A pilot study conducted at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Hospital Institute has found early indications that psilocybin may help alleviate the symptoms of chronic Lyme disease.
«Everything was black, and then little dots appeared. Splashes of white and green occasionally formed kaleidoscopes of color. As the intensity increased, waves of emotion washed over me, along with a memory.»
Wearing a blindfold and lying on a couch, listening to classical music on her headphones, Lori Unruh Snyder felt suddenly transported to the hospital where her father had passed away the previous year. She imagined sitting in the hospital cafeteria, wondering what she was doing there, when she heard his voice. «I heard his voice and it was like, «It's okay. Everything's going to be okay. Just do what you need to do,»» Unruh Snyder told DoubleBlind. «That was very comforting to me.».
It was July 17, 2023, and Unruh Snyder found herself in a specially-appointed room at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, experimenting with psilocybin in the name of science. She had never taken psychedelics before, but she was willing to try new things: diagnosed with Lyme disease, she had been struggling for a decade with fatigue, bloating, mental confusion and a host of other debilitating symptoms. Many of the doctors she had previously consulted had failed to make her better, or even understand what was wrong. Now, at Johns Hopkins University, a team was investigating whether psilocybin could help her.
The resulting study was published in February and shows striking results: after participating in two sessions of psilocybin administration, 20 adults reported a significant decrease in their Lyme disease symptoms, along with improvements in sleep and quality of life. At the six-month follow-up, participants continued to show improvement, with a 40 % reduction in disease symptoms. «People seemed to get better,» stated Albert Garcia-Romeu, lead author of the study, in an interview with DoubleBlind, «and those improvements seemed to last.».
However, the study has limitations. It is limited in scope, lacks a control group and includes only a small number of participants, so the results are understandably very preliminary. Still, this pilot study is a promising sign that psilocybin could be used to treat a wider range of conditions than medical experts have previously considered. And while many questions remain to be answered in the rapidly growing field of medical research with psychedelics, the study also provides concrete evidence suggesting that psilocybin can be safely administered in controlled clinical settings.
Ask anyone with chronic Lyme disease and they'll tell you it's a nightmare. Transmitted by parasitic blacklegged ticks, the infection is caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi . Most people recover with antibiotics, but in 10 to 20% of cases, the bacteria can wreak havoc on the body for months or even years.
Still, although an estimated 476,000 people in the United States seek treatment for Lyme disease each year, according to the CDC , chronic Lyme disease remains a controversial and often misunderstood topic. Ross Douthat, a conservative opinion columnist for the New York Times , noted in a book about his own experience with Lyme disease that many patients end up turning to homeopathic remedies and other home remedies because they have so much difficulty getting proper diagnosis and treatment from traditional doctors.
For Unruh Snyder, his problems began in 2012 or 2013, when he felt itchy on the back of his leg after walking through the tall grass behind his family's new home in Raleigh, North Carolina. «What's that? Ah, it's a tick,» she recalled thinking. An associate professor of international agriculture at North Carolina State University, she specializes in the study of rangeland science and describes nature as her «natural habitat.» She grew up on a farm in Delaware, where she had already dealt with harmless ticks, and this time she followed the same homemade procedure.
“Strip it off, burn it off,” he recalled, speaking to DoubleBlind. “At that point I didn't think twice about starting antibiotics.”.
Two weeks later, he developed a very high, flu-like fever. The doctor could not figure out the cause of his joint pain and fatigue, and the situation worsened. Over the next few years, Unruh Snyder's face would suddenly swell. On one occasion, he went completely blank in the middle of a class. «My brain would shut down, and it was almost embarrassing,» he remarked. «I was thinking, «Mmm, I have no idea what I was telling my students, this is scary.»» She underwent tests to rule out Alzheimer's or incipient dementia, even though she was only in her early 40s.
In 2020, after having difficulty breathing during a trip to Las Vegas , he asked his doctor to run a series of tests, the results of which showed an allergy to pork and beef. He investigated whether he had developed an allergy to shrimp, to which his father was also allergic, but the tests revealed no problems. Her doctor suspected that she had alpha-gal syndrome, a potentially life-threatening allergy that can develop after a tick bite. However, the doctor also recommended that they be tested for Lyme disease, and the results were positive: on March 13, 2020, after eight years of suffering, he was finally diagnosed with Lyme disease.
According to Garcia-Romeu, Johns Hopkins' interest in the relationship between Lyme disease and psilocybin began in 2019, when philanthropist Alexandra Cohen visited the campus Lyme disease research center lab. Cohen runs the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation with her husband, one of the largest funders of Lyme disease research in the world, and arranged a meeting with the late Roland R. Griffiths, a renowned psychopharmacologist who founded and directed the Johns Hopkins Center for Research on Psychedelics and Consciousness.
“[Griffiths] asked me, ‘What do you think about this?’ I told him it sounded interesting,” said Garcia-Romeu, who now serves as associate director of the psychedelic research center. He and Dr. John Aucott, director of the Johns Hopkins Lyme Disease Research Center, began developing a “proof-of-concept study” focused on a few key symptoms.
“That included things like pain and fatigue, but also, of course, depressive mood. We also looked at sleep quality and quality of life,” Garcia-Romeu said. “We thought this would be a start to answer the question of what happens when we try to do a study like this. Can we find people willing to participate? Would they join the study if it was available? If they did, would they improve? And if so, in what areas would they show improvement and in what areas would they not? We asked those kinds of simple, very basic questions to lay the groundwork.”.
To launch the study, the team recruited participants from previous studies at the Johns Hopkins Lyme Disease Research Center. They also recruited through «online advertisements and word-of-mouth,» the study reports. Unruh Snyder became involved in the study after learning about the Johns Hopkins research through a colleague. A teacher and researcher herself, she gathered her medical history and underwent an interview, physical exam, electrocardiogram, medical questionnaire and other tests to meet the requirements. Interested participants had to be «medically stable» and would be rejected if, among other criteria, they had moderate or severe drug or alcohol addiction, schizophrenia or psychosis, bipolar disorder, or severe problems with the heart, kidneys, or immune system. The study also looked for patients who did not regularly use psychedelics, excluding anyone who had reported using them in the past year.
As for substances, the researchers certainly did not buy hallucinogenic mushrooms on the street. The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research has a Schedule I license that allows it to conduct research with banned substances. However, the team also needed to obtain approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Johns Hopkins Institutional Review Board to obtain synthetic psilocybin in crystalline powder form, also known as crystalline polymorphous psilocybin , from the Usona Institute, a nonprofit medical research organization based in Wisconsin.
As the researcher, Unruh Snyder took meticulous notes on her experience during the eight-week study. On July 17, she ingested psilocybin capsules totaling 15 mg, mixed with 100 ml of water served in a glass tumbler. Settled in a room set up as a relaxation space, she experienced the psychedelic trip for seven hours. Among the highlights, she felt herself transforming into a piano key, jumping across the keyboard to become first a white key and then a black key: an explosion of creative energy fueled by her passion for music and the lab's standard playlist of works by Vivaldi, Brahms and other classical composers.
Two therapists who had worked with her in several preparatory meetings were present to facilitate the process during her trip. Two weeks later, she took a second dose of 25 mg and shared her reflections in subsequent sessions. In the months that followed, she felt a burst of energy. Suddenly, she was more active than she had been in years. She brought a whole new perspective to teaching at North Carolina State University, and her graduate students noticed that she seemed happier and more engaged. She recalls that one day, her husband was moved to tears watching her play a song because of the new clarity and creativity she was demonstrating in her music.
“I didn't realize how much I was holding on,” Unruh Snyder said. “Part of what I experienced during that first trip was accepting that I live with Lyme disease. I have limitations, but I can find ways to overcome them.”.
Garcia-Romeu tells DoubleBlind that the next step is to design a larger randomized study. Following recent discussions about the development of psychedelic drugs that do not cause hallucinations , Garcia-Romeu is analyzing some data with a colleague to determine whether there is any correlation between participants' experiences during their sessions and afterward. For example, whether those who experienced a greater sense of unity or love showed a significant improvement in their quality of life or a greater reduction in Lyme disease symptoms. Another idea for the next study would be to use a brain scan to assess whether there are changes in participants' brains associated with Lyme disease and how psilocybin treatment might affect it.
A broader study seems timely: due to climate change and warming winters, ticks have been migrating to areas of the United States where they were not previously seen, increasing the risk of infection. «We are seeing a growing problem with Lyme disease. If more people get the disease, that also means more people will develop chronic problems later on,» Garcia-Romeu said. «If this could help, it would be a great achievement.».
In the three years since her participation in the study, Unruh Snyder told DoubleBlind that she still has limitations to overcome due to Lyme disease. She has not returned to psilocybin because she wishes to preserve the integrity of the Johns Hopkins research, should she be re-selected for future long-term studies. However, it is clear that she is still experiencing the positive effects of those two psilocybin experiences.
“Now I can't imagine life without this. I don't know what I would do if I hadn't had this experience,” he said. “Imagine spending eight years going from doctor to doctor: you have this, you have that, you have the other. But your body says, ”Oh, I don't think I have depression, I don't think I have anxiety. I know my body hurts, but why? They never gave me a clear answer. They deny it to you over and over again, but now I'm much more aware of what feels good to me.".
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