Woah...that was trippy 😵💫 With psychedelics gaining attention from regulators and the public, scientists are getting creative and asking: How can we study these compounds effectively to really grasp their effects? 🎨: WIRED Staff; Getty Images
The anthropologist Anthony Wallace noticed in the 1950s that Euro-American subjects who took mescaline in the lab had very different experiences than Native Americans who ate peyote buttons as part of religious ceremonies. He suggested the concept of a “culture-controlled trial,” which would test the same drug and the same dose but in different social and cultural contexts.
These factors make the efficacy of a medical intervention “unstable over time and potentially at the whim of social zeitgeist.” Noorani is also credited with the term “the Pollan effect,” or the impact that Michael Pollan’s bookhas had on public perception of psychedelics and, inadvertently, the expectations of clinical trial participants.
There’s no agreement on the best way to find out whether the study participants or researchers can guess what group they’re in, or what their expectations are going into the study. But one way to start addressing this problem is simply to start checking. “Everybody pretends that if you have a placebo control group, that is sufficient to control for the placebo effect,” Imperial College London’s Szigeti said. “That’s not exactly true.
But when Szigeti approached the mental health company Compass Pathways about helping them to include blind breaking and expectancy measures in their upcoming Phase 3 trials of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, they said no. “Costs for them would be basically zero, just a few questionnaires here and there,” Szigeti said. “I even emphasized that I would be happy to analyze it separately from the main trial, not to mess with their business.” They still turned him down.
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