Download In this episode, hosts Kyle and Joe interview Balázs Szigeti, PhD and David Erritzoe, PhD to discuss the self-blinded microdosing study in collaboration with the Imperial College London. In this episode, they explore the self-blinding study and it’s pros and limitations, with the aim to collect data on microdosing and its possible benefits. 3 Key Points: Microdosing (LSD) has the least amount of research so far among research on drugs like Psilocybin, MDMA and Ketamine. This microdosing study includes a procedure on how self experimenters can implement placebo control. This will help determine whether microdosers feel benefits due to the placebo effect or because of the pharmacological action of the microdose. Just because microdosing may have a placebo effect (the way a user feels while taking it) it may actually have benefits that one cannot necessarily ‘feel’ (users may become more creative, have better problem solving skills, etc). Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on iTunes Share us with your friends – favorite podcast, etc Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics Show Notes About Balázs Balazs attended his undergrad in the UK at Imperial College and studied Theoretical Physics He moved to Scotland to get his PhD in Computational Neuroscience He became interested in psychedelics via the Global Drug Survey He was doing MDMA research and then the microdosing project came to him About David He is a medical doctor and works in clinical psychology doing research He does brain imaging and his background has been in addiction, depression and schizophrenia He did his postdoc at Imperial and worked with Robert Carhart Harris He worked in a clinical trial working with people of treatment resistant depression He is currently working on an online survey for microdosing Psychedelic Medicine MDMA for PTSD is the most advanced in terms of available scientific evidence for psychedelic medicine There is already a big gap in psilocybin vs MDMA for treatment There isn't much research on microdosing yet In order to do research on microdosing, you'd have to bring in a ‘patient’ and have them in the lab for many hours at a time, very frequently, and it's not practical The Microdosing Study In this microdosing study, they are testing cognitive function The user will have to fill out a questionnaire throughout the duration of the microdose There were a lot of things, very political for the downfall of psychedelic science When the double-blind method was introduced for science, it used methods that would have compromised the ‘setting’ of taking psychedelics There is a manual that the users have to follow for the setup process Its a semi-randomized process where they take the microdose over 4 weeks and it may be either the psychedelic or a placebo It works on a method of a dose hidden in a capsule assigned to a QR code, where the user doesn't know what they take until the end of the study This is a study inviting people that plan to microdose a blotter based psychedelic Its a hands-off study of observation, based on a users own plan on taking the substance Limitations of the Study Its half-way between a clinical study and an observational study They aren't sending the users the LSD, they are just providing the platform for the users to share their experience on In this trial, the flaw is that the research team doesn't know the dose size of the blotter the user takes, it could start as a 100mg, more, less. Its a variable that cannot be controlled The fix would be to have the LSD sent to the lab, tested for dose size, and then sent back to the user (anonymously), but since it's illegal it cannot be done It's also hard to determine even distribution of a blotter into microdose size They don't know if the user is cutting the blotter paper like a pie or in squares Also, because the drug is being bought on the black market, they