Psychedelics Appear to Cure my Tinnitus!

[Si Dread]

Hello my clever friends at ADD Mods, dunno if this is perhaps a little thick for ADD but shift it about as needed.

Psychedelics cure my tinnitus! I've been a DJ & drummer most of my adult life, but I also produce fast, intense dance music & live in appartments. Since about 1991 I have had Sennhiesers or some expensive headphones clamped on my ears often for many, many hours at a time. Producing music does similar things to time that actually tripping does! Anyway, headphones have helped me analyse my work prior to completion & makes the whole process of producing & recording alot more enjoyable without disturbing my neighbours.

Long story short, I've fucked up my hearing & I've had pretty annoying tinnitus for, I dunno, at least a couple years now.

I've tried a few little things here & there over this time as well & I've found that different classes of compound produce differing effects on my tinnitus. For instance, when Minx (our name for mxe) was legal, I did it fairly regularly in quite conservative doses. A number of other related compounds came & went & they ALL turned my tinnitus UP. Turned it up alot, so much so that on one occassion at a mates, on perhaps only 20mg of MXE I watched THREE movies back-to-back & barely got ANY of the fucking dialogue even after constantly having to ask to have the TV turned up. I gave up about 3am & just fell asleep. Even once the effects of Dissociatives have worn off, the high volume tinnitus continues.

Classic 5ht2a Psychedelics however have a very different effect on my hearing. They KILL the fucking tinnitus almost stone dead! Phenethylamines such as 2c-e & Tryptamines from the 4-subs group all produce the same results. Psilocybin the same. For the duration of the trip & normally for the after-glow period, my tinnitus drops to something like 10% of it's usual level. I have to try to hear the tinnitus, rather than trying to hear the movie! A recent experiment with a Lysergamide for the first time since the 90's, brought the same relief from the tinnitus. As Lysergamides are sometimes used to treat Migraine headache, & I am also a sufferer of those Goddamned awful things, I wonder if perhaps something about the way Psychedelic drugs work with 5ht2a receptors might one day produce a cure for Tinnitus..?

I once posted on here about how smoking marjuana seems to protect my lungs against the worst effects of polluted London air & I hoped to find a way of getting this information to the medical establishment. I never did! Does anyone know how some protetariate, every-day, man-in-the-street like me might go about reporting these sorts of surprising health benefit effects from recreational drugs use? I doubt there's much point in simply telling my GP about it, I never see the same Doctor twice & I doubt they'd take anything I said seriously once I open my mouth about, say, Magic Mushrooms..!

 

[sekio]

5ht2a receptors are thought to play a role in the amplification of sense data in the brain. Maybe that's got something to do with it.

Part of your problem may be that drugs like LSD are well-documented to produce tolerance to their effects with regular (daily) use. But either way, looking into low-dose hallucinogen therapy to supress tinnitus seems like an OK idea to me. As 5ht2a agonists are never used in medicine these days, you'd be hard pressed to find a doctor to prescribe you Delysid!

In the meantime maybe treat it like cluster headaches- try to soldier through as much of it as you can, but throw in a hallucinogen every once in a while to help?

 

[Si Dread]

That's a thoughtful reply, thanks very much.

Just so you know, I have no intention of self-medicating with Psychedelics for daily tinnitus, but I will continue to document any effects from occassional use.

My tinnitus goes up & down anyway, some days are worse than others. I wonder why that is..?

 

[username13]

As a sufferer of this dreadful condition i am very happy to hear you mayhave some improvement. Just curious it seems like this isa temporary cure of the problem and then it comes back? Can you say for how long it goes away?

Ive not tried shrooms since my tinnitus came on strong, when im ready wil have to give it a try. Once told a doctor, an EareNoseThroat guy, aout my tinnitus and he said "what like you hear voices or something?" and i said yeah they are teling me to kill you but i wont obey them,for now

 

[endotropic]

Classic 5ht2a Psychedelics however have a very different effect on my hearing. They KILL the fucking tinnitus almost stone dead! Phenethylamines such as 2c-e & Tryptamines from the 4-subs group all produce the same results. Psilocybin the same. For the duration of the trip & normally for the after-glow period, my tinnitus drops to something like 10% of it's usual level. I have to try to hear the tinnitus, rather than trying to hear the movie! A recent experiment with a Lysergamide for the first time since the 90's, brought the same relief from the tinnitus. As Lysergamides are sometimes used to treat Migraine headache, & I am also a sufferer of those Goddamned awful things, I wonder if perhaps something about the way Psychedelic drugs work with 5ht2a receptors might one day produce a cure for Tinnitus..?

Just out of curiosity, do you notice any reduction in your migraines after taking a 5-HT2A psychedelic? I know a girl who takes (prescribed) medication daily to prevent migraines, but for a week or two after tripping she claims she can skip doses without the headaches returning. All 5-HT2A psychedelics have the same effect on her, ergoline or not. Notice anything similar?

 

[Si Dread]

Hello again, sorry for the delay, been busy posting this all over

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/51485

I can't say for sure that my migraines have improved because of psychedelics, nor have I suffered enough since I removed dietry triggers to judge whether improvements are brought after tripping. What I can say is that through my life I have tripped with reasonable regularity & my migraines have become less painful & less often as time has gone on. However, my mum suffered migraines too & hers also tailed off a bit in strength as she got older & she never tripped! Also, at the same time that I first started tripping, I was also removing from my diet dozens of possible triggers such as chocolate, coffee, cheese, cream, yoghurt, hell all milk products & eventually I discovered red wine & red grape juice were problematic too.

Now the other question, what was that..? Ah yes, duration of action... It appears sadly that the effect wears off along with the trip. In fact, I could "hear" my tinnitus coming back even as a recent trip wore off. I also have a feeling that tolerance brought less relief. If using certain Psychedelics regularly brings tolerance through down regulation of the 5ht2a receptor system, & that system is related to tinnitus symptoms, then that would make sense...

 

[Epsilon Alpha]

If 5HT2A down regulation is the cause perhaps chronic dosing with an antagonist such as hydroxyzine could provide a more consistent effect with a prescription. 5HT2A appears to downregulate as soon as it binds anything agonist or antagonist.

 

[bolinas]

My hearing isn't particularly good. Especially high pitch above certain frequencies and especially more in one ear. From birth.

Back in the days of JLF Catalog, I had some Anadenanthera Peregrina seeds (although they were mischaracterized as Anadenantera Columbrina, or the other way around). I think they were toasted and then smoked? I can't really remember anymore. What I do remember is that it was supposed to have bufotenine or something similar.

I took the substance in the outdoors. After it came upon me, my hearing was better than it had ever been in my life. My tinnitus was gone. I could hear all the animals making their rounds, the wind blowing the trees, all the normal sounds that are muted (or covered in tinnitus) to me. I could hear better in my poor ear. And it was real sound, not hallucination.

I've always wondered why such a simple approach could so radically, if only temporarily, improve my hearing and what this really means about the true nature of my hearing loss....

 

[Si Dread]

Remarkable! I'm not entirely alone in this! Maybe there's something to it...

If it helps the clever folk who now about brain chemistry & pharmacology, the following drugs increase my awareness of my tinnitus, appearing to make it worse...

Methoxetamine, Ketamine, 3-meo-pcp & every other dissociative I've tried, I'm not that fond of them. Also Diazepam, Etizolam & cannabis.

 

[Sturnam]

This is a great paper:

Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin

Psychedelic drugs have a long history of use in healing ceremonies, but despite renewed interest in their therapeutic potential, we continue to know very little about how they work in the brain. Here we used psilocybin, a classic psychedelic found in magic mushrooms, and a task-free functional MRI (fMRI) protocol designed to capture the transition from normal waking consciousness to the psychedelic state. Arterial spin labeling perfusion and blood-oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI were used to map cerebral blood flow and changes in venous oxygenation before and after intravenous infusions of placebo and psilocybin. Fifteen healthy volunteers were scanned with arterial spin labeling and a separate 15 with BOLD. As predicted, profound changes in consciousness were observed after psilocybin, but surprisingly, only decreases in cerebral blood flow and BOLD signal were seen, and these were maximal in hub regions, such as the thalamus and anterior and posterior cingulate cortex (ACC and PCC). Decreased activity in the ACC/medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was a consistent finding and the magnitude of this decrease predicted the intensity of the subjective effects. Based on these results, a seed-based pharmaco-physiological interaction/functional connectivity analysis was performed using a medial prefrontal seed. Psilocybin caused a significant decrease in the positive coupling between the mPFC and PCC. These results strongly imply that the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain's key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition.

Robin L. Carhart-Harris, David Erritzoe, Tim Williams, James M. Stone, Laurence J. Reed, Alessandro Colasanti, Robin J. Tyacke, Robert Leech, Andrea L. Malizia, Kevin Murphy, Peter Hobden, John Evans, Amanda Feilding, Richard G. Wise, David J. Nutt
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012 February 7; 109(6): 2138–2143. Published online 2012 January 23. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1119598109
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22308440

Essentially, their hypothesis is that psychedelics decrease activity of integrator hub association areas (posterior cingulate cortex, and medial prefrontal cortex) which produce their effects on consciousness, and also decreases activity of the thalamus, which is a sensory gatekeeper, and regulates the flow of sensory information to higher level brain areas. Skip to the discussion, since that's really where their theory comes out. Assuming this is correct, your tinnitus would improve from decreased input of sensory information from your thalamus, or shifting its focus onto the enhancement of other sensations (tactile, thermal, taste) which might mean less resources for the tinnitus input to be transmitted to higher level sensory areas. It also inhibited blood flow to the hypothalamus, which is involved with migranes, so that might be involved as well.