80% of Post-Traumatic Stress Sufferers Lost Symptoms After Taking Ecstasy -- Study's Results

Alternet - After MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, over 80% of sufferers from post traumatic stress disorder no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, as compared to only 25% in the control group. This study, just released, was conducted by Michael Mithoefer, M.D. (and his colleagues) and is published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Psychopharmacology.

According to the media release, MDMA could "offer sufferers a vital window with reduced fear responses where psychotherapy can take effect." MDMA is also called Ecstasy.

Facts about MDMA have been obscured, first by panic about the rave culture, then by a well-publicized university study that actually administered a different substance, and then by propaganda associated with the “war on drugs.”

If MDMA is shown to cause more harm than good as a medicine, it would not be used. But that is the opposite of what the study showed. To quote the research paper, “there were no drug-related serious adverse effects, adverse neurocognitive effects, or clinically significant blood pressure increases.” What MDMA appears to offer is a way not merely of producing temporary good feelings or of masking symptoms of PTSD, as in the use of selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, but of facilitating effective psychotherapy. Read more.