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Psychiatrist Matthew Johnson led the first study study on the effects of psychedelics on smoking cessation back in 2014. In that study, 15 participants who had all tried and failed to quit before were given three doses of psilocybin — the hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms — over the course of ten weeks. When Johnson’s team followed up six months later, only three of the fifteen had resumed smoking.
Johnson says that when asked how the psilocybin trips helped them quit, the participants said the drug helped them experience a perspective shift, and gave them a new sense of agency.
“They would say things like, I saw life as a miracle and it kind of made smoking a smaller thing. I kind of stepped back and saw the bigger picture and it kinda helped to see quitting smoking as more achievable,” Johnson told NPR’s Will Stone. Subjects said psilocybin helped them break out of old narrative patterns, Johnson recalled.
A new study from Johnson’s lab makes the strongest case yet for a psychedelic drug’s impact on smoking, Will Stone reports. The new study involved two groups of about 40 smokers. One group wore nicotine patches for 8-10 weeks. The other group received a single high dose of psilocybin. All of the participants also participated in cognitive behavioral therapy tailored towards smoking addiction over the course of 13 weeks.
At the end of six months, those who had taken the dose of psilocybin had more than six times greater odds of being abstinent from cigarettes than their counterparts who were given nicotine patches.
The results of this study are exciting, says Megan Piper, who researches tobacco and nicotine addiction at the University of Wisconsin and was not involved with the study. Piper says with currently available medications plus counseling, only 20% to 30% of smokers are able to quit successfully.
Psylocibin works differently from nicotine patches and other medications that target nicotine receptors, says Dr. Brian Barnett, an addiction psychiatrist at the Cleveland Clinic. He suspects the intensive therapeutic support played a crucial role.
"It's not the drug by itself here," he says. "It's really harnessing the neuroplastic and learning effects that happen after the [drug] exposure." He says brain imaging results from this latest study may offer clues to why the treatment worked, and the biochemistry behind the perspective shift that participants describe.
Learn more about psychedelics research and smoking addiction.
Also: GLP-1s have transformed weight loss and diabetes. Is addiction next? |
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What does it mean to be an American? There’s no single answer. At NPR, we think of American identity as a story, one that’s constantly being rewritten by the people who live it.
The American Storytelling collection brings together stories from local stations across the NPR Network, from small-town struggles to natural wonders to the layered histories that shape our nation. These are some of our biggest little-known shows, all in one place.
Explore the American Storytelling channel on Apple Podcasts or find it in the NPR App. |
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Andriy Onufriyenko/Moment RF/Getty Images |
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When you go to a medical appointment, it typically unfolds like this: Your provider asks you what brings you in. You answer, and then they ask you a series of questions with the purpose of coming up with a diagnosis, prescribing treatmentmor ordering a test. Hopefully, they'll use their prior knowledge of your health or your medical records to inform those next steps. And ideally, you’ll have the chance to ask the doctor questions too.
But consulting a chatbot with a medical question is a very different process. "Doctors are trained to ask you questions about symptoms you might not have realized you should have mentioned,” says Andrew Bean, author of a new study on how consumers use AI chatbots to figure out medical problems. The study found that when two people used different words to describe the symptoms of the same condition to a chatbot, they got very different results.
The researchers tried to stimulate how people use AI chatbots by giving participants medical scenarios and asking them to consult AI tools. After conversing with the bots, participants correctly identified the hypothetical condition only about a third of the time, as NPR's Katia Riddle reports.
In another study, researchers found that even when the diagnosis was correct, ChatGPT's advice underestimated the urgency of the condition more than half of the time. In one example, it failed to direct a hypothetical patient with diabetic ketoacidosis and impending respiratory failure — a life-threatening condition — to go to the emergency department.
Still, some health care providers actually encourage their patients to use chatbots, especially in conjunction with a human doctor.
“A good time to use a large language model is when you're about to go see a doctor — or after you see your doctor," says Adam Rodman, a hospitalist who researches AI programs at Harvard Medical School. He says bots can help you become more informed about your health and prepare you to get more out of limited time with a human provider.
Read more about the study’s findings.
Also: 'ChatGPT saved my life.' How patients, and doctors, are using AI to make a diagnosis |
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We hope you enjoyed these stories. Find more of NPR's health journalism online.
All the best,
Andrea Muraskin and your NPR Health editors |
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