Psychedelics 101 for doctors: 5 Questions for Psychedelic Medicine Association founder Lynn Marie Morski

Morski discusses what healthcare professionals know and don’t know about psychedelics, and how her organization seeks to bridge the gap between the two.

In 2013, Lynn Marie Morski was a physician working at the Veterans Administration in San Diego. Morski grew up in a conservative Illinois family and had received negative messages about psychedelics, but that fall, she went to Burning Man, an art festival in the Nevada desert, and tried LSD for the first time. While Morski says she wouldn’t recommend trying therapeutic psychedelics in a festival environment, her experience led to what she felt to be deep therapeutic realizations. She went on to try psilocybin and ayahuasca, and found the substances also led to the kind of insights and emotional relief she’d experienced with LSD. 

As she learned more about the growing body of research on the therapeutic potential of the drugs, she thought they might be able to help her patients at the VA some of whom struggled with traumatic brain injury and mental health issues including PTSD, depression, and anxiety. “After a while, it became really out of alignment for me to continue to go to work and hear them share their suffering and not be able to tell them what I knew about psychedelics,” Morski said. She left her clinical practice in 2019 to start the Psychedelic Medicine podcast. A year later, she  founded the Psychedelic Medicine Association to educate healthcare professionals about psychedelics. The Microdose spoke with Morski about what healthcare professionals know and don’t know about psychedelics.

Why is it important for healthcare professionals to have up-to-date knowledge about psychedelics?

There’s been a lot of focus on many important parts of commercialization, like getting FDA approval and training clinicians to administer psychedelic-assisted therapy. But in the American healthcare system, the vast majority of patients still go to their primary care physician, and that person is a kind of gatekeeper for where patients go next. If we don't focus on educating the primary care workforce, a lot of patients are still not going to get access to psychedelics. Our work at the Psychedelic Medicine Association is to ensure that the primary care workforce is educated so that we can improve access to all, not just for patients who are in the know about psychedelics already and know to ask their practitioner about them. 

It’s also important to counteract the existing stigma. If a patient brings up psychedelics and the primary care provider is unaware of the recent science, and still believes in the stigma, that patient may not be safe to be open with their provider. There are people who wonder if they’ll lose their children for admitting that they tried psilocybin to address their depression; others might not ask their doctors about the medications they’re taking. It's really important for us to educate the primary work force so that the patients are safe to report what they are using. 

What kind of information did you get about psychedelics in your medical training, and what are current medical school students learning? 

I graduated from medical school in 2005, and I received no training on psychedelics. They didn't even mention the endocannabinoid system, as far as I recall. But that was twenty years ago! This past weekend, I had a booth at the American College of Physicians, which is the nation's largest internal medicine conference. There were a number of residents and medical students there, and I asked them what kind of education they were getting. They said if psychedelics were mentioned at all, it was on a chemical level, like information about how receptors work in their pharmacokinetics class.But there were never positive mentions of the drugs, like how they could be used therapeutically. We still have leaps and bounds to go to get this into the medical school curriculum. 

What challenges have you experienced in getting information to med school trainees and practicing professionals?

Our primary goal is to educate the clinicians who have little to no information on psychedelics and get them up to speed, so that’s the reason we sat at this conference, old school style. The new school methods — like search engine optimization — make it hard to get a clinician's attention. If you don't know that psychedelic medicine exists, you're not googling psychedelics, and that's the catch-22 of us trying to get the attention of trainees who are completely unaware of psychedelics. We’re also trying to partner with mainstream medical organizations to get in front of their audiences. 

What questions are you hearing most from current trainees and healthcare professionals, and what work is your organization doing to bridge gaps in knowledge? 

The most common questions we get are related to indications, like, ‘Is such-and-such psychedelic good for a certain medical condition?’ Or questions about medication interactions, like, ‘Can a patient be taking an antidepressant and use ketamine?’ We're also hearing that patients are asking clinicians about microdosing; the evidence for that is mixed at this time, so we don't have an easy answer, but we do provide them with studies to read through. Clinicians on the more skeptical side will ask questions about safety and addictive potential.

The Psychedelic Medicine Association aims to bridge these knowledge gaps and fill them in. The psychedelics field is expanding so rapidly, that even if trainees learned something in medical school six months ago, it could have changed by now. We keep our members up to date by sending them updates with the latest findings in psychedelic research, and hosting a monthly webinar that takes a deep dive into some aspect of psychedelic medicine. 

Lately we’ve done several webinars specifically about ketamine, because that’s what many clinicians are asking about the most. We also realized that there was an immediate need for clinicians in Oregon; many people were going to their primary care providers and saying things like, ‘I can legally go do this substance, but is it medically safe for me?’ We figured that the average primary care doctor in Oregon was going to be caught unaware and have no idea how to answer that question, so we created a course called Managing Medical Risk for Patients Seeking Psilocybin Therapy specifically for Oregon doctors. 

You founded the Psychedelic Medicine Association in 2020. Have you noticed any changes in healthcare professionals’ level of knowledge and understanding of psychedelics over the last four years?

What I’ve seen is an increase in health care practitioners’ awareness. When we first started, we worked with the psychopharmacology conference Psych Congress to put on a symposium. They had surveyed people — mostly psychiatrists — and half of them were barely aware of psychedelics for therapeutic use, and there was something like 13 percent who said that they didn't even want to learn more. As more survey data has come out, I’ve noticed that while the increase in knowledge about these drugs may be slight, the increase in acceptance seems to be greater. I think that’s in part because clinicians are seeing more psychedelic research come out, and they are still cautious but less skeptical than they have been. And that's been huge. 

When I was at the American College of Physicians conference, I sat at a booth for three days, up to eight hours a day. I heard just one negative comment the entire time I was there, and the rest were all people who said patients are already asking them about psychedelics, or who wanted to know about how to get patients into clinical trials. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.