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Phred said:
What a coincidence! As I was preparing to make this post, I came across the thread in this forum regarding the use of mushrooms for pain relief. I can answer the question asked -- are there any mushrooms known to provide pain relief? The answer is yes -- for one specific type of pain at least. As it happens, that pain is the most excruciating pain known to mankind.

As many of you already know, the only reason I started posting on The Shroomery over three years ago was because I have a neurological condition known variously as Cluster Headache, Horton's Syndrome (in parts of Europe) or "Suicide Headache".

I had first grown Psilocybe cubensis way back in 1977 using the method outlined in Oess & Oeric's book. As I grew older, I stopped taking psychedelics and even marijuana altogether. Just one of those things.

In 1985 I started exhibiting the classic symptoms of Cluster Headaches, although it took another seven years before the doctors finally realized that is what it was -- the original diagnosis was migraine. Some of the medication they prescribed worked partially sometimes. Most did nothing but give me weird side effects and suck large chunks of cash from my bank account. For the most part, I just suffered. I (like so many others) seriously contemplated suicide on several occasions. As a matter of fact, if I had owned a pistol back then I would not be typing this post today. No joke.

In the year 2000, I came across a website for clusterheads (what we CH sufferers call ourselves) run by clusterheads. I started scanning it for any new treatments I may have been unaware of here in my beautiful third world banana republic. I came across a series of posts from people who had tried psilocybes to treat their affliction. They were referring to a guy by the name of "Flash" who had brought it to their attention in 1998, shortly after the clusterheadaches.com message board came into existence. Flash had noticed that the only time he had a break in his clusters was a two year stretch when he had been taking LSD recreationally. When he stopped the LSD, his headaches returned. Later, he tried Psilocybe semilanceata he harvested himself (he lives near Aberdeen in Scotland) and found that it also kept the headaches at bay.

Reading the posts from Flash and others reminded me of a few obscure research papers I had stumbled across in the library at Carleton University back in 1973 describing successful trials done in the US on migraine sufferers treated with LSD. I knew right away that Flash was on to something, and decided to grow my own shrooms. The information here at The Shroomery and on Fanaticus's website made that a considerably easier task than it had been back in 1977, believe me!

And lo and behold... the shrooms worked for me as well!

I started flooding the message board at clusterheadaches.com with information on how to grow Psilocybe cubensis and on where to obtain reliable spores -- all of them are Shroomery sponsors, by the way -- and the number of people trying the therapy mushroomed (hee hee hee!) to the point where I estimate there have now been around two hundred clusterheads that I know of who use shrooms (and a few who use LSD) to keep themselves pain free.

At one point around three years ago I was engaged in an e-mail conversation with a gentleman who was in desperate straits -- he was in the middle of a very bad headache cycle and was unable to obtain any shrooms on his local black market. He was willing to grow his own but was dreading having to wait the six weeks till harvest time. I made a carefully-worded appeal here to see if anyone might have some ideas as to how to solve his dilemma. My post was (rightfully, I must admit) deleted in less than 24 hours. No matter how altruistic my request may have been, it was rightly interpreted as a "hookup" request, and the moderators were absolutely correct to delete it. I had no objections to their action whatsoever. So I spread the word amongst my clusterhead fungus farmer friends and was able to arrange an anonymous transfer of badly-needed medication to this gentleman who goes by the name of PinkFloyd on the clusterbusters website.

They worked like magic. Now as it happens, PinkFloyd turns out to be a very highly-respected individual in certain areas -- a mover and a shaker, if you will. He was so grateful for the relief and so fascinated by the power of the fungus to change the lives of so many people for the better that he threw body and soul into an effort to get the word out. He put together a site called ClusterBusters.com. Some of my posts to clusterheadaches.com appear there, as well as an archive of all the posts ever made at clusterheadaches.com discussing hallucinogens as a treatment for cluster headaches.

More significantly, he started contacting various credible people in the medical community to see if he could find someone willing to go through the enormous hassle of getting the required FDA approvals to initiate a clinical trial into the use of LSD and psilocybin in the treatment of cluster headaches.

I and others had suggested that MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) would be a good ally to enlist. We were right!

Not only will there be a clinical trial, that trial will be held at Harvard no less!

Woo Hoo!

Here is the link to the announcement at www.clusterheadaches.com --

http://www.clusterheadaches.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=meds;action=display;num=1078658317

I have been just itching to post this news here at The Shroomery for about a week now, but I wanted to wait till Flash, PinkFloyd and I had posted the joint announcement of the upcoming trials at www.clusterheadaches.com. Flash made the post a few nights ago, so here I am.

This news is friggin' huge, folks. It will be the first clinical trial with LSD on human subjects in the United States in three decades, and it has a lot of people in the psychedelic research community pretty stoked. There are already researchers trying to get on the team with Dr. Halpern and Dr. Sewell, and the official announcement hasn't even been made to the medical community at large.

It is also huge in that it may eventually lead to a legal, effective treatment for the hundreds of thousands of people who have had their lives literally destroyed by a condition which medical texts agree produces the most intense agony known to man. It has been compared to having a limb amputated without anesthetic, or to giving birth (with complications) without anesthetic. And clusterheads suffer that pain for an hour or more, two to six times every day, for months at a stretch. In the case of "chronic" (vs. episodic) clusterheads, they endure that torture every single day of their lives. People quite literally have killed themselves rather than endure the agony -- hence the name "suicide headaches".

Here's a link to a three minute excerpt of a clusterhead going through what he descibes as a level 6 cluster attack. We clusterheads use a scale of 1 to 10 to rate the severity of an attack, with 10 being the most extreme -- the kind where you find yourself reaching for a gun to end it all. Not every attack is 10 for me -- most of mine are in the 7 to 9 range, but I've had more tens over the years than I care to remember. This clip will take a while to load for those on dialup, and it is not suited for watching by the faint of heart, so I strongly recommend not viewing it if you are easily upset by witnessing the suffering of others. I provide it just to show what an incredible boon this treatment is for clusterheads.

http://www.clusterbusters.com/chuckattack.MPG

I have to admit, I am pretty proud of my contributions in bringing this about. I know that without the efforts of myself and others at clusterheadaches.com it may have ended up being just a curiosity buried in the archives of an obscure messageboard. By the time I started evangelizing at clusterheadaches.com, Flash was pretty discouraged and about ready to throw in the towel. I injected some new enthusiasm and kept the ball rolling for a few years with his help, posting so often at the ch.com message board that some folks there must have been pretty tired of seeing the tag "pinksharkmark". By the time I started burning out on it myself, Pinkfloyd and several newer experimenters such as tommyD and mastifflvr28 had picked up the baton and run with it. I still posted occasionally, but nowhere near as often as I used to -- after all, I had my own shrooms and knew they worked and had spent hundreds of hours persuading others to give it a try. If they didn't want to -- no skin off my nose. I'd more than done my part.

But this milestone has motivated me to resume my more activist approach at the clusterhead message board. PinkFloyd has done a tremendous service to the clusterhead community -- and quite possibly to migraineurs as well. Psilocybin and LSD seem to work just as well for those suffering from migraines as they do for clusterheads.

I will try to keep this board updated as events unfold. We are still not at the point of handing out doses of LSD or psilocybin to clusterheads at MacLean Medical School. But it will happen.

pinky

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