Dr. Dave Rabin
Appearances
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you can identify the root cause, whatever the root cause is, sometimes the root cause of a mental health problem is a thyroid problem, right? This is a very common issue where people have thyroid dysregulation. It's very common.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And if your thyroid is messed up for whatever reason, that impacts everything about your nervous system functioning and your mood and your metabolism and everything. Your entire body is regulated by your thyroid. Everything.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So one of the examples that we do in mental health is before we even think about treating you with a mental health as if you have a mental illness, we run a series of labs and we look at, okay, well, is there anything that could be an obvious physical sign of something wrong with your body? That would be why you're coming to me, right?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And if you have thyroid issues, that's what we treat first because that's like an easy fix. You may never need to see a therapist if you can fix your thyroid and get everything straightened out, right? But then if we do the medical, full medical workup,
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
and we realize, oh, you're actually physically, medically healthy, you don't have any issues going on that would result in a mental health problem, then we start to look at, okay, well, what else could be causing the mental health problem? And it's basically like a root cause analysis. So you're really diving into what is at the core of what's happening medically, then psychologically,
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And they would have no idea what I was talking about. And then I would instantly remember that this is something I dreamed about. It wasn't something that happened in our regular lives. And that just started to make me interested in what these dream things we have are.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
then emotionally, and then really starting to, and then with stress as a core theme, trying to figure out what's at the core, and then how do we address that first? And that helps us kind of steer the direction of treatment planning for people. And that's what all psychiatrists should be doing. Many of them do, but there are some that don't.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Yeah, exactly. Because all medications have side effects. All surgery, as good as the outcomes might sound, have potential risk. And there's no treatment for medication or surgical based treatment that doesn't come with potential risk. And that risk is often not worth taking. So if you can... Work with somebody who understands a diagnostic framework.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
It doesn't mean you're going to leave with a diagnosis. It means you want somebody who's going to put their detective hat on. And rather than going straight to the prescription pad, they're going to talk to you enough and gather enough information from you during the history and physical process
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
to the history and physical exam process to figure out, okay, what is actually going on here before I start handing you treatments, right? That's really the core of medicine that we're all taught throughout our medical doctor training and that most doctors have. The problem is in modern society, medical treatment has been commoditized as a business.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And so doctors don't get paid enough to do what they do. And so many of them and insurance companies are often trying to tell doctors what to do. And so, you know, the saying, when everything, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? It's not, that's not just because you have a hammer doesn't mean everything is actually a nail.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And so I think as I got older and started school, I went to my parents and I said, hey, as I started to have more scary dreams, I was like, what are dreams? What's going on when we're sleeping? And they just kind of gave me the answer that all kids get from their parents pretty much, which is, don't worry about dreams.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
It means that certain things are nails that you use your hammer on and certain things are not nails and you need another tool. And so, Right. Doctors have lots of tools. You know, we have like the benefit of medical training is that we have all the tools available to us. We just need to know what's going on.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And so if we take enough time and clients have enough patience with the with the process of us getting to know you to figure out what's going on, which often is on both sides, it's a rush. There's not enough time to figure that out, or it seems like there's not enough time to figure that out.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
If we rush through the diagnostic process, the quickest solution from a doctor's perspective is, well, let me take out my prescription pap. And that's not the best option in most cases. Usually there's anywhere from three to 10 different things you can do that don't require medication or surgery that can start to make a dent before we start moving in that direction to riskier options.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Sure. So before I even get into that, just to wrap up this topic, I think it's important for people to know that that stress and anxiety, especially chronic stress, impact your hormones in your body, right? So if you have low testosterone or you have reproductive issues as a woman, one of the most, if not the most common cause of hormone imbalances and reproductive issues is chronic stress.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
We know that infertility, like 50% of infertility is caused by anxiety, right? But if you get sent to an infertility specialist that doesn't do therapy or mental health work, then they're going to say, oh, well, you need to do all of our fertility procedures to get to have a baby. or to have any chance of having a baby.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
They can't hurt you because our parents want to make sure that we don't become afraid of sleep. And that was fine for the time being, but it didn't really satisfy my curiosity because I kept having vivid dreams that seemed real. And it started to make me question, you know, what is the word real really mean?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And that could include invasive procedures like egg harvesting or hormonal treatments or any of these things, but they're missing the fact that your body is in a stress state. And when you're in a stress state, guess what? There's no blood flow going to your hormonal systems and your reproductive system. Your reproductive system is literally deprived of resources starting with blood.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So why would it function properly? It's silly for us to even consider, based on the way that we know now that the body works, that your reproductive system should not be functioning properly when your body-mind perceives that you are running from a lion. right? You don't want it to function when you're running from a lion. So your body's doing what it was designed to do.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
It's just that stress has hijacked it. And the idea of stress being, oh, this is actually dangerous. So that's neuroscience, really. And we know this because of neuroscience. So neuroscience is a field that has been around for quite some time, I guess, probably about 100 years in the modern neuroscience.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And what it is, it's the study of the brain and the body and how the brain and the body are connected. and how nerve cells, the brain's core cells that connect information from one part to another, are able to talk to each other and basically entrain learning and information. And neuroscience can be any number of different things. It can be practiced in a lab, which is how I started.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And that's how most commonly people think about neuroscience is a bunch of people in white research lab coats doing experiments on animals or cells. I did that for about eight to 10 years.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And then there's neuroscience on the human level where we're actually studying how people's brains work using brain imaging and biological techniques that help measure the nervous system, EEG, brainwave measurement, things like that, body measurement, heart rate and respiratory rate, all these functions of the body. can be used to help us understand the brain better.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So those are all different neuroscience practices. I am actually fairly unique in that I am a translational neuroscientist. So what that means is I don't work at the bench anymore. I'm not in the lab. And I do work in the clinic with my patients. But my focus is on how do we literally translate the great discoveries we've made in the lab
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
and then bring them into the community and bring them into clinical care? And how do we change the way we treat patients? How do we change the way we live from all of the incredible discoveries we've made over the last 100 years, most of which have never actually been fully integrated into the way we live and the way we practice medicine, which I noticed when I was in the lab.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
I'm like, why are these great discoveries not moving forward into changing the way we work? And They just weren't. There's all these blockers along the way. So one of the main ones is how do we describe the findings and how do we create new tools? Apollo being the first translation that we did from our work from the lab into the clinic and into the real world.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
But how do we literally translate what we learn from the lab into a language that everybody can understand? And so that's kind of my specialty is on the translational neuroscience side.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
I mean, I think everyone tends to want to know how their brain and body were right. Like, have you ever met anybody who really just doesn't want to know, you know? So I think like most people want to know, I think the, the challenge has always been how, what words do we use to teach them? Right. How do we teach them?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And, and maybe the, uh, adults don't know the answer to that question because these dreams feel real and regular waking life feels real. So maybe there's more to it. Um, and then from there, I, you know, went and started reading, you know, as I got older into high school and things like that, I started reading science fiction that my vivid dreams kind of like faded. I didn't have them as often. Um,
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And can we, you know, like Einstein brought this up back when he was alive, which was, you know, if he, he used to say something like, if you can't teach something to a, a five-year-old or a seven-year-old, I can't remember the age, but it was something under 10. If you can't teach something to a person of a young age, it's not the fault of the person trying to learn.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
It's not the fault of the learner. It's the fault of the teacher. And not being able to explain things adequately. And I thought that was really interesting because he kind of brings up this topic of language as an evolving, active, dynamic thing. That it's up to us as the teachers to come up with better ways to meet our learners where they are and explain things in a language they can understand.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And so I really took that to heart because I had people in my training who did that and who taught me things in a language I can understand. I had people who did the complete opposite and just talked about things the way they understood it and made it really complicated. And I am, you know, I am an MD, PhD, I'm a neuroscience and a psychiatrist.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And I still struggle to understand what some of these guys were talking about, guys and gals were talking about. So it's not unique to you as a listener that you might have a hard time understanding this. Some of this stuff is really, really freaking hard to understand.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
For me, yeah, it's almost like a game to figure out how can we find the words, right, and develop our personal language skills better and expand our vocabulary to meet an individual, a learner, where they are, wherever they are. They could be a child. young child. It could be somebody who just graduated from high school or is in high school.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
It could be somebody who is an older adult who grew up, you know, 70 years ago, who has no frame of reference of the kind of things that we face every day in the same way that we do. Point being that we have to meet the learner where they are. And so it's fun to try to figure it out. How do I describe what you want to learn to you in the words that you can understand?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
100%.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Yeah, it's a great question. And I think, you know, speaking of things that have been poorly translated, right? Psychedelics is amazing. Yes. And I think the best way to understand psychedelics, again, if we're going to take a language-based approach, is let's start with the word. What does psychedelic mean?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So psychedelic was a term that was coined by Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, and Humphrey Osmond in the late 40s, early 50s, to describe the experiences they were having with LSD. And back when LSD was first discovered and before they, and so that term psychedelic means to reveal the mind. Psyche means mind. Delos means to show or to reveal.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So this term is not, is not mean crazy seventies dance party. or rave or festival music festival, right? That's not what that's not what it means to just like eliminate that from your consciousness for a moment. And think about that word for what it actually means, which is mind revealing experience. Following me?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And then when I got into medical training, I became very interested through my science fiction days in neuroscience and brain science, how the brain works. And some very great mentors that I had along the way kind of advised me that just studying dreams is very hard and that it's hard to build a career doing that. And so I would be better off
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Okay. So that's how it starts. And the reason why that's really important is because the words we use to describe these experiences before Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond coined the term psychedelics or psychedelic experiences was psychotomimetic, which means to mimic a psychotic episode. Okay. So that was how people looked at psychedelic experiences before we had a new word.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So again, just thinking about we have to develop new language, right? Language has to evolve with our understanding of the world. Just perfect example, because these are not mimicking psychotic experiences. They are not hallucinations. They are changing the lens with which we look at reality through so that we can learn from reality through a different filter, a different lens, right?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
That's what's happening. The chemical shifts neurocircuitry that shifts a filter in our brains and allows us to intake different stimulation and frequencies from the environment that are always there. We're just perceiving them now.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
under the influence of the molecule or the chemical or the meditation experience you had or the great yoga or whatever, whatever it was, the breath work, whatever it was that induced the psychedelic state doesn't have to be drugs, right?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So like that word psychedelic is also important to understand because it doesn't mean you have to have a drug involved that you take from the outside to get there. It means a state where you're looking under the hood of your awareness, right?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So what Freud and Carl Jung referred to as the subconscious or unconscious material that lives underneath the surface of everything we're normally paying attention to, all that material, like an iceberg, right? Our awareness is just the tip of the iceberg. It's just what you see above the water.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Everything underneath that is our subconscious and unconscious material, which is much, much more vast than what's just the tip of the iceberg above the surface.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So when you enter into a psychedelic state, whether it's through deep breathing, meditation, yoga, mindfulness, soothing touch, soothing music, or something like ketamine-assisted therapy or MDMA therapy, what you're doing is you're changing the neural network connections and the interactions in the brain to be able to look under the hood and expand your awareness to reveal parts of your mind to yourself that you weren't necessarily aware of before.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
calling me.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So these are very powerful. Okay. Yeah. These are very powerful tools. They're some of the most powerful tools you've ever had in mental health because the entire goal of psychotherapy from the beginning was to look under the hood. It's just really hard if you're scared of what's underneath the surface, right? So the psychedelic medicines help us to, when used properly in the therapy context,
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
molecularly amplify safety and the safety cascades in the emotional brain to help us feel safe enough to look under the hood. And then once you look under the hood from a perspective of safety, you're like, oh, wow, that's not that scary. I can figure this out. I can process some of these emotions. I can feel my body. I can reconnect with myself.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And then you start to have these profound therapeutic opportunities for healing that we've never really seen before in the mental health space.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
to become a doctor and be able to actually treat people and work with people and learn from people, which as doctors learning from our patients is like one of the best possible ways that you can learn anything. And so our patients are often our best teachers.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Yeah, I mean, you know, just think about the history, right? We're trying at this point in the 21st century to overcome like several decades of anti-psychedelic propaganda. And it was amplified by Richard Nixon and amplified by the war on drugs from Reagan.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And that's the legacy that we are trying to dispel of propaganda that has changed the perspective to be anti-psychedelic drug and anti-altered state throughout all of the medical and scientific community and throughout the government and throughout the general population, because people think they're going to lose their minds if they take these medicines. And that's certainly not true.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
It's a rare side effect. If people use them incorrectly or abuse them, certainly you cause damage, right? But guess what? Like you can kill yourself with Tylenol, right? Tylenol is an over-the-counter drug that you can buy at any store, as much of it as you want. You can buy it at any drug store and it can kill you if you misuse or abuse it. Like actually by destroying your liver.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Psychedelic medicines don't destroy your physical body. They don't cause physical toxicity. in the same way that something like Tylenol or Ibuprofen, which can cause kidney failure if you take too much of it, can do, right?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So even just thinking about it from a scientific perspective of this relative safety profile, or what we call the toxicity profile of psychedelic medicines versus things that are common in our over-the-counter space like
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Tylenol and ibuprofen or aspirin or things like opiates, narcotics, benzodiazepines, other mental health drugs, these are all riskier and more dangerous to the physical body and our overall health than a proper use of psychedelic medicine. And proper use is very important, right?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Like we don't prescribe these medicines to people and say, oh, just use them however you want, however it feels right for you. Like that's not how medicine works. Right. The dose makes the poison, right? That's the saying that has existed in medicine forever. The dose makes the poison.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So if you're using something incorrectly, you best believe you're probably going to have some unwanted side effects from it. So what we really talk about, and I think this is where it becomes easier to explain to people is there's a proper way to use these things. This is what they are. There's nothing scary about it.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And so I started working in medical school and doing neuroscience research on the side and starting in college and really became interested in chronic stress.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
It's helping relearn and remind you how to access a natural state in your body, which you can access on your own with breath work. If you don't want to take a psychedelic drug, you can access it by teaching yourself how to breathe properly too, right? And you can access it in your dreams. Like every single person who has ever had a dream has had a psychedelic experience.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And we think that this is like a drug-only experience. It's not true. So as you start to explain this understanding to people, people start, even the biggest skeptics start to say, oh, maybe there's more to this that I should look into, right?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And then that's all you need to do is just kind of invigorate that spark of curiosity for people that maybe everything they knew about this topic is not correct. And then they start to figure it out on their own. But I think the next step that we need to teach people that's really important
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
is that if you look at medical history, right, and you look at going back to, you know, similar times where other illnesses have been treated the way that current mental illness is treated. So current mental illness, you get diagnosed with a mental illness. Most people are afraid of that diagnosis. The reason why is because we don't have cures for mental illnesses.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
As doctors in the psychiatry, psychology space, we don't talk about, hey, when you have depression, PTSD, oh, there's a cure. You're going to get cured. We don't use that terminology. What we say is you're going to get treated and treatment can last for a lifetime, right? So there's a difference between cure and treatment.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Cure means you take something for a short amount of time and then you have a really good chance of no longer having symptoms for the rest of your life afterwards. And treatment means you are getting treated for a chronic illness that will in all likelihood exist for your entire life. And it will always have a high likelihood of coming back.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
and the because stress in particular impacts our dreams right like if you have if you watch a scary movie that's just as you have before bed your dreams will take on that content and if you have a really hard day your dreams can take on that content and stress changes the way we make meaning in the world and meaningfulness in the world during our waking life seems to have some impact on what material pops up during our dreams so that became interesting and then
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Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
That is the same way that infections were treated in the 90s, before the invention of antibiotics. You know, infections were considered a lifelong illness that was chronic. It resulted in early death or it resulted in loss of a limb. And there was no cure known for infections in almost every case until... Alexander Fleming, who I believe won the Nobel Prize for discovering penicillin.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, all over the course of 20 to 30 years before we had double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trials, people started one-off or few-off testing penicillin to treat all these different kinds of infections.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And within 20 to 30 year period, we made one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science, which took infections, a terminal and often lifelong illness that shortened human lifespan by 10 to 30 years. And we made it curable. to the point where you could take a drug and do proper aftercare of your infected site of your body. It's not just the drug that's doing it.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
The drug helps your body get into a state by weakening the bacteria or the infection. It helps your body get into a state to fight it off itself. So you still have to do the self-care as part of the antibiotic treatment. And within one to 12 weeks of taking an antibiotic, you're cured. Right. That changed everything for humanity.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Like that is the single biggest longevity and quality of life invention and discovery medicine that we've had in the last hundred years and maybe ever. And so next to handwashing. right? Next to hand washing. It's like the greatest discovery and so simple. And then you think about where we're at with mental illness, where mental illnesses currently are treated for life.
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Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
They're basically chronic lifelong illnesses. Most cases they have no cure. And then you look at the MDMA assisted therapy trials and you see, which have been very excellently conducted. And you look at those trials and
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
55% of people who have had PTSD for 17 years on average that would likely be continuing to have it for life, 55% of those people with just three doses of MDMA-assisted therapy and 42 hours of therapy over 12 weeks are no longer meeting diagnostic criteria for PTSD two months after the treatment's over. Then you look at one year out, those same patients, that number goes up from 55% to 67%.
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Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
without additional treatment. So more people are better at one year out than they were at two months out and then no additional treatment with just three doses of medicine, three doses. That is antibiotic level effect. And it invites us into an opportunity to be curious about
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Can we effectively develop the same type of cures for mental illness that we developed for infections and extend, have another opportunity in front of us to embrace these new medicines, use them properly, teach people how to use them properly, and then
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Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
you know, extend human life another 10 to 30 years and expand quality of life to a level we've never known before just by using medicine and therapy in the right way.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And that's what I'm, I think, you know, a lot of my work is around inviting people to entertain that possibility that's really right in front of us, that the data from the research is showing that we can potentially cure mental illness in the next five to 10 years, starting with PTSD. And nothing could be more exciting than that. I mean, that's like
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Game-changing for the field and game-changing for humanity.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
As I was treating patients in 2012 timeframe, 2013, I started to be treating more people who had severe PTSD and trauma-related disorders and being a learned fear, learned stress disorder, and realized that most of our Western standard of care treatments were not working very well. We're taught to use a lot of medications for PTSD, and the medications only work really in about
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Well, so the only legal psychedelic treatment that's available right now is ketamine therapy. And so that's what we use in our clinic. Ketamine is extremely safe. It's been around in the Western medical community as a legal drug for probably 70 years. And
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
It was originally developed to evacuate wounded soldiers from battle and without going into shock and to provide better, safer anesthesia for surgical procedures. And it's still used for both of those purposes. But it was discovered in the late 90s, early 2000s to have powerful antidepressant effects and psychedelic effects at certain doses.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And so that was originally, I think, a study that came out of Yale in the late 90s, early 2000s that demonstrated that ketamine is a powerful antidepressant and helps people with certain kinds of mental illnesses. And that's now been studied since that time. in a number of studies.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And it's the most effective and only legal psychedelic medicine that licensed physicians can legally prescribe and use. And it works very well. When people actually participate in the full treatment protocol of ketamine-assisted therapy,
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
not just taking ketamine, but ketamine-assisted therapy, that we see something like 90% response rates to treatment for depression and PTSD, which is really exciting. So similar levels of response over a 12 to 24-week period, as we see with MDMA-assisted therapy, when it's done correctly with therapy.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And we published a paper on, if anybody's interested in what does proper use mean, we published a paper in 2023,
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
As a collaboration between some of my colleagues at psychedelic.support, which is a major psychedelic harm reduction service, they're amazing, and my nonprofit, the Board of Medicine, and our clinic to describe the evidence-based best practice gold standards for what proper use means based on the current evidence we have today.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
for the use of psychedelic assisted therapy and psychedelics in therapy. So that being said, ketamine probably works in depression for about 50% of people with just four doses or six doses without therapy, but the effects tend to not be long lasting. So the effects will fade if you don't do it with the talk therapy.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
If you include the talk therapy as a core part of it, we see the benefits sustaining for extended periods of time, like months or years later, people are still feeling like themselves and not symptomatic. Whereas when you just deliver the medicine by itself, people tend to relapse and become symptomatic again within usually a year or two or less.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So that's kind of how we use ketamine as a medicine and it being the only legal psychedelic medicine we have access to right now nationwide.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Well, I mean, that's all we have right now. MDMA therapy has been on the horizon of legalization for a very long time. It's been researched in quite rigorous trials for the last 30, 40 years. MDMA-assisted therapy probably has the most evidence behind it for any mental health indication and mostly being studied for PTSD. Extremely effective and safe and promising when used properly.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
30% of people, there's still 70% of people who get treated with medications for PTSD that never get better. That was really surprising to me. And so I started to look outside the box to other things that could work, natural techniques. breathing, meditation, mindfulness, yoga, soothing touch, psychedelics.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And then there's psilocybin for depression and treatment-resistant depression, which has very promising trials. Psilocybin is also being used for end-of-life care. People who have
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
had severe terminal physical illnesses like cancer have had great responses to psilocybin even just one dose um then the others are like ibogaine iboga which is an african root plant that is being used for opioid addiction studies psilocybin is being used for cocaine and other addiction studies so way this is like if you think about it it's a way to what is what why do people addiction is really at the heart of this i'm an addiction trauma psychiatrist as my focus and
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Psychedelic medicines are really interesting because they help people shift their perspective on why they use substances. People who are using substances addictively use them to numb or distract themselves from discomfort in the body, which is usually caused by unprocessed or unresolved trauma.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
and feeling basically, and that unprocessed, unresolved trauma makes us feel ashamed and therefore afraid to be ourselves and be in our bodies. It makes our bodies feel like an unsafe place. So correct use of psychedelics within the psychotherapy
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
environment amplifies safety learning again that helps us to unlearn fear associated with our bodies and reminds us our bodies are safe places to be and that healing can occur naturally and wants to happen naturally when we remember that our bodies are safe and that they're allowed to heal themselves and they have the ability to heal themselves, which they do for all humans and most animals, if not all animals.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So It's interesting because now we're seeing over the last 30, 40 years, thanks to the work of many great scientists, that you can use a drug treatment in very intentional ways to help people discontinue addictive behavior, which is extremely damaging to their lives. We have very few treatments, if any, that work well for addiction, and especially opioid and cocaine, alcohol addiction.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So that's really exciting.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And I found through one of my colleagues who was interested in psychedelic therapy, she sent me 10 of the top papers that have been published around the world in leading journals, leading medical journals, basically studying psychedelic-assisted therapy for PTSD and trauma.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So Apollo is a software technology that uses, we developed out of my research at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center that delivers like soothing sound wave vibrations that kind of feel like a cat purring or like ocean waves gently washing over you or like taking a few deep breaths or chanting OM, getting a hug.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
All of these soothing sensations that we get boost vagus nerve activity because they remind us that we're safe in the moment, like right now. When you have those experiences, you're reminded that you're safe and you can just relax and be present. And so that is interestingly a neural pathway that's well understood in the brain and the body where you feel something soothing.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
It sends that signal to your emotional cortex, your emotional cortex, and it's called the limbic system and the specifically the insulate cortex of the brain, which is like deep underneath. gets activated in a positive way that says, hey, I'm safe, this feels good, right? This reminds me of something that makes me feel safe and comforted.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Then that sends a signal to the amygdala, our fear center of the brain, that says, hey, fear center, you don't need to be firing off right now, we're good. We're not in a survival threat situation. And then recovery is allowed to turn back on. So that pathway is a well-understood pathway.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And when I started to study MDMA-assisted therapy and how MDMA-assisted therapy and other psychedelic medicines are facilitating access to these incredibly transformative healing experiences. And by the way, I'm one of the few psychiatrists nationwide that's trained in both ketamine and MDMA-assisted therapy. I was really curious, how is it doing this? How are we getting these
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Completely stunning results from these treatments with just three doses or six doses. I mean, it's just something we've never seen before. So I started, right. I mean, it's just amazing. So I started to like, again, an antibiotic level effect for a mental illness, again, like unparalleled paradigm shifting in mental health. So I'm like, how is this possible?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So being like a neuroscientist and a mechanistic guy trying to figure out how things work all the time, I'm like, I'm going to figure out how this works. And so I got my MDMA training in 2016 from maps. And then
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
started to recognize through the training and the work I was doing and the work that many other great scientists in the psychedelic space had done on humans and animals is that the way MDMA works, if you really break it down in the simplest explanation, is that
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
When you, you build a, you build a trusting relationship with your therapist and you learn what it feels like to trust again and to trust in your therapist and then to trust in yourself. You just get that as a, that's the foundation of all psychotherapy and all medical treatment is just building a trusting relationship with your doctor or your therapist. That's where it all starts.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And as I started to read these papers, I realized that psychedelic medicines were actually working to help people heal from trauma by inducing a waking dream state with a chemical that you take from outside your body and put it in your body. And I was like, wow, this is really wild. And as soon as I read those papers in 2012, I realized that...
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So we build a trusting relationship with the, with the, uh, with the patient. The patient remembers what it feels like to feel safe enough to trust. And they remember that feeling. Then you sprinkle in the MDMA in a six to eight hour therapy session. And the MDMA is like throwing rocket fuel on the cascades, the neural cascades in the brain that are involved in safety learning.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And that amplifies or catalyzes these feelings of safety that help a patient, even the most severe patients, feel safe enough in that moment to go back in time into the past and remake meaning around past traumatic events. So safety is really the key. And that's how regular therapy works. Regular therapy is just about feeling safe enough to remake meaning. And so MDMA just makes that easier.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
It just makes it easier for us to bring people back there and to accelerate that process that could take 10 or 20 years for people to do without MDMA. We can do it in 12 weeks with three doses of MDMA. So that's really how it's working. And so as I started to be doing this research and get my own training in this area, I realized this key word safety keeps popping up.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Why is this popping up everywhere? And I realized that it's because when we feel safe, our vagus nerve gets activated and our recovery nervous system starts to get resources again. So then I thought, well, maybe because MDMA, this is back in 2016, I had this light bulb go off. I thought, well, it's going to be like eight to 10 years before MDMA becomes legal.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So what if we had technology that could give us some of the benefits of MDMA, the safety from MDMA without having to take MDMA? novel concept, right? Nobody had really thought about that before.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So as I mapped out the neural pathways of what MDMA was doing and what soothing touch was doing and soothing music and the smell of your favorite food your mom makes and like all these things that make us feel safe, I started to realize they're activating the same vagus nerve pathway.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So we went back to the lab at the University of Pittsburgh, and then we were able to design sound waves that are very low frequency, like bass sound waves that come out of your subwoofer that are, you can't even hear, but they're very, you can feel them on your body. I'm wearing it on my chest right now. You're wearing it on your wrist. It doesn't matter where you wear it.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And you can also get it through your phone. So anybody who's interested can feel Apollo right now by just downloading the Apollo Neuro app on your iPhone and just feeling the vibrations and what we're talking about. But this is unlike any vibration you've ever felt come out of your phone before because it's a slow wave of vibration that's tuned to your body.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And all humans are tuned actually the same in that we all breathe at around five to seven breaths per minute to enter a meditative, calm recovery state. Any human basically on the face of the earth can breathe at five to seven breaths per minute. And within a couple of minutes, enter recovery in the body and biologically increase activity in the vagus nerve.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So we thought, well, maybe if we send the right signal to the body as vibration, the body will recognize it and know how to get into that state. And guess what? It did. Just like hearing your favorite song on a bad day, just like getting a hug from a loved one on a bad day, your body knows how to calm down immediately.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And so we thought, well, maybe technology can do this for us in a wearable, in your phone. And so we studied that. We put it through multiple rigorous clinical trials at the university, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, all the things.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
I could study dreams and do what I always wanted to do as a kid, but do it from the perspective of psychedelic medicine. And then down the road, sort of developed Apollo based on my research into psychedelic medicine. So that's kind of how that all came about.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And it kept showing that these specific patterns of sound waves were increasing vagus nerve activity and helping healthy people perform and recover faster and helping people with severe illnesses recover faster and And then we launched it in 2020 to the world as a wearable. And now this year as an iPhone experience that anyone can get for free.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Oh yeah, it's my pleasure. Nothing makes me happier than to know that this helped you through challenging times and that you're still enjoying it. We've been using it every day, almost every day for seven, eight years since our early prototyping days.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And we now have 16 clinical trials, two of which have been published, six more expected to come out this year that are actually showing that just having this vibration on your body, whether it comes from your phone or from a wearable, one of our wearables,
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Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
within two minutes helps relax you and calm you down and reduce stress and changes your breathing pattern and your heart rate variability, which is the leading metric of vagal nerve activity and performance and recovery and longevity. So thinking about that, right, like two minutes, that's all it takes to get your body into a relaxed state again.
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Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
But if you use it for three hours or more a day, five days or more a week, we see people within as little as 21 days getting 30 to 60 minutes more sleep a night. And that is wild, right? Like 30 to 60 minutes more sleep a night is six to 10 times the benefit of melatonin.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And it's like two to three times the benefit of Ambien and the other leading prescription sleep aids that have a lot of side effects. And we can do that just by calming your body with a little ocean wave sound waves before bed and in bed. And you don't need to take a drug to get not as good an effect and risk having side effects.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So I think this is for us one of the most exciting things to work on and where we're going to see technology going in mental health because we don't need medicine necessarily as the first line. Medicine's great and it's very helpful for certain things, but there's a heck of a lot we can do before we start taking medicine. And one of those things is learning to calm your body again.
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Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And that's really what Apollo is doing. It reminds us how to feel good and to feel safe in our own bodies. And then as you use it, it becomes easier to access that state without Apollo. So it really is a training tool in a lot of ways that you can use anytime you want.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
It's safe for children, adults, elderly people, and it improves most metrics of well-being, quality of life, socialization ability, your ability to have right, like reliable energy during the day, better sleep, better mood, less pain, all of that is impacted by these kinds of stimulation to your nervous system.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And it would happen if it's the same thing would happen if you were getting more hugs the way you should, right? We just don't get enough hugs, right? Do enough meditation or breath work. So if we're not going to do it on our own, technology can now be supportive in helping us get there.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Yeah, so sleep is a great question. Sleep is the single core issue in almost all mental and physical illness across the board. If you're not sleeping well, and we now know this from modern neuroscience, if you're not sleeping well, and you're trying to get treated or heal from an illness, it's going to be a lot harder if you don't fix the sleep first.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So sleep is really the core because all of our major physical and mental emotional recovery happens during sleep, much more than it happens during the day. So the way Apollo helps with this is twofold.
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Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So one of which is if you're using Apollo in the basic kind of like manual mode, we recommend a schedule for you that basically turns Apollo vibrations on automatically during the day and at night to keep you awake and energized and focused and clear during the day. And then to keep you
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Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
you know, unwound and calm and relax at night before bed so that you're ready to fall asleep when you hit the pillow and then helps you fall asleep faster. And the vibes that people use at night are unwind before bed and then sleep when you get into bed. And you can schedule Apollo to just turn on automatically for you, which is one of the best features that people use.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And then regarding sleep, we're actually one of the, we're the first fully closed loop AI product. So if you think about what Tonal did for the fitness industry, Tonal was the first closed loop fitness product that changed the way people work out forever by actively training you based on your data and adjusting your workout based on your data. Apollo does that for sleep.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So it's closed loop AI and it is the first of its kind that can detect in real time when you're about to wake up in the middle of the night. and then turn on automatically to prevent you from waking up or to put you back to sleep faster after you wake up. Just like a snoo for adults.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
I don't know if you heard of the snoo, but it's like the most popular baby crib that does that for, yeah, for children under six months old. This Apollo works for everyone over six months old. So you can literally now have a tool you can wear anywhere on your body. Ankle or wrist is probably the best for sleep. I personally prefer the ankle, but wrist is totally fine.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And wherever works for you is fine. It can be worn anywhere. And we can actually intervene in real time. We can detect when you're about to wake up. and then turn Apollo on in a very gentle vibration that just kind of, like your mom when you're a baby, rocks you back to sleep. And that gets people upwards of 60 more minutes of sleep a night, which is really exciting.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
I mean, 60 minutes of sleep a night is like seven hours more sleep each week You think about seven hours of sleep each week. I mean, most people can't even imagine how they'd function with seven hours more sleep each week. But you notice a difference.
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Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And in 21 days, which is how long it takes to restructure a circadian rhythm, a sleep and wake cycle, you can actually be sleeping significantly better and feel so much better during the day.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And so we really encourage people, whether you're going to do this without Apollo, you're going to sleep train without Apollo, or you're going to sleep train yourself with Apollo, is to give it 21 days and really put in the effort of just put this thing on, let the AI do its thing, and see the impact for yourself of how much better you can sleep and how much more sleep you can get back by calming yourself naturally.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And you won't be disappointed. I mean, it's incredible. It's the first thing that actually helped my wife, my co-founder, Catherine, sleep through the night after we started this company, which was really stressful.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So the best places, and I'd love to hear from people, by the way, don't be shy. Please reach out. You can find me on socials at Dr. David Rabin on Instagram and X. You can find me on my personal and clinic website at drdave.io. If you want to look up Apollo Neuro, and you have an iPhone, go to the App Store, download the app, it's free.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And you can upgrade your phone to start delivering, you know, Apollo science fact, Apollo vibes through your phone, and your phone instantly becomes upgraded to be a source of well being for you. And so it's a free upgrade on us, there's no reason not to try it out. And you can find that at Apollo neuro in the App Store. If you have an iPhone, you can also go to the hug vibe.com
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
thehugvibe.com and you can download that'll take you right in to download the app and then you can share these good vibes with other people who have iPhones and the Apollo wearable you can find at apolloneuro.com this is available for both Android and iOS users the wearable that Dylan, you and I are both wearing.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And lastly, if you want to learn about my work in the psychedelic space, I recommend checking out our nonprofit, theboardofmedicine.com and some of the great work we're doing to update the medical field on the latest, greatest evidence-based treatments and train clinicians and everyone to understand the power of these new treatments. And I have a show, two shows that describe
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
my work on psychedelics and the news on brain science, consciousness, and psychedelic medicine on Spotify and Apple Podcasts called The Psychedelic Report, which is the psychedelic news every couple of weeks, and Your Brain Explained, which is the show about how your brain works and the like. So please reach out. I would love to hear from you. And thanks again for having me.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Thank you.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
I mean, chronic stress is probably now more than ever due to the latest results and findings in neuroscience and population research around the world, especially since the COVID pandemic in 2020. I mean, it's probably one of the leading causes of all illness. And it's hard to quantify because we know that when you're physically stressed, we know the mind and the body are connected, right?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So that's kind of like one of the first core neuroscience teachings that is been found to be true, that was taught that is not the case many generations ago, starting with Descartes in like the 1800s, that this idea of the mind and the body are separate.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So a lot of the work we're doing now in neuroscience is to try to understand better how some of the ideas we had about how the mind and the body work and are connected are actually not the case. And there's more to it than we thought. So, you know, when you're stressed and you have a physical illness, what happens to your symptoms or your pain typically gets worse, right?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And so that's most people who have any kind of pain disorder or physical illness. If you've ever hurt yourself in any way and then you get stressed out, it increases inflammation in the area that's suffering the pain. And so that increases pain. And then if you don't treat that, you can get mental illness as a result of having untreated physical illness.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
If you have a mental illness like depression, anxiety, PTSD, or any other mental illness, and you increase the stress in that person's life in whatever way, they will also have worsening mental health symptoms and their mental illness will become harder to treat. And part of what's happening is that the body has two major parts of its nervous system that are involved in the stress response.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
One of which is, and most people know about these two parts, but one of the parts is called the fight or flight response. or freeze response nervous system, which is called the sympathetic nervous system. That's not actually that sympathetic in the way we typically think about that word. But what it does is it protects us from survival threat. So it's a resource allocation system.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
We only have so much blood to go around in the body to feed all of our organ systems at once. And so when you have something that's supposed to trigger a survival threat, that's supposed to trigger the sympathetic fight or flight nervous system, evolutionarily for hundreds of millions of years, that would include
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
being chased by a predator, running out of food, running out of water, running out of air, being potentially excommunicated by your community or being deprived of sleep. These are like the six major factors that potentially threaten our survival because we need those things to survive and thrive and reproduce.
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Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And so if one of those things is threatened, it's supposed to trigger our fight or flight stress response. If we're stressed out, but none of those things are being none of those boxes are being checked on the survival, six survival key factors, then it's not supposed to trigger our fight or flight nervous system.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And we have another part of our nervous system called the vagus nerve system or the parasympathetic rest and recovery system that governs all recovery.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So sympathetic nervous system fight or flight takes all of our blood and available resources when we're in an actual survival threat and then clamps down on the vessels that go to reproduction, digestion, immunity, rest and recovery, all the things we don't want. to be getting our blood and resources when we're running from a bear, right?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
You don't want to be thinking about reproduction when you're running from a bear. You want to be getting away from the bear. All the blood, the simple concept is all the blood vessels get squeezed to the organ systems and empathy systems and creativity systems to get us
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Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
to safety and it sends that blood to our skeletal muscles, our motor cortex of our brain, our fear center of our brain, our heart and our lungs to literally just get us to safety. When we get back to safety, then the blood vessels switch.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And so the blood vessels clamp down to those skeletal muscles in the heart and lungs and then redirect all the blood as the blood vessels open up to reproduction, digestion, immunity, sleep, you know, creativity, empathy, all the good stuff. And they're not generally both active at the same time most of the time. So it's a resource allocation problem.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
So if you can imagine when you're stressed out all the time, when we as humans are stressed out all the time because of everything that's going on in the world, we're literally sending all our blood to our skeletal muscles, heart, lungs, fear center of our brains, motor cortex.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And we're taking that blood from our recovery nervous system, the nervous system that is responsible for healing our bodies and also delivering nutrients to reproduction, immunity, digestion, sleep, and for helping us to take waste away from those organ systems. So if you didn't have garbage pickup and you didn't have food for an extended period of time, how long would we last?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Not very long, right? Like we need garbage pickups, we need food. You'd last maybe like a week. But in the body, the body has ways of negotiating this and figuring it out and extending our ability to sustain organ systems for years with decreased garbage pickup and decreased nutrients, meaning decreased blood flow to those organ systems, but eventually those organs dysfunction.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And so that's why we see people who have chronic stress and, you know, developing all these different illnesses, physical and mental, emotional, because their organ systems responsible for recovery are just deprived of resources and waste. So you can see this direct connection between like, where's your blood going? And in any moment and stress and organ system functioning.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Thank you.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Yeah, it's a great question. That's actually one of the first ways that we focus on treating folks is any good clinician will first start to ask you questions about your life. And in the first visit from the intake and the first therapy visits, we ask you questions about what's going on, right? What's your day like? What are your nights like? What's your work life like?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Well, I actually became interested in consciousness and dreams from a very, very young age. It was probably When I was between maybe four and seven years old, I started to have very vivid dreams that I couldn't really explain, but felt very real to me. And they felt as real as my regular waking life. And I found myself referencing those dreams when I was interacting with my brothers or friends.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Where are the major sources of stress? Where do you feel like things are going well? Where do you feel like things aren't going well? And when did it start, right? When did things seem to be going, like when do you last remember things going well? And when did things start to take a turn downhill from your perspective?
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And then you can start to build a map of somebody's life and figuring out like, well, you know, was there, and there usually is, a stressful situation event or a series of massively stressful events that occur at a certain time point that start to take us in a direction towards feeling like we have mental illness or mental health challenges.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
And the difference between somebody who's just stressed and somebody who has actual mental illness is really time and intensity of the symptoms. So typically the definition is that it is described based on you. If you have
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
if you have feelings of depression, feelings of anxiety, or any other, you can add in whatever other mental health, mental illness symptoms you want for six months or more on a continuous basis, then you may be struggling with a mental illness. And if you have
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
mental health symptoms like anxiety, depression, or sadness, focus issues, any of these other symptoms, and they last for a very short time, and they're only existing when you're really stressed out in your life, then you probably have just too much stress and not a mental illness. And then we need to focus on let's figure out ways to minimize the stress in your life and not just
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Think about what medications are we recommending for you and what treatment therapy and that kind of thing. But it's how do we get the stress under control? How do we help improve your resilience, your adaptability, and give you the emotional bodybuilding skills effectively to learn how to bounce back from stress more quickly? And these skills also benefit people who have mental illness.
The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Of course, but once you have a mental illness and you fit into that pattern of somebody who's had six months or more of symptoms, it becomes a little bit more difficult and delicate to treat. So that's why we really try to bring people into treatment earlier before they start developing six plus months of struggles.