
Psychedelic brew called ayahuasca shows promise in treating recurrent depression - cpncrunch
http://www.psypost.org/2016/03/psychedelic-brew-called-ayahuasca-shows-promise-treating-recurrent-depression-41668
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cpncrunch
Small trial with no placebo control.

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AnimalMuppet
Isn't it kind of hard to do placebo control in a trial of a psychedelic? (Or
do people actually have psychedelic effects off of placebos?)

Or would "placebo control" be telling them "this is going to help your
depression", not "this _psychedelic_ is going to help your depression"?

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gus_massa
I think it's impossible to do a double blind experiment, but you can still
test it to compare vs placebo and vs standard medicines and vs another
psychedelic.

The idea to compare to a placebo is that there are a lot of variables that you
can't control. For example, most studies have some eligibility criteria like
age, so you need to know the baseline reaction of _your_ population.

Perhaps the weakly meeting to check the general state of the subjects is
enough to change the outcome. If you don't compare against a control group
with almost the same treatment it's possible that the effect you are measuring
is not due to the psychedelic but to the other details.

