Magic Mushrooms: A Potential Cure for Color Blindness? New Case Study Has Interesting Results

This article was originally published on Cannabis.net and appears here with permission.

Psilocybin magic mushrooms has been proven to help treat many treatment-resistant conditions.

These include depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and OCD to name a few. But did you know that psilocybin may also have the potential to treat color blindness?

Color blindness is commonly caused by genetic factors, which means that parents can pass them down to their children. However, in less common cases, color blindness may occur due to damage inflicted on the brain or the eyes. Any color blindness can also get worse with age, usually because of cataracts. Aside from these, diseases such as macular degeneration or glaucoma can also cause color blindness.

So yes, this man claims that psychedelics helped treat his color blindness, as documented in a study published in the Drug Science, Policy, and Law journal.

The unnamed patient is a colleague of Brian Barnett, the study’s lead author and a psychiatrist working at the Cleveland Clinic. The said man is 35 years old, and he has suffered from mild deuteranopia, which is a form of color blindness affecting the red and green color spectrum of vision. He has admitted to taking different psychedelics in the past, including psilocybin as well as DMT and LSD. The man acknowledged to experiencing improvements in his color blindness after taking these psychedelics, but he eventually decided to try an experiment on his own.

He turned to the Ishihara test, a widely used and accepted medical test for analyzing red-green color blindness, and took it before consuming one dose of dried magic mushrooms. Normal results for the Ishihara test are at least 17 and up, but his score was just 14. One day later, he got 18, then 8 days after, he reached 19.

He continued taking the test at intervals for four months after, comparing each result when he culminated his experiment. He also consulted with doctors about his experiment, who also asked him to take a test 436 days after the first magic mushroom dose. He was able to get a 16 on the Ishihara test upon the doctors’ recommendations, but he took psilocybin again as well as other psychedelics.

Brian Barnett responded to Gizmodo via email, saying: “This improvement lasted at least 16 days and possibly longer, though after that point the subject used other psychedelics, which make it impossible to determine whether the initial psilocybin dosage was responsible for ongoing improvements.”

“We would not expect psilocybin to repair his genetic defect, so it could never fully restore his color vision. Instead, we hypothesize that psilocybin improved processing of the limited visual sensory input entering the brain of this individual,” added Barnett. The study’s authors also add that it’s common for psychedelic users to experience changes in color perception, which may explain what the subject went through.

While this is just one case that went viral on the internet, there are older studies that suggest that – psychedelics may certainly have the potential to treat color blindness.

A 2021 study, also published in the Drug Science, Policy and Law journal, reviews 23 anecdotal reports from individuals who have reported an improvement in color blindness following the consumption of drugs including LSD and psilocybin. Surely, there have been similar experiences before, but according to study authors JEC Anthony and his colleagues, it was only then that they could study psychedelic drugs due to previous obstacles to research.

Anthony and his colleagues worked on a prior research, during which participants reported to them changes they experienced in color blindness after psychedelic use. This piqued their interest to further study if these results are common, leading them to conduct a large-scale drug survey, which was the 2017 Global Drugs Survey. The poll asked color blind participants to respond with any changes in color vision after psychedelic consumption, and they found 47 answers that they categorized. It was also interesting that the responses were broken down to almost an even division, with almost half or 23 people reporting improvements in their color blindness following psychedelic consumption, while 24 didn’t.

Psilocybin and LSD were also the most common drugs reported to trigger these changes, but participants also consumed other types of drugs. The authors stated that “responses did not indicate that a specific drug induced changes in color blindness with a greater frequency than other drugs.”

This led the authors to conclude that due to the lack of responses available, it could be hypothesized that recreational psychedelic drug use may actually improve color blindness, even among a portion of the population. Another interesting result was that 39% of individuals who experienced vision changes reported that these improvements lasted anywhere from three days up to several years after psychedelic use.

“Psychedelics may facilitate the experience of an expanded spectrum of colors,” says Anthony and his colleagues. “In the excited psychedelic state, new communication between cortical regions may link new photisms to pre-existing concepts of colors, thus facilitating a new color experience and improving color blindness.”

Conclusion

As we are on the cusp of a psychedelic revolution, this may just be the beginning of seemingly miraculous therapeutic benefits that magic mushrooms and other psychedelic drugs can bring about. That said, we do need much more research so that scientists can thoroughly study these possibilities and hopefully be able to provide us with the necessary safety information to use psychedelics for treating a wide range of other ailments – color blindness or not.