Dr. Kelan Thomas recently wrote about the risks of repeated microdosing for developing valvular heart disease that piqued the interest of friends and colleagues at Third Wave for which I’m a certified coach. One of them, Gregory Ferenstein, co-authored an article that critiqued this hypothesis. His conclusion: there simply isn’t enough data to suggest that microdosers are contracting this condition. Research, of course, has been limited for decades because psychedelic substances have been outlawed and demonized. But one thing they agree on is the need for more rigorous screening and continued research. It’s always a good practice to be fully transparent and ask questions.
An important factor to consider in this discussion is that there are scientifically developed protocols from researchers like Dr. James Fadiman and Paul Stamets who recommend scheduled breaks between microdosing cycles. I personally haven’t seen any issue with anybody that I’ve worked with, including myself, and I’ve been microdosing with regularly scheduled intervals. As a matter of fact, I’m on a six-week break right now. I do that for a couple of reasons.
First of all, so that I can benchmark and understand how much more effective and impactful microdosing is by taking breaks and seeing what has changed. It’s like a marketing experiment called A/B testing that splits the audience to test variations of a campaign to determine which one performs better. As a micro dosing coach, I want as much rigorous research as possible, and respected institutions like Harvard and Johns Hopkins as my control groups so that microdosing coaches and psychedelic therapists can prescribe and put in place practices that are going to assist their clients. The more we learn about how to mitigate the potential risks and side effects, the more comfortable people will be in adopting these protocols.