Doctors prescribe pain medications for many reasons, and opioids are a common choice for those in surgical recovery or injury. Unfortunately, up to 19 percent of people who are prescribed opioid pain medications develop an addiction to them. With the opioid crisis taking over 100 lives daily, alternate options are not only welcome, they are much needed. That is why medical researchers continue probing new options for pain management medication, like LSD.
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Researchers continue uncovering new psychedelic potentialities all the time. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is known for evoking electric visuals and expanding how a person relates to their world through a trippy hours-long experience. To research scientists, it is a possible pain management tool. A small-scale study on LSD recently added to the mounting support for pain mitigation.
The most recent balanced crossover study regarding LSD and pain administered the drug intravenously to 20 patients. Researchers then used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to understand how the psychedelic would interact with the pain neural network.
This is not the first study to map the neural activity of LSD with an fMRI, but researchers did utilize new brain markers. They analyzed pain processing using amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation, independent component analysis, functional connectivity, and dynamic causal modeling.
The research supports the notion that LSD could help with pain. In this study, both groups showed increased brain activity, but the LSD crowd had a leg up in the pain relief department. Those given the psychedelic had more peace with their emotions, which translated into better management of pain-related stimuli.
Authors add that an MRI creates complications in getting reliable results. Researchers reduced scan time in the study because “prolonged bed rest during fMRI scanning may make patients uncomfortable and increase clinical pain intensity and patient’s reactions.”
Authors suggest that finding less noisy and intrusive means of mapping neural pathways would provide more accurate results. They concluded that identifying more brain markers would show whether LSD is a viable pain management tool.
A less intrusive method of neural mapping needs to be figured out to get accurate readings of a truly psychedelic experience. , Logging more brain markers and reducing the noise and time of an fMRI may be the move until other methods are approved on humans.
