Experimental Use of Dermorphin to Treat Chronic Fatigue Syndrome — Some Questions

[Hip]

Does anyone know why the chemical supplier from which I obtained my dermorphin states that its dermorphin is for research purposes only, not for human consumption? Is this just in order to protect the chemical supplier legally? Or might the dermorphin they sell not be good for human consumption? That is to say, not a food grade product?

On PubMed, there are a number of studies which have tested the effects of dermorphin on human subjects, so it is clearly legitimate to use dermorphin for research purposes on humans.

 

[sekio]

How about both? It's certainly not made in a cGMP facility, but it's probably not outright *toxic*, either. Just read the spec. sheet. And your "supplier" doesn't want to be held liable if you overdose, or something else goes tits-up.

it is clearly legitimate to use dermorphin for research purposes on humans.

The FDA generally frowns on unlicensed "experiments" involving administering humans less-tested drugs. There's a lot of paperwork you have to go through before you can stick needles into people. At least, officially.

 

[pizzystrizzy]

If you are in the United States, it would be illegal to sell dermorphin for human consumption because it is not approved by the FDA. Your vendor is trying to establish that they did not sell it to you in order to consume. They don't technically have to do this, but in terms of selling substances of this kind, this is somewhat standard. At the opposite end of the spectrum, imagine that they sold it to you in pill form with a box that said "take 2 to treat your Chronic Fatigue." That would be about as illegal as they could get. Just having them in pill form probably crosses the threshold since if you are selling pills, there is a tacit understanding that they are for human consumption (because what else do you do with pills?). If it just came as a powder or liquid with a label, that might be legal, but to be on the safe side, they add the disclaimer. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm sure there are other factors that a court would use to establish intent, but that's the idea behind it. BTW I'm not saying that it is safe for human consumption, I have no idea. But I don't think a label like that should be taken as evidence that it is in some way more toxic than regular dermorphin designed for human consumption...

 

[Hip]

Thanks once again for your replies and advice.

In fact I took my first dose of dermorphin intranasally 3 days ago. I took a low dose of 100 micrograms (mcg) of dermorphin. Dermorphin is around 40 times more potent than morphine, so the equivalent morphine dose would be 4 mg.

There were virtually no physical or mental effects whatsoever arising in the period immediately following this 100 mcg dose of dermorphin. Dermorphin has an extremely short plasma half life of just 1.3 minutes (ref: 1), so pretty much all of this drug leaves your system within 15 minutes. By comparison, the half life of morphine is 2 hours.

However, even though no physical or mental effects appeared immediately after I took dermorphin, very noticeable effects did appear over the subsequent 3 days. These effects were:

• My generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) symptoms disappeared (I had GAD as a comorbid condition with my chronic fatigue syndrome).
• My chronic inflammatory sinusitis slowly disappeared.
• The constant sense of inflammation in my brain disappeared.
• A large patch of psoriasis I had on my leg for years substantially cleared up around 24 hours after taking the dermorphin, which was quite remarkable.
• My energy levels increased, but this is just a mild increase in energy so far.
• Other chronic fatigue syndrome symptoms such as the brain fog (mental confusion), sensory hypersensitivity (the horrible autism-like over-sensitivity to sounds, light, etc) were also noticeably improved.

Negative effects I noticed from taking dermorphin were:

• In the 3 days following my single dermorphin dose, I felt emotionally and intellectually a little "flat", especially the first day after taking dermorphin, but this mental flatness slowly wore off as the days went by. By contrast, all the positive effects of dermorphin seemed to actually increase as the days progressed.
• Some mild insomnia.


It seems apparent from my above experience that dermorphin is instituting some sort of longer-term changes to my body, because as mentioned, a single dose of dermorphin leaves your system after just 15 minutes, so for there to be these positive effects that last for several days after taking dermorphin, this drug must be triggering some more permanent beneficial changes to the body.

In fact, my experience mirrors what happen to Jox when he took kambo (which contains dermorphin). He took a single dose of kambo, but he said the full benefits of kambo only began to manifest several days later. Jox reported that the beneficial effects improved as each day went past. Only after 7 days did these beneficial effects of kambo start to wear off (but a then a second dose of kambo that Jox took at the 7 day point maintained and indeed further boosted the benefits).

What I am going to do is also wait a full 7 days before I consider taking my next dose of dermorphin, and observe if the above-detailed benefits of dermorphin also improve as each day goes past. So far they have.

 

[pizzystrizzy]

hmm. Extremely interesting. Nice report. How did you end up handling the issue of dividing up the dose / possibly mixing with inert powder?

 

[Hip]

How did you end up handling the issue of dividing up the dose / possibly mixing with inert powder?

Endotropic's concern was that if my mixture of dermorphin powder + inert powder was not very well mixed, I might run the risk of snorting up an overdose of dermorphin. It took possibility this seriously, and came up with the following system to mix the powers very thoroughly:

For the inert powder, I used inositol, a water soluble B vitamin that is safe in high doses of many grams, that is sold as a fine white powder, and which in my tests proved to be very comfortable to snort intranasally (I found it caused no irritation at all in the nasal cavity).

I decided on a powder mixture ratio of 250:1. With this ratio, each 25 mg of the powder mixture will contain 100 mcg of dermorphin.


I placed my 5000 mcg of dermorphin powder, and 1245 mg of inositol powder, as two separate piles on the surface of a flat mirror. Then, to the dermorphin pile, I added 16 pipette drops of distilled water (about 1 ml of water), which turned my little pile of dermorphin powder into a tiny puddle of water on surface of the mirror. Dermorphin is highly soluble in water, and dissolved into these drops of distilled water immediately. I gave the water in this tiny puddle a good stir anyway, to make sure the dermorphin was fully dissolved in it.

I then pushed the adjacent pile of inositol powder into this tiny puddle of water + dermorphin, using a Stanley blade. There was just enough water to soak into the inositol powder and turn the pile of inositol powder into a damp sludge. I thoroughly mixed this damp inositol powder sludge, so that the inositol powder was evenly damp. This ensured that the dermorphin dissolved in the water was evenly soaked into the inositol powder.

Then, using the Stanley blade, I spread the damp inositol powder sludge very thinly over a large area (say 20 cm by 20 cm) of the mirror surface. I placed a weak fan next to the mirror to blow a very gentle breeze over this area of damp powder, in order to dry it. (I used a 12 volt computer cooling fan for this purpose, but set to a very low speed, in order not to blow the drying powder off the mirror).

After an hour or two, the powder seemed completely dry, and I used the Stanley blade to gather up this power into a pile. Just to be doubly safe, I mixed this pile of dry powder for while, using the Stanley blade.

So now I had 1250 mg of a perfectly mixed inositol + dermorphin powder combination. I placed this powder mixture in a small container for storage.

To administer dermorphin to myself intranasally, I just weighted out 25 mg of this powder mixture (I have a digital scales that measures down to 1 mg), and snort it up the powder using a wide drinking straw. This 25 mg of powder mixture gives me a dose of 100 mcg of dermorphin.

 

[Toz]

I think I saw a documentary where some guy tried this substance. It did not seem like something you'd want to repeat every week. Or ever for that matter.

If it's so hard to dose, how come you don't just use a syringe and needle and do a subcutanous injection? I'm guessing this would work just as well as burning yourself and then placing it on the skin (which seems to be an unusually painful form of subcutanous administration of the drug).

 

[pizzystrizzy]

clever. I'm curious to see how long the beneficial effects last for you. Weekly dosing may not be necessary. I can imagine that some people who suffer from cfs might come across this thread at some future point and try to replicate what you've done, especially if the remission of your symptoms continues. I must say I have no clue what the physiological mechanism is...

 

[Epsilon Alpha]

I'm very curious as to why this particular compound causes what you claim is a remission. Unless we later find out it has an ungodly affinity for another target or unheard of functional selectivity at the MOR there's really not much that sets this apart from other short acting ultra potent opioids.

 

[Hip]

If it's so hard to dose, how come you don't just use a syringe and needle and do a subcutanous injection? I'm guessing this would work just as well as burning yourself and then placing it on the skin (which seems to be an unusually painful form of subcutanous administration of the drug).

If you are talking about kambo, the waxy secretion obtained from the skin of the Amazonian giant leaf frog, then I imagine this secretion may be full of bacteria and other microbes, so you probably would not want to inject it.

As for pure dermorphin from a chemical supplier, which is what I have, I guess you could inject this, but I am not really familiar with how to prepare a sterile solution for injection.

I'm very curious as to why this particular compound causes what you claim is a remission. Unless we later find out it has an ungodly affinity for another target or unheard of functional selectivity at the MOR there's really not much that sets this apart from other short acting ultra potent opioids.

Note that Jox used kambo to obtain remission from his CFS, and kambo contains other potent drugs and compounds in addition to dermorphin. It may be that Jox's remission was due to the combination of drugs in kambo.

Though my hunch is that dermorphin is the key player in this CFS remission.

To understand how dermorphin might cause CFS remission, we need to understand the disease processes in CFS. Many researchers believe chronic fatigue syndrome is caused by a long-term low-level infection of the brain, from a virus such as an enterovirus. Many of the various symptoms of CFS are probably caused not so much by the virus itself, but by the immune response to the virus. There will be a strong inflammatory response to the virus in the brain, and this inflammation in the brain likely drives many CFS symptoms. In particular, the inflammatory cytokine IL-6, released by the immune system in the brain, may be causing a lot of the symptoms of CFS.

Now interestingly, this study suggests that mu-opioid receptor stimulation decreases IL-6 (and delta-opioid receptor stimulation increases IL-6). And this study says that in monocytes, mu-opioid receptor stimulation by morphine decreases IL-6.

So dermorphin may be reducing the severity of the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome just by reducing the IL-6 driven inflammation in the brain.




DERMORPHIN CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME TREATMENT UPDATE:

I already mentioned earlier in this thread that, after administering a single dose 100 mcg of dermorphin intranasally in an experiment to treat my CFS, in the days following that single dose, there were many noticeable improvements in my CFS symptoms: my anxiety disorder symptoms disappeared, the inflammation in my sinuses and head disappeared, my brain fog improved, and my sensory hypersensitivity improved.

I also already mentioned that there were also some negative effects from this dermorphin: I felt emotionally and intellectually a little flat for days after taking dermorphin.

However, on the fourth day after taking that single dose of dermorphin, all hell broke loose, and I suddenly entered a horrible mental state of mild psychosis, with severe emotional flatness, which was very disorienting.

I have experienced days with mild psychosis symptoms before (they are not uncommon in people like myself with anxiety disorder), but I had not had a mild psychosis attack for a long time.

On the fifth day after taking dermorphin (the next day), most of these mild psychosis effects disappeared, and I was back to normal. But the good effects of dermorphin on my CFS also wore off by the fifth day, so it was back to square one at that point.

So the effects (good and bad) of a single 100 mcg intranasal dose of dermorphin seem to last for around 4 days.

This unpleasant mild psychosis experience on the forth day was quite off-putting. Though I think this bad experience may just be something particular to me, as I have had some mild psychosis symptoms before, due to my anxiety disorder. So this mild psychosis may not manifest in other people with CFS trying dermorphin.

It is now 10 days since I took that single dermorphin dose, and there are no long term effects to report. Everything has returned to normal.


SUMMARY OF MY DERMORPHIN CFS-TREATMENT EXPERIENCE:

The benefits of dermorphin for chronic fatigue syndrome that I observed are significant, and dermorphin would appear to be a potentially very useful treatment for CFS.

However, in my case, the side effects of dermorphin — the emotional and intellectual flatness, culminating in a day with some mild psychosis symptoms — were a problem. However, I think these side effects may just be an idiosyncratic response in me, and may not appear in other people.

If I can find a way to prevent these side effects, I would definitely further experiment in taking dermorphin regularly as a CFS treatment.


More info on my dermorphin experiment for treating chronic fatigue syndrome can be found on this thread:

http://forums.phoenixrising.me/inde...zonian-medicine-kambo-on-a-cfs-patient.22952/

 

[sekio]

So dermorphin may be reducing the severity of chronic fatigue syndrome by reducing the IL-6 inflammation in the brain.

there is no reason to believe this effect would continue after the dermorphin has been metabolised, or even that it occurs at all with dermorphin, given that dermorphin is apparently totally different from e.g. fentanyl w.r.t its activities in man.

was there any precipitating cause for your little psychosis or was it out of the blue? and do you plan to continue dermorphin treatment? is there any plan to have any sort of blinded control?

 

[Hip]

there is no reason to believe this effect would continue after the dermorphin has been metabolised, or even that it occurs at all with dermorphin, given that dermorphin is apparently totally different from e.g. fentanyl w.r.t its activities in man.

Yes, with dermorphin's half life being 1.3 minutes, this drug is pretty much completely out of your system within 15 minutes. Yet from my observations it was clear that dermorphin created some potent, unequivocal effects that lasted for 4 days after taking it. So somehow dermorphin is precipitating some long-term actions in the body, even though dermorphin completely leaves the body within 15 minutes.

One speculative explanation for the long-term action of dermorphin in the body is as follows:

The thing about brain inflammation is that there can be some hysteresis in its switching on and off: in particular, once brain inflammation is switched on by an exposure to lipopolysaccharide (LPS), this brain inflammation can remain on and running for many months, long after the LPS trigger has gone. Nobody quite understands why LPS triggers long term inflammation. So one might speculate that perhaps the anti-inflammatory action of dermorphin is reversing this hysteresis; that is to say, dermorphin may be turning off the inflammatory response in the brain that was jammed in the on state. In this way, a single dose of dermorphin may have long lasting effects that are still felt days after dermorphin has completely left the body. But this idea is very speculative.



Another (perhaps more likely) reason why dermorphin may have long-term effects in the brain is that some opioids alter NMDA receptor function in the brain: this study indicates that morphine alters NMDA receptor-mediated neurotransmission in the nucleus accumbens, and these effects persist 1 week after morphine withdrawal. So morphine can create NMDA receptor effects in the brain that persist many days after the drug has left the body. This nucleus accumbens effect is likely part of morphine's tolerance and addition properties. (Interestingly, the nucleus accumbens forms part of the pleasure center of the brain, so the fact that some opioids alter NMDA neurotransmission in this pleasure center may explain why I felt so emotionally flat after taking dermorphin.)

Now interestingly, it is known that NMDA receptor antagonists help prevent morphine tolerance. I wonder whether the co-administration of NMDA receptor antagonists with dermorphin might help prevent some of the bad side effects I experienced from taking dermorphin? That might be my next experiment. NMDA receptor antagonists might prevent the emotionally flatness side effect I had, by blocking the desensitization of mu-opioid receptors in nucleus accumbens pleasure center.

Having said that, this study found that what studies observe with morphine cannot always be extended to opioids in general; in particular, the study found that for selective mu and delta opioids, the mechanisms of tolerance may be different to that of morphine.

In terms of the mechanism of morphine tolerance, in this study, the authors actually propose a model in which signals from activated mu-opioid receptor are picked up by the associated NMDA receptor, which in turn exerts a negative feedback effect on mu-opioid receptor signaling. So in other words, the NMDA receptor mediates the desensitization and tolerance build-up of the mu-opioid receptor to mu-opioid drugs. Block the NMDA receptor, and you block this tolerance build-up.



Note that chronic NMDA receptor overstimulation is thought to play a role in chronic fatigue syndrome; thus the fact that mu-opioid drugs exhibit NMDA receptor effects may help explain why mu-opioid drugs benefit CFS. (Note that many CFS patients have observed that mu-opioid pain relieving drugs such as oxycodone and hydrocodone noticeably reduce their neurological CFS symptoms; so this beneficial effect is not unique to dermorphin).

was there any precipitating cause for your little psychosis or was it out of the blue? and do you plan to continue dermorphin treatment?

It was out of the blue, though I think dermorphin may have had a hand in causing it. A few years ago, when my anxiety disorder were very severe, I used to get mild psychosis symptoms quite often, a few times a week. On each occasion, the psychosis would last say half a day. This type of psychosis is called anxiety psychosis, and is a symptom of anxiety disorder.

These anxiety psychosis symptoms would make it hard to follow programs on the TV, as the brain has a harder time interpreting reality. Though anyone speaking to me would not notice any difference in behavior, as the psychosis was mild. These days, fortunately my anxiety disorder is much improved, and these mild anxiety psychosis episodes have disappeared, and I have not experienced psychosis for years. That is why I was so surprised to experience a recurrence of my anxiety psychosis, apparently triggered by dermorphin.

I don't want to go back to experiencing these anxiety psychosis episodes, so I am apprehensive about using dermorphin again. However, I am debating this with myself at the moment. I suspect that the only reason dermorphin precipitated this anxiety psychosis is because I was prone to such episodes in the past. However, other CFS patients, who have no history of anxiety psychosis, may not experience these negative side effects of dermorphin. So ideally it would be better to test dermorphin on another CFS patient with no past proneness to anxiety psychosis.

is there any plan to have any sort of blinded control?

I could certainly easily perform a blinded control on myself in future, by getting a friend to prepare both a dermorphin-containing and a dermorphin-free version of the power that I snort intranasally, blindly labeling them "A" and "B".

 

[polymath]

It's not impossible that an opioid could have therapeutic effects that last after the elimination of the drug from the body... Morphine has been tested as a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder and a single dose was found to have a beneficial effect lasting for at least a week.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15766302

 

[Hip]

It's not impossible that an opioid could have therapeutic effects that last after the elimination of the drug from the body... Morphine has been tested as a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder and a single dose was found to have a beneficial effect lasting for at least a week.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15766302

Very interesting indeed.

I would guess that the mechanism by which morphine helps OCD is the same one as detailed above: that is to say, the alteration of NMDA receptor sensitivity.

 

[Solipsis]

Pharma geeks; why does dermorphin cross the BBB but not endorphine or DAMGO? I want my Gibsonesque endorphin transdermal patches!
Or is this one of those "oxytoxcin totally crosses the BBB" ... .only 10% sort of deals?

As it appears, analogues of it can pass the BBB as can β-endorphin as a cationized complex, via ADE i.e. by binding to anionic sites, so one could jump to the assumption that dermorphin can, too, via this same way. It just may be that they are not all equally prone to be degraded by proteinases, which could be much better armed to deal with endorphin since it is endogenous. Then again, dermorphin is not particularly metabolically stable either, as evidenced in post #24 by reference.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15031301
http://ajpgi.physiology.org/content/275/3/G514.full

You may know this by now: I am just as you say, a geek, but not an expert or a scientist active in this field.

 

[copium7777]

I am curious about dermorphin and deltorphin for cfs although I'm too weak and have heart issues that would rule out kambo/the whole deal ...

I do have a friend with far milder cfs and mcas who has done kambo ceremonies and he thought they helped , but he is still sick and it is hard to say which treatments helped the most. A very interesting topic imo.

Seems like deltorphin is promising for pain if u can dose it right bc Delta opioid agonists have less side effects than mu

 

[dopamimetic]

In my experience, combining NMDA antagonists and opioids exacrebates psychotomimesis. I have never ever heard fucking voices before I did buprenorphin and following that other opioids. AH-7921 was the only opioid that didn't have this side effect, ok and tramadol but guess that one's just too weak. But I am not exactly your typical guinea pig and have had some strange reactions before.

Anybody seen deltorphin available or having experiences with it? I am very interested in delta opioids but apparently there are no pure agonists available yet. The only one I know that purposedly has delta agonism was bromadol with some pretty nice results but also pretty dangerous as it's so strong that the only vendor selling it fucked it up even as a solution ... and afaik there have been some debates about how relevant its delta agonism is in humans. But it was very different from classical mu agonists (methadone, morphine, desmethyl/tramadol etc), somewhat more fluid, cuddly and - to me - softly euphoric (don't get that usually from mu agonists).

Very interesting findings about dermorphine. Thanks for sharing.
But wouldn't that indicate that NMDA antagonists might help too? In my experience they can do wonders for lethargic depression, yet only in the short-time and lead to compulsive usage patterns with mania and overdose if one doesn't have the willpower of a horse.

 

[copium7777]

im preyyy sure its possible to procure deltorphin, but very tricky to dose, OP got dermoprhin and was very fastidious about voluimetric dosing, but with my level of brain fog im not sure i'd trust myself to follow these procedures

 

[copium7777]

So now I have dermorphin powder but basically no knowledge of how to dose lamo

 

[Zephyn]

Kambo is utter garbage if you ask me. Useless other than to research for potential antibiotic/antiviral related compounds. Oh I see, people have isolated specific peptides from it. Perhaps it might be better that way, nd have some use. As for dosing, *at least for the straight up toad venom* containing whatever proportions of the different peptides it has, from what I understand applying it to a fresh burn is the method as not enough can absorb through the small wound to kill you. Id be extremely careful dosing that pure compound