Psychedelic Mushrooms Work Magic On Cancer Patients

Cancer patients experience immediate, significant and long lasting relief from their existential anxiety and depression when they’re treated with psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms (known as magic mushrooms), and two studies have found. As many as 40% of patients with advanced cancer experience anxiety or depressions, and antidepressants work only about as well as placebo treatments. A study, led by doctors at John Hopkins University School of Medicine, divided into two groups 51 patients with life threatening cancer diagnoses. They were given either a therapeutic or a very low dose of psilocybin in a first treatment, and then got the opposite dose five weeks later. The results “show that psilocybin produced large and significant decreases” in depression, anxiety, “and increases in measures of quality of life, life meaning, death acceptance and optimism,” the authors said. “These effects were sustained at six months.” Roland Griffiths, lead author of the study said, “The finding that a single administration of a relatively short-acting drug has rapid substantial and enduring anti-depressant and anti-anxiety effects is really unprecedented.”