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Charles Grob, MD. Grob is one of the only researchers in the United States to have administered MDMA to human subjects. Here he responds to the question, "Why MDMA rather than conventional therapies?"
Grob's research team is planning a study of MDMA psychotherapy in the treatment of cancer patients (Harbor UCLA Hospital*). The rationale for the proposed study is based in part on numerous remarkable anecdotal accounts of the therapeutic use of MDMA in the treatment of cancer patients. MDMA is empathogenic and anxiolytic -- it promotes feelings of peacefulness and acceptance that enable people to move through denial and defense in order to respond clearly to difficult realities and to experience complex emotions. Clinical case reports suggest that MDMA can reduce acute and chronic pain experienced by end-stage cancer patients, perhaps that portion of total pain and suffering resulting from emotional, psychological, cognitive, and social variables. To date, no scientific studies have been attempted to evaluate the safety, efficacy or mechanism of action of MDMA as an adjunct to the reduction of pain in end-stage cancer patients, as a treatment of anxiety and depression, or as a tool to facilitate psychologically-mediated stimulation of the immune system. Once the Harbor UCLA study is approved, it will be the first to formally investigate the therapeutic use of MDMA with cancer patients.
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* Read more about research at Harbor UCLA under the direction of Dr. Grob.
Glossary: empathogenic: allowing one to enter fully into another's feelings or motives
anxiolytic: having the quality of reducing anxiety
PTSD: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
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