How to Change Your Mind

of psychiatry and psychotherapy: psychedelic therapy could look more
like shamanism or faith healing than medicine. Another challenge was
the irrational exuberance that seemed to infect any researchers who got
involved with LSD, an enthusiasm that might have improved the results
of their experiments at the same time it fueled the skepticism of
colleagues who remained psychedelic virgins. Yet a third challenge was
how to fit psychedelics into the existing structures of science and
psychiatry, if indeed that was possible. How do you do a controlled
experiment with a psychedelic? How do you effectively blind your
patients and clinicians or control for the powerful expectancy effect?
When “set” and “setting” play such a big role in the patient’s experience,
how can you hope to isolate a single variable or design a therapeutic
application?