Here is my breakdown of the new #psychedelic #microdosing paper published yesterday (tinyurl.com/mrbhk3xd) that was 🔥🔥🔥 since all these flyers were going around at the wonderland meeting👇🍄💊🚨 Healthy males were randomised into LSD (n=40) and placebo (n=40) groups. They received 14 doses of either 10μg LSD or placebo every 3 days for 6 weeks.

💊Psychonauts of the Multiverse, help me!🍄

I am trying to figure out the best approximate dose conversion between #magicmushrooms and #LSD for a study. Based on #science, 100µg LSD ~ 3.2g dried mushroom (see calc 👇). Is this reasonable based on your personal experiences? The number I cite above is based on two papers. The first one tinyurl.com/muarwac6 says: "we estimate that 4 g of typically available dried mushrooms (P. cubensis) delivers the approximate psychoactive equivalent to 25 mg of psilocybin"

Now that #psychedelic trial's lack of blinding is hot again, lets remind ourselves that for most treatments blinding doesn't even work as a concept, eg. mindfulness, psychotherapy, lifestyle interventions etc. Lack of blinding is the rule rather than the exception, a short 🧵 Blinding as a concept only works for pharmacological treatments, but there are many more interventions where 'blinding' does not even work conceptually (see 👆). Nobody is upset that blinding quality is not measured and blinding integrity is not maintained in an exercise trial.

In the @COMPASSPathway trial the 25mg vs 1mg (=placebo) #Psilocybin difference is not only significant statistically, but also clinically. On the MADRS the 'minimal important difference' is ~3-6 points (tinyurl.com/5apzv8h8), the 25mg dose meets this criteria (more context 👇) The 'minimal important difference' sounds like a low bar to cross, but actually most #antidepressants fail to do so relative to #placebo, tinyurl.com/yut6xyhd - thank you @PloederlM for your work on this, would love to hear your take on this trial!

The recent #psilocybin vs. alcoholism trial used an active placebo (diphenhydramine). Despite this ~94% correctly guessed their treatment, showing that blinding didn't work. IMO this shows that active placebos likely wont solve the blinding issue of #psychedelic trials, a 🧵 Active placebos may have perceivable effects, but these wont confuse most patients, because psychedelics have very specific subjective effects. When a patient experiences drug effects, in most cases its easy to decipher whether its due to a psychedelic or some other drug.

Does blinding work in #antidepressant #RCT? Recently there were 2 papers on this topic with opposite conclusions. A🧵on #blinding and why #robustness #DataAnalytics may lead to better #science The two papers are tinyurl.com/2p9atk4t (p1; by @AmeliaJScott, @LSharpeUSYD and @BenColagiuri) and tinyurl.com/mtmtx7m3 (p2; by @Toshi_FRKW and colleagues).

Despite the importance of #blinding in medical research, most trials don't assess blinding integrity, partially because there is no method to adjust trial results for blinding integrity... until now! New preprint with implications for #microdose and #psychedelic research 🧪🧵👇 First, we define activated expectancy bias (AEB), which is an uneven distribution of expectancy effects between treatment arms due to patients recognizing their treatment allocation. AEB can be viewed as residual expectancy bias not eliminated by the trial’s blinding procedure.