Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology & Psychiatry, Director Psychedelics Division, Neuroscape, UCSF
May 16, 2022 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
The Vice article is pretty fair. Big up @shayla__love ; however, this needs addressing: "the people in the study had already been the subjects of previous published work: an open label trial from 2017, and a double blind randomized control trial (DB-RCT) from 2021 that was
published in the New England Journal of Medicine." - It could be read to imply same patients in both trials which isn't accurate. The samples are entirely independent. Another thing: I appreciate the effort to explain the interaction test to readers but we address that test in
May 16, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Thanks to those who've recently sent sweet words of support, also to the friends who were honest with me about "improvements" & for the useful reflections this has invited.
There will be a Vice article appearing in the next day or two covering the topic. I engaged with the author & asked they print or link to our full response, which they've agreed to, which I respect.
May 12, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
One of my least favourite things: professional spats. I also dislike online trolling and echo-chambering via social media driving polarization. I like pluralism and wisdom teaching & am keen to step back from this forum for a while and focus more on family, mindfulness & metta
I felt I had to write a response to what I regarded as an unfair and inaccurate critique of a recent paper of mine, led by the super recent PhD graduate, @neuroDaws, alongside my wise & valued mentor of many years, @ProfDavidNutt . I value critique & so thank those who've
Nov 3, 2021 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Most psychedelic research has examined average outcomes and compared them across time and conditions. One consequence of this approach is it may neglect the relevance of extreme cases and values.
'Extreme value analysis' is a different approach, that endeavours to examine potentially salience extreme values or cases, which despite their relative rarity, are nevertheless important.
Apr 8, 2021 • 46 tweets • 9 min read
Each day until publication at 5pm ET on 14th april, I’ll give some brief about the paper. The trial was a two arm double blind randomised controlled trial in 59 people with major depressive disorder, 30 in what we call the psilocybin group and 29 in the other. Obvs we wanted 60
But circumstances conspired against that. Unrelated, due to covid lockdown in the uk (end of March 2020), we also had to cancel the second of two psilocybin dosing sessions for the final 3 patients, 2 of which it transpired for from the psilocybin condition. I won’t reveal
