A small study has found that a drug that’s Potent causes the elimination of post traumatic stress disorder
Joe Hudak: a young man with mental health problems in the United States and the iboga shrub. After 20 years, he returns home to Mexico
After multiple deployments with the US Army Special Forces, Joe Hudak returned home in 2011 changed by his time in Iraq, Afghanistan, and South America.
He was quickly diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He tried talk therapy and a range of medications, but they didn’t help. He attempted suicide twice in 2012. He says that he was battling a war in his head. He retired from the Army after 20 years of service.
Eventually, he learned about Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, a Texas-based organization helping service members access psychedelic treatments in countries where such drugs are legal or unregulated. In 2022, the group paid for him to fly to Mexico to be part of a study sponsored by Stanford University testing a psychoactive drug called ibogaine.
ibogaine is a bark from the african iboga shrub and is used by the Pygmy tribe in Central Africa for spiritual and healing ceremonies. It is illegal in the US and many other places.
There were so many voices in my head that I would be yelled at and shamed. “What ibogaine did was cut out those extraneous voices.” He had more energy and life. He could be present for his 7-year-old son. A friend commented that he looked like his old self again.
The effects of ibogaine on neurological and mental health: A neuroscientist’s insight into a critical period for patients with traumatic brain injury
Veterans are already at a high risk of developing psychiatric conditions because of their combat experiences, and physical trauma to the head, such as from blast explosions, can compound that risk. Antidepressants and antianxiety medications are commonly prescribed, but they don’t address the underlying brain injury.
“The drug seems to have a broad, dramatic and consistent effect,” says Nolan Williams, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California and a co-author of the study. The results of the trial, which did not include a control group, are published today in Nature Medicine.
Researchers did not get involved in the administration of the drug. The magnesium supplement and the drugs lowered the risk of cardiac side effects.
The researchers found that one month after treatment, participants had average reductions of 88% in PTSD symptoms, 87% in depression symptoms and 81% in anxiety symptoms. The participants were assessed for mild-to-moderate disability before and after treatment, and one month after, for mobility and other functions.
Research in mice by Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, offers a clue: ibogaine might temporarily re-open a ‘critical period’, the name given to windows of time normally seen during early development in which the nervous system is particularly malleable3. Dlen says they found that ibogaine kept the critical period open for at least four weeks compared with two weeks for psilocybin, even though they did not use the drug in humans.
