Boris Heifetz

I don't think that's going to work. I think that that's ignoring all of the rest of the components, the experiential component at the center of it, as well as the preparation that goes into it and what you make of the experience, the actual integration. And a lot of that is really dictated by human relationships, social support, and the context of drug use.

And these are devilishly difficult things to define in a precise way.

This was like her, you know, fifth like cancer surgery. Like this has been a recurrent cancer.

She was almost like dancing. This is, you know, someone who had like a lot of stuff in their belly, like still had drains, bandages. She was like, you know, it was infectious. I thought to myself at the time, like, if she didn't get ketamine, like I'm quitting. Like, I don't know, like, or even, I mean, in retrospect, it was more like, I want to know what, like what we did so we could do it again.

She was in the placebo group.

Boris told me the people who got placebo... They got so much better, they were indistinguishable from the patients who got ketamine.

You know, there's a lot of the same reactions. Like, well, I, you know, I can't explain it either. But this, it's important. It's, you know, I got better. In some cases, they stayed better.

Imaginary is like something that doesn't exist. This is a real thing. And placebo has real biology behind it. And it is one of the most valuable treatments we have in medicine, full stop.

There's the drug. There's the trip. And then there's all these non-drug factors, meaning the stuff at the beginning, like the expectations you set, the hope you have, the lessons you learn.

So a lot of people actually have been talking about this for years, like, well, what if you just knock someone out? What if you eliminated experience during a psilocybin trip or during one of these drugs in this broad class, in which I'll include ketamine for a

How do you control for a transformative experience?

How do you control for a transformative experience?

You know, it's like the industrial revolution in medicine, that you can really reduce things down to a drug, you would take it every day, you know, something that you can define.

It's very difficult to study experience because really a lot of things are happening. You're getting a drug. You're learning something. There's a learning process. There's hope, expectation. And then there's this like wild phantasmagoric, you know, thing that happens for eight hours in the middle of it.