodox solution. One man, Bob Wold, decided to start clusterbusters.com, a website devoted to campaigning for research and disseminating information about how to safely use hallucinogenics...
Anecdotal reports of the clusterheads' use of hallucinogens attracted the interest of John Halpern of Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts. Spurred on by the suicide of a colleague who suffered from CH, Halpern and colleague Andrew Sewell interviewed 53 people who had self-medicated with the hallucinogen therapy. The survey results suggested that there was something to Flash's idea after all. The pair published their results in the respected journal Neurology, and Halpern has now submitted a protocol for a Phase-I clinical trial to the university's Institutional Review Board.
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He read that LSD could help him so he took mushrooms. I guess if I had headaches that bad my logic would be just as faulty. Glad to hear it worked though.
And then there's the episode where House takes nitroglycerin to give himself a migraine, then takes LSD to kill the migraine, then takes antidepressants to kill the hallucinations.
PRION @1, According to the article that I link to, he thought psilocybin mushrooms contained LSD.
Darn, i was just about to comment on that House episode...
@#1: How is that faulty logic?
Actually, there is a 3rd season episode "The Jerk" where House gives a patient psilocybin to kill a cluster headache. 10mg was the dosage from the episode I think.
Um, the whole class of anti-migraine drugs -- triptans -- are chemically analogous to triptamines.
There was even a House M.D. episode that nodded to this fact.
Think of it as the difference between pseudoephedrine and methamphetamine, or the difference between novacaine and cocaine.
Damn, everyone mentioned that House episode. Nice catch MooFrank on "The Jerk" episode though:
Dr. Gregory House: Oh, almost forgot, I need to give a 16-year-old magic mushrooms to treat a cluster headache. Is that cool?
Dr. Lisa Cuddy: [sarcastically] No problem.
[House exits her office]
Dr. Lisa Cuddy: [chasing after House] I was being sarcastic!
Dr. Gregory House: Wouldn't look that way in the court transcript.
http://www.maps.org/ for more info :)
I'm just glad something real is being done for CH sufferers. As a seasonal sufferer of CH's they are the worst pain I've ever experienced. It's like there's a little man that sits in my eyeball and he has a million hands that press on my eyeball trying to pop it from the inside out. There have been times that I would do anything to stop the pain. It sort of drives you a little crazy too, my wife said that when I get like that it's pretty scary. While I've never tried the mushroom route, I would be willing to give it a shot if it takes that pain away. They call them Suicide Headaches for a reason.
as i understand it the medical community has been doing a few studies here and there about using shrooms to treat clusters and migraines for years. i remember reading an article on the subject somewhere round abouts 98.
I'm saying it is not logical to go the route he did. There is no way he was misinformed by -serious research- into the subject about the contents of mushrooms. He did not perform said research, which is illogical when attempting to self-medicate with a new drug.
He took a chance. I can say that under the stress of his condition, many of us would be willing to throw caution and logic out the window.
I guess it really is a semantics thing. Perhaps logic is a poor word choice. Maybe we can agree that he was daring?
Oh, BTW thanks for the house references!
Good lord. I wonder what species he took?
For most of the psychoactive psilocybes 12-20 mushrooms is not a "sub-hallucinogenic dose". For common street varieties that many would leave you blown out of your ever-loving mind with the walls writhing around you.
It might fix your headaches, but your liver isn't going to be so happy in the morning.
He took a chance. I can say that under the stress of his condition, many of us would be willing to throw caution and logic out the window.
Indeed. Having mentioned that others have been driven to suicide by his condition, can anyone really fault the guy?
Lucky for me I can post anonymously, because this isn't something I'm hugely into admitting to the general public, BUT I can make the claim the ecstasy cures hemorrhoids.
Not to get into the grizzly deets, but after days of suffering, I had the choice of sucking up the intense pain, or canceling a huge party we'd been planning at our house.
I chose to soldier on, and within hours of dosing, they were gone. Completely. We're talking a miracle. I even told my doctor, who was mystified, but figured it had to do with it causing vascular constriction. Whatever it did, it worked, and they didn't come back.
Shrooms treating CH's has been known for a time. I'm guessing that the guy just needed a justification to get it in writing. Rather than starting his article, "I did a Google search and..."
when presenting this sort of information it might help the novices if you mention that there are several different types of 'shrooms', and that the above mentioned number ingested is relevant to the type of 'shroom' - otherwise someone will take twelve of the wrong type and die. or worse.
Anonymous #12: Liver problems? Can you provide a citation, please?
LSD would be a better choice if they're about the same effect wise. Shrooms vary GREATLY as to their strength. You can't quite gage the effect. LSD can be made to be the same strength each time. Also, that amount of shrooms -even weak ones- would blow your mind. Though not your liver as someone else suggested. The amanitas kill your liver, not the psilocybin ones. The psilocybin one's can give you seizures though. You can still think and function on low doses of lcd. On shrooms you question whether or not you should eat cigarettes and whether or not you are in fact a chair.
Here's a piece I wrote about this for the Boston Phoenix:
http://69.25.198.13/Boston/News/62230-Will-Harvard-drop-acid-again/
@#12, #16: Psychedelic mushrooms which contain psilocin/psilocybin do have toxins which pass through the liver, as does any other drug. However, these hardly put any significant amount of stress on the liver, especially if he is only dosing every three months (I have had friends who shroomed way more often than that and had no adverse effects).
However, it is questionable how well one's liver can deal with the toxins when it is already impaired, as it is often said that alcohol and shrooms are a bad mix.
And for your citation, of course it's from Erowid:
"The mushrooms that contain psilocybin and psilocin will not cause liver damage.
"There are other mushrooms that will cause liver damage if eaten. They contain toxins called amatoxins. The mushrooms which contain these toxins are mostly from the genera Amanita, Galerina, Lepiota, and Conocybe. Amatoxin poisoning is responsible for over 95f mushroom poisoning fatalities. Death is usually in 7 to 10 days due to liver failure."
http://www.shroomery.org/8763/Do-hallucinogenic-mushrooms-cause-liver-damage
There are medical studies underway right now to investigate this. You can learn more about them here:
http://www.maps.org/research/cluster/psilo-lsd/#cluster
and here:
http://www.clusterbusters.com/
The latter is a link to a community support group of cluster headache suffers who have found successful self-treatment using psychedelics. (Cluster headaches are the most intense form of migraines.)
Finally, a bit of self-promotion... there is an annual conference on psychedelics in New York City called Horizons that discusses psychedelics in medicine, culture, creativity, law and spirituality. The 2008 event just happened a few weeks ago.
Learn more about Horizons here:
http://horizonsnyc.org/
And listen to audio from this year here:
http://www.archive.org/details/Horizons2008
when i was younger i used to get bad migraines all the time. then i went on a two month dxm bender (cough syrup) and i never got them again.
of course i wouldn't recommend that
Deadly Galerina's fall into the general description of 'little brown mushroom', and to those who aren't sure what to look for, they can look awfully like a cubinsis.
I found some growing outside the office where I work once, took detailed photos of them and took a spore print and microphotos of the spores to get a positive ID on a myco forum.
I wasn't fooled by them as they are obviously different when you've grown (shh, don't tell) and observed in the wild many varieties.
And, incidentally, mushroom hunting is great fun, it's amazing the variety and beauty you can find. I highly recommend it, even if, like me, you can't stand the taste of the things. They're still a lot of fun and make for great photos.
uh - either those mushrooms are very very small - or something's amiss. I recall watching my roomates in college get blissed on far fewer than his "sub-hallucination" amount cited.
Glad the government protects us from these things.
This is great news! I have suffered from cluster headaches for 10 years. Nothing the doctors have given me has ever helped, mostly their pills just made me sick. I will definitely experiment the next time i have an attack.
#22
I participated in a Bioblitz last June and the whole mushroom thing fascinated me. I was a member of entomology twig, but I kept wandering over to the mycology table to check out the amazing things they were finding. And I sure find a lot of really crazy looking fungus when I go out bug hunting. I agree with you, mushroom hunting is fun even when you don't eat them!
Has the web made good shrooms easier to get?
The magic mushroom that is easiest to find here in Britain is the Psilocybe semilanceata.
12 to 20 of these would be sub-hallucinogenic for most people although I have met people who are more sensitive.
I normally start at about 50 and work up.
Of course they are considerably more potent when fresh so that too is a factor.
I don't usually suffer from headaches myself but I do remember once a gang of us wanted to trip and I had a headache. I tried taking the mushrooms anyway and it did shift it. At the time I thought it was just the relaxation I get when I start to come up.
The wonderful thing about certain psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin) is that they don't just kill the pain (RX meds like sumatriptan, cannabis or codeine are good enough for that) but actually halt the recuring cycle of attacks. For months in my case.
#21: Don't. DXM is a guaranteed brain-rot.
I have to salute anyone who has found a way of eliminating the debilitating pain of migraine or cluster headaches.
There's no drug or therapy that's worse than remaining untreated. I store my guns disassembled in case I get a migraine; I won't be capable of reassembling one if it's bad enough that I'd use it. I did once throw myself down a flight of stairs, but I survived.
That being said: the common "magic mushroom" found growing in cow-pats around the mid-atlantic coast of the USA will blow your mind pretty thoroughly if you eat 12.
Regular poster, but anonymous for this one!
I suffered from CH and ran through the mill of pills etc with no relief.
Medical oxygen helped a minor amount once the terrible attacks hit but I still suffered .
One dosage has kept me cluster free for 2 years now.I only hope MAPS and other involved scientists can somehow bring this relief to all CH afflicted.
My advice to anyone thinking about trying this as a treatment.
Be careful with mushrooms, the doses vary so much even within a single harvest from a single location.
I've had nights where I've eaten 3 mushrooms and had my walls breathing. 12 of the same batch on friends has had little to no effect.
Other times its the opposite (so its not just the individuals tolerance.
The only way to make sure you'll get a fairly even dose is to dry out your mushrooms completely, grind them up in a food processor (to the point they're powder). Then add the powder to a tea or put it into capsules.
All this said I doubt I'll ever eat mushrooms again as they always make me feel twice as sick as I do 'high'. Although my stomach is particularly shit.
Is it just me or are we talking about 12-20 mushrooms every 2 months. b/c in my experience about 3-4 is enough to get you hallucinating on any one occasion.
(captcha: Higher opening. indeed)
Prion @1 and 11 - actually it was not an unreasonable stretch he made. The two psychedelics have sufficiently similar modes of action that they are cross-tolerant - someone who tripped on LSD yesterday will not trip nearly so hard on psilocybin/psilocin today. Same goes for DMT, I hear.
Apashiol @29 - That's interesting, I had no idea. In N. America they're typically P. Cubensis, of which 12-20 would be a very strong dose indeed. More like 3-5 for a psychedelic but not hallucinogenic does.
Okay seriously, why are people discussing mushrooms in terms of quantity of a single "fruit" when we obviously know they can vary hugely from one mushroom to another. I've dosed on species that were .3 grams each and some which reached 7 grams with one shroom.
Weights people, weights. There's a reason you buy an eighth (oz.) of shrooms (or any other drug for that matter) and not some undisclosed quantity of the animal (yes, fungi are closer to mammals than they are to plants).
While that may be true, from a practical perspective it could be more difficult to make sure you don't take more of the substance than you wanted to, after all the dosages for recreational use are measured in micrograms.
Also, mushrooms one can easily cultivate at home for their own use, and assuming they use the same genetic lineage and same substrate they can establish a general idea of the potency of them. They can also be dessicated for extended storage, so you could grow a year's supply all at once for medicative use and save it dried.
Thus, with mushrooms you could potentially never have to expose yourself to a risk of arrest by having to purchase from drug dealers just to treat your medical condition.
// PRION @1, According to the article that I link to, he thought psilocybin mushrooms contained LSD. //
LSD is extremely hard to find these days (actual LSD). Mushrooms are easy to find; they grown on cow poop.
Both are psychedelic. It's not necessarily so much 'faulty logic' as an intuitive leap/chance that related human subjective psychedelic effects my synergize elsewhere.
But as others pointed out, 12 - 20 mushrooms would put you in Terrence McKenna "heroic dose" territory, or beyond! Dried or fresh you'd be conversing with the machine elves for some time.
Probably wouldn't have a headache though.
Yay for MAPS!
@38: they're also both tryptamines! mescaline and mdma are further out, and those are the ones that are harder on the liver, if David Presti of UC Berkeley is to be believed (and he is).
I have suffered from cluster headaches for nearly 8 years now. I had medicine that worked, but without access to medical insurance, I haven't been able to get the medicine in years. I would go to the hospital when they got very bad, and they'd give me a shot to kill the pain. This year, that quit working, and I've been suffering though the headaches on nothing more than high doses of aspirin, which has causes ulcers. This very morning I woke up with one that brought me to tears. I'm in the process of trying this cure now. I took a small dose (half a cup) of powerful mushroom tea. I can't swallow it, because I'm unable to keep it down, so instead, it's soaking in my mouth. It's WORKING!!!!!The pain is nearly gone, and I'm functioning just fine. No hallucinations, not even a body high. But the pain I've been in for the last 3 days is slowly dissipating. Bless you all for this. Maybe I can get back to being a wife and mother without missing days of my life. Thank you so much.