Pα+ Psychedelic Bulletin #226: The Ethics of Psilocybin for Advanced Alzheimer’s; Veterans’ Views on Psychedelics

Miracle or Minefield? The Alzheimer’s Case Report

A Case Report published in Frontiers in Neuroscience late last month (Lago et al., 2026) caused quite a stir, with various media outlets and psychedelics advocates hailing it as showing great promise. It reported on a woman in her 80s who has had Alzheimer’s for a decade being repeatedly dosed with psilocybin and apparently experiencing functional improvements thereafter.

We discussed the case with psychiatrist (and key member of religious group Associação Cruz de Ankh) Marcos Lago, first author on the paper, as well as his broader practice: A Research Hypothesis, Not A Treatment Recommendation: Marcos Lago on the Viral Psilocybin for Alzheimer's Case Report.

“Both uncritical enthusiasm and automatic dismissal are scientifically unhelpful”, Lago told Psychedelic Alpha. (Anecdotally, our email inbox was full of tips and story suggestions from both sides of that spectrum.) Still, that hasn’t stopped much of the former, with the caption of an excitable Bryan Johnson video on the topic reading: “This is biblical.”

Dinesh Pal, an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at University of Michigan, served as first reviewer of the Case Report. We asked him if he was surprised to see the report’s contents when it landed on his desk.

“Well, yes and no”, he started. “The functional improvements after a single dose of psilocybin, as described in this case report, were indeed quite impressive”, he said. “However, psilocybin has been shown in preclinical and clinical studies to produce long-lasting improvements in intractable conditions such as chronic pain, addiction, and depression”, Pal went on, “so, there is some basis to expect such profound effects.”

He was keen to emphasise that the Case Report “does not claim to treat or reverse the disease, [it] just describes some functional improvements” and that psilocybin should be studied in more controlled settings in order to further explore its potential here.

There are very few efforts to do so, however. Still, ...