Recently, the family of a 30-year-old man, noting he had fallen into an episode of deep confusion and fatigue, brought him to an emergency room in Nebraska. The man, doctors soon realized, suffered from bipolar disorder. He had stopped taking his prescribed medications and had lapsed into manic and depressive episodes.
But this is a tale about magic
mushrooms.
A mounting body of research
suggests psilocybin (magic mushrooms) may be used successfully as a treatment
for people suffering from depression.
The man we admitted into the emergency room in our opening paragraph, in
seeking ways he might decrease his dependency on opioids to combat his
maladies, discovered some articles exploring the use of psilocybin for treating
symptoms of depression and anxiety. He
thought he might give the mushrooms a try.
While people wanting to “trip”
on psychedelic mushrooms generally consume them as-is or in the form of a
powder put into a capsule or tea, our man attempted a more “doctorly”
approach. He boiled the mushrooms in
water, filtered the liquid through a cotton swab, and then injected the
substance into his bloodstream.
Within a few days, he become fatigued,
vomited blood, and developed jaundice, diarrhea, and nausea. By the time the man appeared at the emergency
room, he couldn't give coherent interview answers. Subsequent testing indicated he had sustained
liver injury and his kidneys weren't functioning properly.
A blood sample revealed the
root cause (pun intended) of his organ failure: The mushrooms, which thrive in
dark places, had begun to grow in the man's bloodstream. They were causing system failure. To save the man, doctors put him on a
ventilator and filtered his blood for toxins.
He remained under treatment in the hospital for 22 days.
Source: news.yahoo.com
Are there fungus among us?
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