The power of psychedelics meets the power of placebo: ketamine, opioids, and hope in depression treatment | Boris Heifets & Theresa Lii

From Our Neurons to Yours

Join us as we dive back into the world of psychedelic medicine with anesthesiologists Boris Heifets and Theresa Lii, who share intriguing new data that sheds light on how ketamine and placebo effects may interact in treating depression.

We explore provocative questions like: How much of ketamine's antidepressant effect comes from the drug itself versus the excitement of being in a psychedelics trial? What do we know about how placebo actually works in the brain? And should we view the placebo effect as a feature rather than a bug in psychiatric treatment?

Join us as we examine the complex interplay between psychoactive drugs, the brain's own opioid system, and the healing power of hope in mental health care.
Related research

• Preprint: Opioids Diminish the Placebo Antidepressant Response: A Post Hoc Analysis of a Randomized Controlled Ketamine Trial (medRxiv, 2024)
• Randomized trial of ketamine masked by surgical anesthesia in patients with depression (Nature Mental Health, 2023)
  

Related episodes

• Psychedelics, placebo, and anesthetic dreams | Boris Heifets (Part 1)
• Psychedelics Inside Out: How do LSD and psilocybin alter perception? | Boris Heifets (Part 2)
• OCD and Ketamine | Carolyn Rodriguez
• Psychedelics and Empathy: Why are psychiatrists taking a fresh look at MDMA? | Rob Malenka

Related news

• Researchers find response to ketamine depends on opioid pathways, but varies by sex (Stanford Medicine, 2024)
• The rebirth of psychedelic medicine (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2023)
• Can Psychedelic Drugs Treat Physical Pain? (Scientific American, 2022)
• Scientists Say A Mind-Bending Rhythm In The Brain Can Act Like Ketamine (NPR, 2020)

Get in touch
We're doing some listener research and we want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at [e-mail] if you'd be willing to help out, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is host

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

บท

1. Introduction (00:00:00)

2. Placebo is your brain's opioids (00:00:00)

3. Ketamine and depression (00:02:42)

4. The placebo problem (00:06:26)

5. Let's try ketamine under anesthesia! (00:09:42)

6. What we expected to see was not what we saw (00:12:41)

7. What is placebo actually? (00:16:08)

8. Reanalyzing the data: opioids vs ketamine (00:22:51)

9. Big picture: ketamine and placebo (00:27:11)

10. What does it all mean for placebo and psychiatric medicine? (00:29:31)

11. Outro (00:34:26)