This case report is being shared widely across social media but it’s full of red flags from top to bottom.
It’s a case report (n=1) that a group of 3 people from Brazil wrote up and pushed into the publishing world. The report is full of big words and tables, but barely says anything more than the abstract: It’s basically “an 80 year old Japanese women received mushrooms and was better afterward” expanded with as much medical jargon as they could apply without accidentally getting too specific. No mention of how the Alzheimer’s disease history was documented or diagnosed or even if she was a patient of one of the authors.
I’m surprised how much it’s getting people to let their guard down and accept the result. Normally when studies get posted with only 100 to 500 participants the comments everywhere are full of doubters calling out the small sample size. For some reason this n=1 story written vaguely about extraordinary claims with a complete absence of pre-treatment documentation or standardize testing/scoring hits all the right notes to convince a lot of people that mushrooms can reverse Alzheimer’s disease.
I know it’s something that a lot of people would like to be true, but this is a domain where anyone in the world can make any claims they want and find a journal who will publish it if you pay them. People write and publish papers like this all the time claiming to have treated major diseases in a single patient or group of patients with different drugs or herbs.
Sure, It’s a single case study so obviously take it with a grain of salt. Actual scientists understand this. People on social media don’t ands that’s annoying I get it.
On the other hand, it’s interesting and perhaps illuminating to people working in that field. A field mind you, that has made a little to no progress in decades. Arguments could be made they’ve made some errors and went down the wrong path. It’s a field that could probably use some new ideas.
> On the other hand, it’s interesting and perhaps illuminating to people working in that field
People in medicine or research have seen hundreds of extraordinary case reports like this. They’re everywhere on different topics and they’re not hard to get published.
They know that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and it’s easy to see that this paper is completely devoid of evidence, just some extraordinary claims written in formal medical language, minus the usual process, methodology, and assessments one would expect in a paper like this.
Hey, fair enough. I don’t necessarily disagree with you, anything with psilocybin in the title tends to be a little more sensational. I find it very interesting though, I just listened to a recent Rogan podcast with Dr. Dean Radin, this exact case study came up because one of his companies is working a related product. Apparently they’ve developed a nasal delivery system that directly crosses into the brain, and the drug uses the same receptors as psilocybin but without the psychedelic effects. Apparently it has extraordinary positive effects on memory and lasts for months. They’ve tested on mice and chimpanzees, so real science is being done in this lane outside this case study. I guess I’m saying sometimes when “traditional” science gets stuck in the mud, we need creative & bold people who think outside the box to move things forward.