Psychedelics Can Relieve Chronic Pain, New Survey Suggests

More research is emerging that suggests chronic pain may soon be added to the long list of medical conditions psychedelics can relieve.

A new study published in the European Journal of Pain last month found that both macro and micro doses of classic psychedelics — LSD, psilocybin, DMT, mescaline — led to better pain relief compared to conventional medication in volunteers surveyed.

“Participants reported that full doses seem to achieve better perceived results in pain relief than microdosing, while microdosing’s effectiveness seems comparable to that of conventional medication according to survey participants,” the paper concluded.

Researchers focused on five conditions: fibromyalgia, arthritis, migraine, tension-type headache and sciatica.

Four of those five, with sciatica being the exception, were reported to be relieved by psychedelics on the dosage day, as well as 1-3 days after, with a few even reporting pain relief beyond the third day.

Psilocybin and LSD were the most common drugs used in this survey of 170 participants.

“The effect of psychedelics on pain related to sciatica was statistically non-significant,” researchers wrote. “This result may indicate that these substances hold promise only for certain kinds of pain conditions, presumably those in which the inflammatory and/or psychosomatic components play a more prominent role.”

Though data obtained from this survey is promising, echoing previous results from researchers investigating psychedelics’ effect on chronic pain — an issue impacting 20 percent of the world’s population — study authors acknowledge a number of limitations, with the biggest being design.

“It provides purely retrospective self-ratings from a self-selected sample of individuals who self-administer psychedelics,” the paper notes. “This design carries the risk of obtaining biased data and the generalizability of the produced results is only limited. It provides limited information to disentangle the role that different mechanisms play to achieve these perceived analgesic effects.”

Authors acknowledged controlled studies are needed, and recommend researchers design clinical trials to explore further.

Amanda Feilding, founder and director of the Beckley Foundation, initiated the survey after establishing The Beckley/Maastricht Microdosing Research Programme, which is dedicated to studying the effects of microdosing LSD on mood, cognitive functions, and pain management in humans.

The program’s previous placebo-controlled clinical study of 24 healthy volunteers found that a 20 microgram dose of LSD significantly reduced pain perception, as compared to the placebo, during cold pressure tests. “I am encouraged by these results as I have long believed that LSD may not only change the sensations of pain but also our subjective relationship with it,” she said after that study was published in 2020. “We must continue to explore this with the aim of providing safer, non-addictive alternatives to pain management.”

As Psychedelic Spotlight previously reported, MindMed is also exploring LSD for chronic pain treatment, while Imperial College London researchers found in 2021 that nine out of 11 chronic pain sufferers self-medicating with psychedelics reported complete, or at least partial, analgesia during their dosage experience.

More recently, a 9/11 first responder advocating for California lawmakers to decriminalize psychedelics, shared that psilocybin healed his PTSD as well as debilitating cluster headaches. “I stopped taking the cocktail of pills I had been prescribed, many of which caused damaging side effects and were addictive,” he wrote, adding: “It’s not an exaggeration to say that psilocybin gave me my life back. It’s been transformative, and allowed me to feel happiness and joy in a way I never thought I would again.”