Short-Term Treatment Effects of a Substance Use Disorder Therapy Involving Traditional Amazonian Medicine

Modulatory effects of ayahuasca on personality structure in a traditional framework

“…A systematic review (dos assessing 28 publications on ayahuasca drew the following conclusions: acute ayahuasca administration was well tolerated (Fortunato et al 2009); it was found to alter visual perceptions in participants (de Araujo et al 2012), activate frontal and paralimbic regions (Riba et al 2006), decrease DMN activity (Palhano-Fontes et al 2015), and impair working memory but decrease stimulus-response interference (Bouso et al 2013). Post-acute effects included improved planning and inhibitory control (Bouso et al 2012), anti-depressive (Osório et al 2015), and anti-addictive properties (Berlowitz et al 2019;Fábregas et al 2010;Thomas et al 2013). Long-term ayahuasca use was associated with the increased cortical thickness of the anterior cingulate cortex and cortical thinning of the posterior cingulate cortex (Bouso et al 2015).…”

Synergism between Catholicism and Indigenous Spirituality within the Drug Addiction Rehabilitation Program of Takiwasi, a Therapeutic Community in the Peruvian High-Amazon

“…Beyond the fact that the synergy we are presenting from the Takiwasi Center reveals itself as physically real, the issues of its effectiveness in the healing of drug addiction is open to debate. Takiwasi shows promising results (Berlowitz et al, 2019) compared to other therapeutic communities of the same type and dimensions, but we have no proof that the secret of these scores resides in the synergy we are speaking of. Then, from the materialistic, scientific and biomedical side of the research, the Takiwasi's synergy opens several fundamental questions:…”

“Tobacco Is the Chief Medicinal Plant in My Work”: Therapeutic Uses of Tobacco in Peruvian Amazonian Medicine Exemplified by the Work of a Maestro Tabaquero

“…This interviewing method requires the interviewer to be knowledgeable in the subject at hand (Meuser and Nagel, 2009b), otherwise the interviewee may avoid complex terrain (expecting the interviewer to be insufficiently competent to understand it) and share only superficial information. Given the multi-epistemic context of this study, an interviewer who is a relevant specialist from a different knowledge culture (Bogner and Menz, 2009)-namely a scientist in clinical and health psychology with experience in investigating Amazonian medicine (first author of this paper; e.g., Berlowitz et al, 2017;Berlowitz et al, 2019)-was considered most suitable. This allowed equitable dialogue and in-depth exploration of knowledge, including aspects that differ in the two epistemic domains.…”

“…A comprehensive semi-structured interview schedule was developed via a methodological procedure described by Kallio et al (2016) : We generated an ample set of guiding questions to cover the different content areas of the research subject, drawing from ethno-medical field research and classification methods ( Lipp, 1989 ; Staub et al, 2015 ), our previous research experience and the anthropological literature on Amazonian medicine and tobacco uses ( Wilbert, 1993 ; Russell and Rahman, 2015 ; Berlowitz, 2017 ), as well as general psychological/somatic symptom category systems ( Schinka, 1989 ; Derogatis and Unger, 2010 ). The resulting inventory was handed to an interdisciplinary expert panel for assessment consisting of scientific advisors from medicine, psychology, complementary medicine, biology, and medical anthropology, and was adapted accordingly.…”

“…Among traditional medical systems currently investigated for mental health, especially the Amazonian tradition and its psychoactive ayahuasca brew (Banisteriopsis caapi and varying admixture plants; Riba et al, 2003;McKenna, 2004) have recently become the center of scientific attention across the globe (Feeney et al, 2018;Hamill et al, 2018;Labate and Cavnar, 2018). Clinical research in this context has been burgeoning over the last years, alongside research on other psychoactive substances (see also "psychedelic-assisted therapies"; Tupper et al, 2015;Johnson et al, 2019), with growing evidence showing ayahuasca to benefit affective disorders, substance use, anxiety disorders, and other conditions (Thomas et al, 2013;Labate and Cavnar, 2014;Osorio Fde et al, 2015;dos Santos et al, 2016;Nunes et al, 2016;Coe and McKenna, 2017;Domıńguez-Clavéet al, 2018;Palhano-Fontes et al, 2018;Renelli et al, 2018;Berlowitz et al, 2019). However, notwithstanding the considerable global interest in ayahuasca and Amazonian medicine, the nature and place of tobacco-based treatments within this medical system have so far been neglected: To our knowledge, no clinical research on Amazonian medicine has yet systematically examined these uses-in spite of the central role the anthropological literature ascribes to this plant in Amazonian healing (Valadeau et al, 2010;Barbira-Freedman, 2015).…”