Observations placeholder
LSD - How much is in the mind?
Identifier
015585
Type of Spiritual Experience
None
Background
This observation is intriguing because it links in with the placebo effect. How much of LSD's effects are actually related to being told you have taken LSD?
If suggestion can make you ill then presumably suggestion can make you well.
A description of the experience
Dr Sidney Cohen (1960)
The hallucinogenic experience is so striking that many subsequent disturbances may be attributed to it without further justification.
The highly suggestible or hysterical individual would tend to focus on his LSD experience to explain subsequent illness.
Patients have complained to Abramson that their LSD exposure produced migraine headaches and attacks of influenza up to a year later. One Chinese girl became paraplegic and ascribed that catastrophe to LSD.
It so happened that these people were all in the control group and had received nothing but tap water."