Shrooms as a solution

Look, I’m not trying to advocate for shrooms. I’m not trying to advocate for anything. In fact, it’s 2021. I shouldn’t even be talking to you guys. But the reality of the situation is that there is an efficacy: psilocybin mushrooms can provide instantaneous relief for this incredibly debilitating condition. 

Sometimes I wonder how powerful a small gesture can really be.

I have a friend that I don’t talk to that often. I’ll call him “Doug”. Doug and I have known each other for a long time but don’t have the exact same social circle. Despite that, there was still a connection there and I always enjoyed talking to him. 

Doug’s also one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Too smart, actually. In high school, he barely showed up to class and graduated with a near 4.0. One day after skipping IB Calculus, he asked me to teach him the lesson from class. After showing him what we learned, we worked a homework problem together. The answer I got was 4; he got 10. We argued about it for a while until he said we should bet on it: $1. I agreed.

The next day, our teacher had one of the classmates work that same homework problem in class. Their answer: 4. The rest of the class got 4, too. But our teacher broke the news, the answer was 10. Doug was right.

Fast forward to 2018, we end up staying up all night talking about… well, everything, sort of. Doug confides in me about what’s been going on in his life over the past few years, including a horrible condition he dealt with for years: cluster headaches. 

They call cluster headaches “suicide headaches” for a reason. The pain is debilitating. According to Mayo Clinic: 

“Cluster headaches, which occur in cyclical patterns or cluster periods, are one of the most painful types of headache. A cluster headache commonly awakens you in the middle of the night with intense pain in or around one eye on one side of your head.

Bouts of frequent attacks, known as cluster periods, can last from weeks to months, usually followed by remission periods when the headaches stop. During remission, no headaches occur for months and sometimes even years.”

Cluster headaches are not life threatening, but they’re something you definitely want to avoid if at all possible.

The entire time Doug was telling me about his journey with this condition I couldn’t stop thinking, “Oh no…. If only he had told me about this…” because I knew something that, apparently, he did not know until after years of suffering with the condition. Psilocybin mushrooms can instantaneously treat cluster headaches. 

By the time Doug told me his story, he had already figured it out. I don’t remember exactly how, probably found the information online. But he did figure it out. But if we had been in touch when that was going on, and he felt comfortable disclosing that information to me, I could have saved him years of pain. 

Now, of course, you may be wondering how the hell I knew about the treatment for cluster headaches. Well, I knew because I saw it on an episode of House. No joke. In the 23rd episode in the 3rd season of House, M.D, the central patient of the story gets cluster headaches. Dr. House, of course, immediately figures this out and gives the patient magic mushrooms in order to stop the pain. 

How could Doug have known that I knew what I knew? While I do have an interest in and fascination with medicine, and I think he knows that, there’s no way he could have known I’d have the exact information that would have kept him from suffering for so long.

Sometimes I think the answers to our problems are closer than we think; we just need to put it out there. You never know who knows what. I guess that’s the point I am trying to make with this article. It’s hard to talk about our problems sometimes, especially in terms that show us as vulnerable. And maybe it’s harder for men to admit they feel vulnerable, I’m not sure. But what I do know is that we can’t know what answers are out there if we don’t explore. 

I think the universe provides when we are open to getting answers. When we feel like there is no hope, sometimes that closes doors. At the same time, if we feel like we already have the answer when we don’t, that closes doors as well. I’m not saying I have the answers, but I truly think every problem comes with a solution. How we find that solution is up to us, but we can’t always know how to find it, and being open is better than being closed when you’re at a loss for how to solve a problem.

Sources:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/cluster-headache/symptoms-causes/syc-20352080