Quote: (05-04-2013 12:17 AM)Thomas the Rhymer Wrote:
I've come across a pill that's far more effective than minocycline.
It's called
The Red Pill
But to get to your post: If you look at the size effects in that study, I'm not comfortable with the size of the error bars. They say they have a low p-value, but it looks like the means for money given could potentially overlap if the experiment is repeated. This may have been a once-off result. I also wonder why they decided to use percentages for their graphs - it probably looks more dramatic. They were using very tiny cash amounts in this study. The difference between the placebo and minocycline group was $3. Question is, how will it affect decision making for big amounts?
And they studied Japanese men, and despite taking minocycline, they still wanted to give half their stuff to a woman whom they had not even met in person. That's much of an improvement in a culture that possesses strong beta traits. I'd imagine a 'red-piller' would get even less of benefit. You can't treat what's not there.
The actual study:http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130418/s...01685.html
But I look forward to your minocycline datasheet. I'm eager to hear your experience with it.
Thomas, true - the size of the effect is small in this study. And I've never used this drug for this purpose (although I did have it in my youth for acne).
ANOTHER drug that I have used to GREAT POSITIVE EFFECT is called D-Cycloserine or DCS. This old antibiotic used in micro-doses (no more than 50mg), can be very effective to treat social phobia or social anxiety. Permanently. (Used to treat tuberculosis, the dose is 750mg/day; over 50mg dose, the effect disappears.)
GO
HERE to see some of the studies findings. (There are a lot more - some of which are negative or mixed..)
What is does is turn fearful anticipation into excitement (the dose maxes in the blood in about 90 minutes, then fades slowly over 4 to 6 hours). This allows for a window for a new memory trace to be laid down.
DCS act on the amygdala analogously to SSRIs - which keep serotonin levels higher in the brain - to keep a protein complex there at higher levels. This protein complex allows the reversal of conditioned fears. (The amygdala is the brain's center for fear and excitement.)
DCS is inexpensive. I got it in 250mg caps from India, online, for maybe 100 pills for only about $100. The early 'social anxiety' trials using it found it highly effective (+90%) in only three doses.
There are two downsides to using DCS. First, the 'excitement' effects fade in the mid-teens of using it, after a dozen or 15 times. Then it fades. The only alternative is to not use it at all for many many months if not years! Second, if your paired dose 'exposure' is wrong, you could de-sensitize yourself to fears you don't want to!
Specifically, I also used it for fear of of heights (another clinically useful purpose for the drug, small trial have found ). I've also suffered from a chairlift riding phobia, the irrational urge to JUMP from chairlifts. It was a very painful, difficult to endure experience!
I was living in Summit County, Colorado at the time, up to 30 minutes to ski resorts like Copper Mountain, Keystone, Breckenridge. So I took DCS and drove myself to the lifts.
The strange result is that I became a mad-man behind the wheel! Driving became this amazing thrill! It resulted in fast driving on a snowy road and high-speed side-swipe collision and $7,000 damage to me and the other guy (my first auto accident in 25 years). The Lesson? Use DCS wisely!
Thomas, you suggest the monocycline results may have been "one off," an outlier. But the most compelling DCS study I read used the animal model of PTSD to reverse it using DCS!
In other words, a rat is subjected to an inescapable electric shock in a cage, until the animal simply gives up and lays down - ie, "learned helplessness." And then,, using DCS, the rat "unlearns" the complete helplessness, returning to normal behavior. These were studies at Emory University Medical School that proved the physiological basis for DCS' effectiveness.
The trouble is that DCS is a generic drug and there is patentable way to fund large-scale effectiveness studies on its usefulness, only smaller open trials. Thus, these Emory researchers have recently patented a unique drug delivery method for DCS with the hope of making a patentable funding stream available for proper full-scale pharmacological studies to be done.
If I do a data-sheet, it will be about the usefulness of DCS for Betas. This monocycline article is simply the latest news in "off label" uses to treat social anxiety using anti-biotics.
