Beyond Healing: Consciousness Expansion With Psychedelic Medicine

Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy offers a paradigm shift to treating mental health conditions beyond traditional pharmacotherapy. However, integrating these treatments into mainstream medicine presents challenges, including regulatory hurdles. How can professionals balance scientific rigor with the profound and spiritual experiences that psychedelics induce?

Dr. Keith Heinzerling believes that psychedelics offer more than just symptom relief; they provide a pathway to deeper healing and consciousness expansion. These medicines facilitate access to core psychological and emotional issues, allowing patients to process trauma, reconnect with their sense of self, and cultivate a greater awareness of their place in the world. Unlike conventional psychiatric treatments that focus on symptom suppression, psychedelic medicine fosters transformation by dissolving rigid mental patterns and opening individuals to new perspectives. Dr. Heinzerling maintains that this approach requires careful guidance, integration, and a framework that respects both the scientific and spiritual dimensions of these experiences.

In this week’s episode of Living Medicine, Dr. Keith Heinzerling, the Director of the Pacific Treatment and Research in Psychedelics (TRIP) program at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute, joins Dr. Sandy Newes to talk about psychedelic healing as an alternative to traditional medicine. Dr. Heinzerling discusses his psychedelic spiritual activation retreats, the barriers to FDA approval for integrating psychedelic medicine into clinical settings, and how to conduct research for ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.

This episode is brought to you by the Living Medicine Institute.

LMI is a training, resource, and membership program educating providers about the legal and safe use of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

To learn more or participate, visit https://livingmedicineinstitute.com.

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Living Medicine Podcast, where we talk about ethical medical use of psychedelic psychotherapy, teaching skills, examining the issues and interviewing interesting people. Now let’s start today’s show.

Dr. Sandy Newes 0:18

Hi everyone. My name is Dr. Sandy Newes with the Living Medicine Institute. And for those of you unfamiliar, we provide content and resources and training for clinical and medical professionals who are interested in either launching a career in Academy and assisted psychotherapy or really deepening their skills already. And we are broadly interested in the psychedelic space. And this podcast is really focused on interviewing interesting people within that space who are kind of roughly doing therapeutic work in various contexts. And I am deeply honored today to have Dr. Keith Heinzerling. I’ve been practicing your name. Did I say it right?

Dr. Keith Heinzerling 0:59

Perfect, perfect. 

Dr. Sandy Newes 1:01

Good, and he is a physician scientist working with psychedelics and a student of spiritual science. So Keith is a nationally recognized expert in clinical research with over 20 years of experience conducting clinical trials that intersect in mental health, addiction medicine and psychedelics. He is the co founder and director of the Pacific Treatment and Research in psychedelic center at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute in Santa Monica, where he’s been a principal investigator in multiple trials which I’m super interested in, psilocybin, LSD five, MEO DMT, really specifically focusing right on the mental health disorders, depression, anxiety and alcohol use disorder. And where we connected, initially, because this is a shared interest of mine and ours at LMI, is that Keith is also co founder of rewild medicine, which is aimed at exploring how psychedelics can increase connection to nature, and more recently, Sky fire, which hosts spiritual activation retreats. So thank you so much Keith, for being here on the podcast. I really appreciate it My pleasure. Anything that we missed in the bio there?

Dr. Keith Heinzerling 2:07

Nope, beautiful. Thank you. Good. Well, thank you again.

Dr. Sandy Newes 2:11

I just want to share you know with the audience, which is who are mostly clinical and medical professionals interested in this field, that you know, we seem to really connect. And there’s a lot of intersection between nature, connection, spirituality, psychotherapy, psychedelics and so, you know, it’s one of the reasons I’m really excited to be talking to just really about that intersection. So agree, yeah, I just wanted to start with, you know, how did you end up here? How did you end up at this moment in time where you’re directing this big center and running retreats and focusing, yeah, these intersections, what brought you?

Dr. Keith Heinzerling 2:48

It’s been an evolution. And, yeah, I was just trekking along, working in academic medicine and very happy. You know, like in the spiritual sector, you encounter a lot of people who have undergone some sort of transformation, or perhaps they might call it an awakening or an epiphany, and they’ll tell you that, you know, it was preceded by a period where they were feeling lost or, you know, frustrated or depressed like they had, didn’t have any meaning. And I really didn’t, you know not, it just the truth. I I didn’t feel that way. I was working at UCLA, having a great time in an incredible environment at an amazing university, with really incredible mentors, teaching me to do research, and then eventually me mentoring other people and getting grants and writing papers and designing programs, but I got to a point where I had a thought that the track that we were on doing clinical trials of medications for addiction, and we did a lot of work with pretty much alcohol use disorder and nicotine, smoking cessation, all the addictions, opioid, stimulants, a little bit of cannabis, but particularly methamphetamine use disorder. Since it’s a big problem, we were testing medications like off the shelf, medications like antidepressants, anti can, pretty much anything we could get our hands on, using a randomized, double blind placebo controlled trial, where there was a fake pill and a real pill, and then patients also would get some psychotherapy attached to it. And it seemed like, you know, we had done, I don’t know how many studies I was a part of. I, you know, ran like four or five myself, and was part of many more, and it didn’t seem like we were going to get to the finish line, like I felt like we could get I knew how to get grants, I knew how to do studies, I knew how to write papers. That was great for getting me promoted in academics. But the I thought that we needed a paradigm shift, that that the approach here. Taking was was going to just keep going like this, and people are dying of overdoses and whatnot. So I thought, well, what would be a paradigm shift? And I’d always been interested in psychedelics and psychedelics, thought that could be a paradigm shift. So I started to try to figure out, well, how could I work with psychedelics

Dr. Sandy Newes 5:19

nice, and is that because you felt as though that has the potential? I mean, what I heard there was that it might that your belief that it has the potential to be not only a paradigm shift, but honestly, I think I heard you say this before that you were just looking at really small effect sizes and you wanted a bigger effect. Yeah, not that, yeah, that would be one of those tools. Yes, for

Dr. Keith Heinzerling 5:40

sure, and I think also that, you know, I always went out of my way to even though I love research, and I was very involved in research, I always went out of my way. And several of my mentors also were very intentional about this, that we did not stop seeing patients. We we stayed a doctor or a psychologist or therapist or whatever. Because I think you know when you if you’re just doing research, I mean, you can collaborate with people who are clinicians. Of course, that’s perfectly reasonable, but, but it really keeps you grounded if you have to go, you know, multiple times a week and see real people are struggling with these problems, and then be like, what are we doing? You know, there’s a mismatch. And, you know, I also really felt like that pharmacotherapy, right, giving a drug to someone for a whether it’s depression, anxiety or a substance use disorder that I didn’t, you know us that people don’t get better from these conditions in a passive way. In my practice, we were always trying to figure out how to engage and motivate people and get them working, you know, to get themselves better, really, to believe that they could get better. And then in the studies, you’re actually trying to not do that. You’re like, we don’t want expectation, we don’t want the placebo effect. And you’re trying to really, just like, sterilize and isolate the medication effect, which is necessary for a placebo controlled trial, where you want to isolate the medication effect and see how does you know Bupropion perform compared to a blank placebo? But I didn’t think that was really how people got better with particularly addictions and psychedelics. You know, we often talk about psychedelics as non specific amplifier that, you know, they seem to potentially they may work for a variety of almost every condition that’s being tested for. It seems like it does something, right? So it’s not specific to depression or alcohol use disorder, I think because it, you know, works on some very fundamental and core aspects of who we are as humans, as opposed to being something like an antidepressant that reduces makes you feel less sad, or a medication that makes you feel less cravings for Alcohol, right? It reduces symptoms, and that could be helpful. If you feel better, you can then maybe work with a therapist or or another modality to help change the core underlying issues. But a lot of times, I think people have relapses because there’s not any way for them to get at those core issues, and psychedelics seem to to just inherently go more towards the core aspect of of who you are, and that seemed more of an appealing approach, and more of an approach that would have, you know, a sustainable and durable effect.

Dr. Sandy Newes 8:34

And this is probably a separate conversation, but just you know, you mentioned like Expectancy Effects and placebo effect. And like, I was trained as a psychotherapy outcome researcher, and, you know, Expectancy Effects, and you know, setting expectations overall is part of psychotherapy Outcome Research. Like, it’s, it’s not only like, it’s not only like something to be removed, it’s actually something to be built on, because there’s an awareness of the fact that it’s just inherent. Like somebody to therapy and they have an expectation that it’s going to be helpful. So when we get a research paradigm where we’re trying to remove that from the equation, like in the MD research, like, as if that’s bad, like, yeah, we’re just, we’ve kind of trying to, you know, parcel out that human piece of the whole equation.

Dr. Keith Heinzerling 9:19

Yeah, it’s in, you know, one of the lessons that I think has most has been most impactful, that I have learned from working with psychedelics, is that, you know, in the modern world, and it was probably like this before, but two things can be completely in conflict and just co exist right there in front of you, and they Both have to live in this universe. They’re both there, like, hey, saying, Hey, I’m legit, I’m here, I’m for real. And they’re like, I’m For Real too. And you’re like, but you guys don’t fit together. How do we how do I live with the these two opposing things are both, you know? They’re both completely true, you know? So I think it’s both true. True that you know that the that the framework for pharmacotherapy trials, a placebo controlled trial, most of the approaches that are done for trials that are for registration with the FDA to test the safety and efficacy for FDA approval, and by the way, the FDA will tell you this. They’ve been saying it over and over. They’re like, we’re not equipped to deal with psychedelics. We’re not equipped. And, you know, I don’t know. I don’t we could, like, you said we could talk for hours. But I think that that within the confines of the government and the FDA, many folks at the FDA have been really, like, proactive and very open minded, really tried to, like, bend the system as much as possible to accommodate and then while at the same time saying, Tell us how to change this. But change takes a long time with regulations, so Right? They probably need a whole, you know, Division of that addresses this stuff in the FDA, because you’re right, like, at one minute in the study, you’re trying to to, like, be completely cold and clinical and just sterile and no expectation, be very objective. And then you know you’re doing ketamine assisted psychotherapy with a patient, and you know you’re essentially leveraging their beliefs and using it as part of the therapy and part of the experience, you’re you’re setting an intention and then trying to help them enhance that intention through the experience. So it’s just like completely one hat off and the other hat on, and but, you know, the FDA process is, at the moment, necessary for us to get potentially these medicines approved, and then the legal status changed, so that we could then what probably go and use them in the direct opposite way, and then do more research. And so it’s not really a game, but there are you have to be realistic and strategic if you want to. Don’t go to the FDA with a study that doesn’t fit their their paradigm. What do you expect they’re going to do with it? And, you know, some of the folks, and just full disclosure, I was a consultant. I paid to be a consultant to light coast to help them prepare for the FDA Advisory Committee, and I was there at the meeting in DC with them. And, you know, but I don’t own stock and light ghost or anything like that. And I believed that the particularly the late research, was done by, I know the people, I had faith in the research. And there were problems that were came up, of course, and all that’s been discussed. But you know, during that process, several times we said, normally, you’re bringing a medication to the FDA for evaluation. And what Lycos was bringing, and Maps was essentially, like a whole new branch of medicine, psychedelic medicine. You weren’t evaluating the medicine MDMA. It was the entire approach. And we could, you know, some people say that’s what we should do, and like, really, like Blaze on the frontier, and other people are like, you know, try to fit in and just get this across the line. And again, I don’t know which ones, right? I think there’s cogent arguments on both sides.

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