Tripping Towards a Cure: How Magic Mushrooms Might Outperform Westminster
Once dismissed as fuel for festivals and bad tattoos, psilocybin is now helping Parkinson’s patients move better, feel better and miraculously without needing to hug a lamppost.
If you’d told me 20 years ago that one day we’d be handing out mushrooms to people with Parkinson’s, I’d have assumed you meant the deep-fried ones served next to a sad lump of gammon at a service station on the M5. But no. These aren’t your average button mushrooms that taste like spongy dishcloths. These are magic mushrooms. The psychedelic kind. The kind that once fuelled Glastonbury, teenage epiphanies and regrettable tattoos.
Yet now they might help people with Parkinson’s. Not just with their mood. Or their anxiety. But with their motor function. That’s right, people taking psilocybin in a clinical trial not only felt better but moved better. Which is, to put it mildly, a very big deal.
Now, I’ve always believed that nature holds a few secrets. When I was having cancer treatment, I was trying everything short of licking moss off a rock if someone told me it might help. If someone had told me that rubbing beetroot on my forehead while chanting to a walnut would ease the side effects, I’d have asked, “Do I need to use organic walnuts, or will Tesco’s own do?”
Since then, I’ve compiled a list of thousands, thousands, of natural compounds that might, just might, help people with cancer. Not cure, mind you; I’m not David Avocado-Wolf or whatever his name is. But maybe take the edge off. Help you sleep. Stop your insides feeling like they’ve been sandblasted by chemotherapy. I’ll publish it one day, likely to great acclaim or a stern warning from the MHRA. - (Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency)…
So the news that magic mushrooms might help people with Parkinson’s doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. What does surprise me is how long it’s taken the medical establishment to give this stuff a try. I mean, let’s be honest, we’ve known mushrooms can do something ever since Dave from Reading wandered off into a field at a music festival and came back believing he was a spoon.
But rather than sneering at psychedelics and classifying them somewhere between criminal and satanic, maybe, just maybe, we should have asked… Why do they work like this? Because if a fungus that looks like a toadstool from Super Mario can ease tremors, improve mood and make people feel more human again, that’s something worth exploring.
Now these patients weren’t just sitting on bean bags listening to whale music. This was a clinical setting. Supervised. Measured. Dosed precisely. Yet still, the results were so encouraging they’re planning a bigger trial. With 100 people. Funded by Michael J. Fox’s foundation and, delightfully, an anonymous donor; presumably someone with a particularly fond memory of the 1970s.
Now side effects did include nausea, anxiety and raised blood pressure. Which, to be fair sounds exactly like what I get when watching Question Time these days. But no serious harm. No reports of people stripping naked and hugging lampposts. Just, on the whole calm, therapeutic progress. Something our elected officials might want to try.
In fact, if you ask me, the entire Cabinet should be dosed immediately. Not a microdose either, I mean the full psychedelic odyssey. Lock them in a room, hand them some mushroom tea and a Radiohead album and see if they come out with the emotional range of a human being and half an idea about how to run a country without burning it to the ground. Because right now, they’re operating like a portobello with brain fog.
Look, I know this won’t be the ultimate cure. But it’s progress. And progress in a field like Parkinson’s is hard-fought and slow. This however, is a reminder that sometimes answers don’t come in a vial in a lab, but in the dirt. Growing under a tree. Looking a bit like it might kill you. But maybe, just maybe, it heals instead.
Here’s to mushrooms. May they continue surprising us… preferably not while I’m driving.
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Chris Geiger, Author of The Cancer Survivors Club.
Daily Dose of Disbelief!
Bsky: @chrisgeiger.com
Bsky: @thecancersurvivorsclub.com
Bsky: @dailydoseofdisbelief.com
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