The Washington Times published an article about the use of LSD and psilocybin to treat cluster headaches, and MAPS-initiated research at Harvard's McLean Hospital investigating the efficacy of this treatment.

Until recently, I had never heard of cluster headaches, and neither had my friend Bob, which isn't his name for reasons that will soon be evident.
Bob was in his late 40s with no medical problems.

Out of nowhere he began having headaches. These were not the two-aspirin kind, or even migraines. They were monsters. I realized this one night at his house. For an hour he lay on the floor, screaming. We're not talking moaning and grousing. Screaming.

Clueless, he went to the Web and discovered cluster headaches. They are hideous. His symptoms were par for the course.

Nobody knows what causes them. They are fairly rare, which is why many people have not heard of them. To those who have them, they are a huge deal. Various Web sites describe them: Clusterheadaches.com and Clusterheadaches.org, for example.

Clusterbusters.com has a video file of an attack in progress. "Click below to see a short example of the typical effects of a cluster headache attack in progress ... WARNING: file is very graphic." Yep.

Bob went to doctors, who didn't know what to do but prescribed migraine medications, some of them very expensive and all of them largely ineffective. He was having several of these things a week. He began pondering suicide. I'm not kidding and neither was he.

He then discovered Clusterbusters.com, maintained by people who have the headaches. It reported that sufferers who took small doses of psilocybin no longer had the headaches. At this point he was willing to inject cobra venom if he thought it might help. He got psilocybin, a hallucinogenic found in mushrooms, and the headaches stopped.

Let me emphasize that Bob was not a druggie. In college he had experimented with hallucinogens and didn't like them at all. The dose he took for his headaches was subrecreational: It didn't produce, or barely produced, the effects for which most people take psilocybin.
He got some spores and began growing the mushrooms secretly in his basement. Psilocybin is illegal. He was a criminal. Yet for him, and for a lot of other people, having it was perhaps literally a matter of life or death.

As it turned out, heavyweight neurologists had run into anecdotal evidence of the effectiveness of psilocybin and had undertaken studies, including Dr. R. Andrew Sewell, Dr. John H. Halpern and Dr. Harrison G. Pope Jr. of McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

From Neurology, the magazine of the American Academy of Neurology: "The authors interviewed 53 cluster headache patients who had used psilocybin or lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to treat their condition.

"Twenty-two of 26 psilocybin users reported that psilocybin aborted attacks; 25 of 48 psilocybin users and seven of eight LSD users reported cluster period termination ..."

My question: When a seriously painful medical condition is cured by an illegal substance, the cure being substantiated by premier researchers at as good a medical institution as exists, what do we do? Nobody here is looking for a legal excuse to use illegal drugs. They just don't want to roll on the floor, screaming.

When medical technology and the law are in conflict, human decency suggests making medical exceptions to the law. A great many potentially abusable drugs -- Demerol, morphine, codeine, what have you -- are used medically under control by prescription.

Why not psilocybin? If you ever listen to someone with a cluster headache, you will agree. I promise.

By Fred Reed
May 5, 2007

Link

I've heard of psilocybin helping people with cluster headaches before and it shows great promise, but the US goverment wil be a big obstakle before any real medecin on psilocybin base can be produces.

If you look under mushrooms on the erowid site you'll find an article about the topic which is already several years old but so far the pharmaceutical industry doesn't seem to be interested, of course they won't be able to patent mushrooms which might explain why they are not interested.

indeed, their only interest is making mony, so if thre is a cheap medicine, why bother? but perhaps there could be made an analoge that could be patented and that would work against clusterheadache? that would probably be a tryptamine and have halucinogic potential, so that could be the reason why they dont study such an psylosybin analoge. but with this news getting around that mushrooms can help people wit those cluster headaches people can grow their own mushrooms and can benefit from the effects without helping the pharmacutical industy and thus the industry misses out on more mony

You're right, I don't use shrooms that often but I have to say I've taken a very small amount a few times when I was a bit depressed and it did help me to go on, go to work etc.
This is only my personal experience of course and nobody should try this because I said so. When I mean a small amount I really do mean very little, I didn't feel any of the psychotropic effects, I just wasn't depressed anymore and had healthy energy levels.

I think I'm gonna do me a batch right now come to think of it.

skoeip wrote:indeed, their only interest is making mony, so if thre is a cheap medicine, why bother? but perhaps there could be made an analoge that could be patented and that would work against clusterheadache? that would probably be a tryptamine and have halucinogic potential, so that could be the reason why they dont study such an psylosybin analoge. but with this news getting around that mushrooms can help people wit those cluster headaches people can grow their own mushrooms and can benefit from the effects without helping the pharmacutical industy and thus the industry misses out on more mony

Exactly but there does not exist a medicine that works even half that good as psilocybin. What i heard is that you don't need to take mushrooms often to get rid of the headaches, only once or twice a year... So there is no money in it anyway. We can only hope patients will be able to get their hands on the shrooms

Actually, if research is allowed, then the pharmaceutical companies will patent an expensive drug to stop the headaches & make loads of money. They'll make a fortune as the ingredients are cheap & easy.
At the moment a typical drug used to stop attacks (not cure them) is injectable sumatriptan (6mg) & here where I live, a double dose costs approx 90 euros !
So it's pretty expensive.

The people with cluster headaches who have taken lsd or pscilocybin only take minute doses, ie - pre-psychedelic doses.
Some actually take them whilst having the attack.
Now the pain is so enormous that the idea of dropping acid or eating mushrooms
is awesome & a bit scarey.
If you took a psychedelic dose then perhaps the headaches would be intensified ?
But if someone was crazy enough to go for a big dose, then perhaps the bad trip that could follow would be good for them if they were able to handle it, for at pre-psychedelic doses perhaps the pain just stops but the person doesn't get to see the core problem & try to deal with it. With a decent psychedelic dose the pain may not stop & the person would have to face the problem & try to resolve it, or just flip out & go crazy.
I've looked all around the clusterbuster site & haven't found anything on anyone using strong doses as a tool to try to mentally solve the problem.
I'm sure that it would be possible to use LSD in this way.

Interesting to see this post.

I am here to testify for the use of clusterbuster medications. (ie; psylocibin, LSD and LSA containing seeds)

I have suffered severely from cluster headaches for over 30 years. The pain has been likened to having an appendage removed without anesthesia. Thats possibly an understatement.

In my many years of suffering I would be hit on an average of 10 times at 2 hours each time per 24 hours with pain indescribable. In all the years I was prescribed countless drugs and methods to cope. Not a single thing ever helped.

Long story short, I discovered LSA seeds Rivea corymbosa.

With some trial I have now for 2 years been pain free. I and others dose with small amounts of LSA or psylocibin on a routine basis anywhere from once monthly to bi-annualy.
I personally never reach an effect beyond a slight sedation feeling and this has turned into a true gift from the gods for me.

The ball is rolling and hopefully in the not too distant future research will show the value and allow the use legally of hallucinogenics for the treatment of cluster headaches and a litany of other ailments.

^Really good to hear that you have found something to help you! Hope you continue to reap the benefits and that these seeds will remain legal forever.

Question: how much do you take? Is it a sub-psychoactive dose or do you experience some of the effects?

Space-is-the-Place wrote:Maybe if the pharmaceutical industry gets it's head out of it's own ass....

And see that the shit they sell is a poor derivative of gold...

automedication all the way

I can also testify, that indeed this works. At the age of 14 or something I started getting migraines, and yes it's hell. I mean constantly getting a big ass piano on your head from 10-stories-high, that's what it feels like. But eversince I started exploring the world of psychedelics(mainly since my first mushroom trip), the migraines lessened. Normally I'd have two a month or so, after my first mushroom trip I've had none for almost a year. They did come back, but using mushrooms, lsd, lsa every now and then, sure helps a bundle. Whereas I first had 2 a month, I rarely have migraines now(like 4 times a year or something).

I really hope they'll be researching more on this soon, cause there still are lots of people who haven't got a clue what to do with it. And migraine-painkillers, don't work at all in my experience, I think even a high dose of morphine wouldn't even completely dim a migraine.

Peace.

spingerfitzengefühl wrote:If you look under mushrooms on the erowid site you'll find an article about the topic which is already several years old but so far the pharmaceutical industry doesn't seem to be interested, of course they won't be able to patent mushrooms which might explain why they are not interested.

The medicines the docter gave me for cluster headache cost 80euro's for couple of pills. Each pill must be taken when the headache begins and begins to work after hour or a half(just like everything ingested oraly) so till than the pain is there. The medicine works as follows: the pain slowly fades, though not completly and my chest feels like there's a big woman on it. Some substances trigger the headache so i avoid them in my diet. But after a mushroom trip 3 to 4 weeks i can eat all i want and no way i have a attack. Without mushrooms i'd have to deal with this pain in a way that just doesnt suits me, suppress the pain with chemical meds that cause scary(the pressure on my chest scares me) side effects.

I have heard many good things from lsd. Another "cure" for cluster headaches is intakes of pure oxygen through a mask. I have read the cluster headache section in wikipedia and that is what it said.