PT517 – Long COVID and Psychedelics, Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, MD, Joel Castellanos, MD, & MaryAnn Welke Lesage

Psychedelics Today

Psychedelics Today, LLC

Life Sciences, Science, Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.6 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 31 May 2024

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode, special guest host Court Wing interviews Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, MD: professor and chair of rehabilitation medicine at UT Health San Antonio; Joel Castellanos, MD: co-founder and associate medical director of the Center for Psychedelic Research at UC San Diego; and MaryAnn Welke Lesage: a long COVID survivor who reports experiencing drastic improvement in symptoms after MDMA and psilocybin therapy.

As the world slowly recovers from COVID, many people are seeing continued or new symptoms, and while much is still not understood, these symptoms are being categorized as long COVID: essentially a persistent viral inflammation causing brain fog, headaches, depression, and other hard-to-diagnose symptoms. With estimations of as many as 18% of people in the U.S. experiencing this at one point and 6.8% currently dealing with it, could psychedelics – which can decrease inflammation and reset neural networks – help alleviate these symptoms?

They discuss:

How long COVID fits into what we already know about psychedelics, pain, and inflammatory medicine
Why MDMA or psilocybin therapy, specifically, can help
The importance of physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) and the myriad of tools these physicians have learned to work with
Why anecdotal evidence matters towards future research

and more!

For more info, read Lesage's article, "How Psychedelics Became Key to My Long COVID Recovery," as well as the official paper: "Long-COVID symptoms improved after MDMA and psilocybin therapy: A case report."

For more links, head to the show notes page.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, everybody and welcome back to psychedelics today. This is Joe Moore coming out here from Brackenrich, Colorado.
0:17.9	Today on the show, we have a few guests. We have Joel
0:21.1	Castellanos, who's been on the show before with Timothy Furnish for episode 369. That's a really
0:28.3	great episode if you want to learn more about the psychedelic pain topic. And we also have Monica
0:35.1	Gutierrez on the show, who is a physician and professor and chair of rehabilitation medicine at University of Texas Health, San Antonio.
0:46.2	Previously, it was the medical director at the brain injury and stroke program for the hospital and developed a post-COVID recovery clinic as well.
0:54.4	And today on the show, the primary subject is Marianne Welk Lesage.
1:00.0	I'm sorry, Marianne, for brutalizing your last name.
1:03.7	But Marianne has been very helpful in developing this conversation around psychedelics and
1:10.0	long COVID.
1:11.0	She's the first ever person to be published about in a, I guess we call it, a case report.
1:17.5	Her case report was published this week, Wiley Online Library, the title Long COVID Symptoms Improved after MDMA and Cilocybin Therapy.
1:26.2	A case report by Chopra Furnish, Gutierrez,
1:31.8	Javittoski, and Castellanos came out May 28. So good stuff. And yeah, this episode is,
1:40.8	Court Wing is the actual person who is doing the interview court's been a friend and a
1:46.5	colleague for years now been working to develop these psychedelics and pain association and remap
1:52.0	therapeutics and i think um he knows quite a bit about this pain topic so he's a he's a great
1:58.8	person to engage on this long COVID topic. So I
2:02.5	think that's good enough for right now. Thank you all for tuning in. I'm sure there's another
2:07.7	bit of intro about everybody that court will provide in the start here. So enjoy this episode.
2:13.9	Know that this is a n of one and more research is very much required.
2:19.4	So enjoy and we'll see on the other side.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Psychedelics Today, LLC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Psychedelics Today, LLC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.