Reflections from Psychedelic Science 2025
I recently had the honor of attending Psychedelic Science 2025 on scholarship, a full-circle moment that stirred grief, clarity, and inspiration. What I brought into that space wasn’t just professional curiosity. It was also a quiet weight of a story I haven’t often told, one that shaped my approach to nursing and integrative healthcare.
Over a decade ago, someone I loved - a young, brilliant, emotionally layered chemistry major one semester away from graduating - was struggling beneath the surface of charm: depression and substance use with Ketamine. I was 19, a first-year nursing student, away from home, and unaware of the depths of addiction. Though he researched psychedelics clinically, his experimentation evolved into dependency. He was the first person I did yoga with. We studied Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, and influential bands such as Phish and the Grateful Dead. If you know, you know. A bright, clever, and progressive young man with a world of potential who
It was not until months into our relationship that I knew how bad things were. Reflecting on my reaction, I was naïve and judgmental. I helped him into treatment alongside his family. He completed a 30-day program successfully. But when he came out, it became clear he wasn’t ready to maintain sobriety. I was overwhelmed, processing, still in nursing school, and simply did not have the tools yet to support him outside of compassion and presence.
I eventually left our relationship, and he relapsed one month later. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I loved him, but had to choose to love him from afar. Two years later, he passed away after using again after another period of sobriety. I have carried that choice to leave and the guilt in professional silence for years.
A few years later, in my early days as a new emergency room nurse at age 21, I watched doctors order ketamine for conscious sedation, pain, and other procedures. Pulling that medication from a Pyxis machine felt extremely strange after never learning that this was used clinically in nursing school.
Years after that, Ketamine Clinics began to open for PTSD, anxiety, and depression. I worked in one and noticed the support for integration was lacking, qualifying for treatment was extremely easy, and it seemed to be led by providers hungry for money. Although patients still reported life-changing improvements in their mental health, it felt insufficient in terms of safe & sustainable usage.
Years later, psychedelics are becoming more mainstream with books like How to Change Your Mind, and the stigma seems to be dissolving - for cancer patients, veterans, palliative care, celebrities, etc. Clinicians I worked with who once feared psychedelics are becoming more curious. Psychedelic tourism continues to rise, and Ketamine Clinics, as well as at-home treatment options, are booming. Elective classes are being offered at a graduate level on botanical medicines and entheogens, taught by emergency medicine physicians and ethnobotanists in my DNP program. More and more evidence has emerged representing the powers of psychedelics on Anxiety, Depression, PTSD, and beyond. I’ve since volunteered in Festival Medicine and watched young people use untested substances or in unsupportive settings have traumatizing reactions that more often than not, untrained clinicians respond poorly to. I was able to peripherally witness the Mayo Clinic’s Integrative Cancer Clinic’s research on psilocybin for patients. I’ve completed training on nurses’ roles in psychedelics via Johns Hopkins, Harvard, UPenn, MAPS, and the Mayo Clinic. I now reside in a state where Psilocybin is legal. The trajectory of this same substance that had once fractured my life is now suddenly becoming routine medical care. And for good reason.
I continue to remain supportive as well as speculative in this psychedelic renaissance. From aspirin’s origins in willow bark to the global turmeric boom, Western medicine has long mined Indigenous knowledge while ignoring its roots. Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is not simply a set of remedies - it’s a relational worldview, an intergenerational understanding of ecosystems, healing, and stewardship. But in the hands of the pharmaceutical industry, TEK is often stripped of its context and turned into product pipelines.
Neem, hoodia, ayahuasca, iboga, psilocybin - all were once sacred medicines, embedded in cultural, spiritual, and ecological systems. Today, they’re patented, synthesized, and monetized - often with no credit or compensation to the communities that preserved them. This isn’t just about lost attribution - it’s about how modern science treats Indigenous knowledge as raw data, rather than living wisdom.
When Healing Harms: The Risk of Untrained Guides
The psychedelic space is expanding rapidly—but not always responsibly. While evidence mounts for the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, so do the headlines about unethical facilitators, retraumatized participants, and abuse cloaked in the language of “healing.”
Without proper training in trauma-informed care, cultural competency, and ethical boundaries, facilitators can unintentionally (or intentionally) cause great harm:
Sexual misconduct or coercion by facilitators during vulnerable states
Re-traumatization due to lack of psychological support or improper integration or setting
Gaslighting, spiritual bypassing, or being blamed for “not surrendering enough”
Negligent medical screening, resulting in psychiatric crises or physical complications
Cultural insensitivity, where sacred practices are appropriated or misused for aesthetic or profit
This raises necessary questions: Who should be guiding these experiences? Should facilitators be licensed? If so, by whom? And how do we standardize something inherently sacred, cultural, and relational?
Licensure alone does not ensure integrity. Western credentials can’t replace years of lineage, apprenticeship, and ancestral stewardship. At the same time, without regulation, we risk creating a Wild West of wellness - where harm is inevitable and accountability is rare.
We must move toward a model that holds both clinical rigor and cultural reverence - where facilitators are trained not just in protocols and dosing, but in humility, history, and harm reduction. We need systems that:
Include Indigenous and ancestral healers in training and leadership
Prioritize lived experience and relational skills over titles alone
Establish ethical guidelines and accountability structures, especially around consent and power dynamics
Respect that not all healing fits neatly into Western frameworks of licensure or control
Healing is sacred work. And when it’s done carelessly - or capitalistically - it becomes dangerous.
Colorado, however, has become a national leader in developing a state-sanctioned facilitator training and licensing program. Under the Natural Medicine Health Act (Proposition 122), Colorado is establishing a legal framework to train and license psilocybin facilitators, with full rollout anticipated in 2025–2026.
Here’s what’s changing:
Facilitator licensure will require completion of a state-approved training program, background checks, and ongoing education such as Memoru Center for Visionary Arts and the Changa Institute
Training must include trauma-informed care, cultural awareness, ethics, and harm reduction, not just protocols and dosing.
The state has created a Natural Medicine Advisory Board, which includes clinicians, Indigenous leaders, and harm reduction experts, to guide implementation.
Approved facilitators will offer legal psilocybin sessions in licensed healing centers under a regulated, supervised model—not clinical diagnosis, but supported access.
At Psychedelic Science 2025, surrounded by researchers, clinicians, Indigenous leaders, and harm reductionists, I was reminded: preparing clinicians to care for the whole person is still far from where we need to be.
The Systemic Gap in Clinical Training
We’re trained to:
Prescribe - but not to guide lifestyle change
Diagnose - but not to treat the whole person
React to illness - but rarely to build resilience
Nutrition, mindfulness, movement, sleep, trauma-informed communication, and supplement safety are rarely covered in clinical training. Psychedelic medicine? For many providers, it’s completely absent. And in today’s healthcare system, where we’re time-strapped, burned out, and limited by insurance, this disconnect has real consequences. Patients increasingly turn to the internet or underground communities for answers. We lose ground on healing and trust.
The Stigma Within: When Clinicians Carry the Bias
We often talk about the stigma patients face but not enough about the stigma that comes from us as clinicians.
Even as the science evolves and public interest in psychedelic therapy grows, many healthcare professionals still view it with skepticism, discomfort, or outright dismissal. Psychedelics are often labeled as taboo, despite decades of data, ongoing clinical trials, and endorsement by leading academic institutions. This is a direct result of a lack of formal, evidence-based, and culturally attuned education in academia.
But here’s the problem: when clinicians carry stigma and are underprepared to care for the psychedelic-curious patient, the patients and the environment suffer in silence. They stop asking questions. They stop sharing openly. They self-medicate or seek unregulated care underground. Tourism to Indigenous places and selfishness from Westernized practices takes hold. We exploit ecosystems, overharvest botanicals, and misappropriate sacred rituals. And we, as providers, miss the opportunity to guide patients with safety, compassion, evidence, and harm reduction in mind.
Instead, we need:
Curiosity over criticism
Education over ego
Dialogue over dismissal
Sensitivity over arrogance
Mindfulness over greed
To truly shift culture, we must start within by examining our own beliefs, biases, and discomfort. Only then can we meet psychedelic science with the respect and readiness it deserves.
Eco-Tourism, Extraction, and the Western Gaze
As the psychedelic renaissance grows, so does a troubling trend: spiritual eco-tourism and the commodification of sacred traditions. Western seekers increasingly travel to Indigenous communities for ayahuasca, peyote, San Pedro, and other medicines - often without fully understanding the cultural, ecological, or spiritual frameworks that sustain these practices.
This demand has consequences:
Overharvesting of plants like peyote and ibogaine
Exploitation of Indigenous healers
Cultural misappropriation of rituals and symbols
Clinical reductionism that strips sacredness from medicine
Our duty as clinicians and researchers is to honor the origins of these medicines and resist the urge to standardize or sanitize them into clinical boxes by finding ways to avoid the impact of Western practices on outside communities.
How We Can Move Forward
Even within today’s constrained system, progress is possible:
Ask trauma-informed questions
Push for curriculum reform
Offer micro-interventions (QR codes, guides, referrals)
Honor ancestry and lineages
Build collaborative, cross-discipline teams
Stay up to date and educate peers
Helpful resources include:
🎓 U-Penn (University of Pennsylvania’s Educating Nurses in Psychedelic Assisted Therapy)
Regardless of how we feel as clinicians, we must be prepared to answer patients’ questions and offer guidance, resources, and support.
My time at Psychedelic Science 2025 affirmed what I’ve lived and what I know: healthcare’s future demands not just innovation, but cultural reverence, integration, and clinician education that prepares us to hold space, not just write orders, and not just follow wellness trends uncritically. We must rise with curiosity, humility, and heart.
