Non-Pharmacological Interventions
Psychedelic-assisted, ayahuasca, peyote
10 interventions. 1 rest on strong human evidence. Ordered with the best evidenced first.
From the Mazatec Ceremony to Breakthrough-Therapy Trials
A mushroom medicine used in Mesoamerican healing for at least a thousand years, banned from research for forty, and now producing some of the strongest patient-reported outcomes in psychiatry.
Kava (ʻawa, Piper methysticum)
A sterile, human-bred Pacific root pounded into a numbing, calming ceremonial drink, carrying about 3,000 years of Oceanic protocol and, by the account of its systematic reviewers, one of the more developed evidence bases for short-term anxiety relief among traditional botanicals.
Ketamine-Assisted Therapy (KAP)
A 1960s dissociative anesthetic that proponents and trialists report can reduce severe depression and suicidal thoughts within hours, now the one legal psychedelic-adjacent treatment in routine clinical use, shadowed by questions of durability, bladder harm, and a booming at-home market.
A PTSD Treatment That Met Its Trial Goals and Was Declined by the FDA
A therapy whose Phase 3 trials reduced PTSD symptoms and was still declined by the FDA in 2024 on design and conduct grounds, a rejection about process and safety, not a verdict that it does not work.
An Amazonian Sacrament, a Discovery of Indigenous Chemistry, and a Sovereignty Question
A brew whose two-plant pharmacology was worked out by Indigenous Amazonian chemists centuries before Western science understood it, now caught between clinical research and a real question about extracting it from its culture.
Ibogaine (iboga; Tabernanthe iboga; noribogaine)
A sacred Central African initiation medicine that Western clinics reframed as a single-dose addiction interrupter, carrying both striking anecdotes and a documented record of cardiac deaths.
Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) and the Native American Church sacrament
A cactus sacrament with the deepest documented entheogen lineage on the continent, where the urgent questions are sovereignty and survival of the plant, not whether it polls well in a trial.
Holotropic Breathwork (Grof Breathwork)
A drug-free method built to chase psychedelic states with fast breathing and loud music, created after LSD therapy was criminalized.
Kambo (Phyllomedusa bicolor frog secretion; also spelled kambô, sapo, vacina-do-sapo)
Burn-applied frog secretion from an Amazonian hunting ritual, now marketed as a "detox," whose violent purge has produced documented deaths and almost no clinical evidence for its health claims.
San Pedro Cactus / Huachuma (Trichocereus / Echinopsis pachanoi)
A mescaline-bearing Andean cactus carried in healing ceremony for more than three thousand years, now circling the edges of modern psychiatry with almost no controlled human trials to its name.