How does ibogaine work in the brain to end addiction?
At the Anzelmo Wellness Center we use plant medicines to help clean your system of opiates, but also to help you to see yourself: your habits, your pains, wounds, traumas, and the roots and cause of your addictions or depression, in such a powerful and clear way. Ibogaine can show you why you have your anger, stubbornness, loneliness, separation, sadness, reactions, and emotional triggers. It can help you release the shame, guilt, and self-judgement. And can help you forgive yourself, for all the suffering you caused others, yourself, and the wrongs that have been done to you.
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Ibogaine works on both the brain’s “hardware”
Ibogaine works on both the brain’s “hardware” – the neural circuitry, neurotransmitters and receptors, and the brain’s “software” — a patient’s personality, according to chemist Ignacio Carrera, in an article on Chacruna.net
During an ibogaine treatment, the patient experiences a psychedelic trip that often shows them two paths — one if they were to continue to use drugs and one if they were to stop. It can also show them their past through a new prism — they can view old and sometimes forgotten memories in a new light; helping the patient to understand why they used drugs in the first place. The patient can gain tremendous insight into their personality and addiction, helping to “pursue profound changes in their lives, including changing their relationship with their drugs of abuse,” writes Carrera.
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“Being able to put together the thoughts that they’ve had, why they’ve relapsed before. I think that’s what Ibogaine really shows you. Our errors in our life. It brings out of us what’s inside of us. It’s not showing us the path to go, it’s more showing us the mistakes that we’ve made.”
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“We’ve been talking about our pasts here, me and the other patients, clients, and I used to get physical responses, just even talking about drugs. I would get rapid heartbeat, get a little nauseous, feel like I had to go to the bathroom or something, and now I just don’t. It just doesn’t even appeal to me. I’ve spent too much time doing that. I don’t want to stab myself with needles anymore. Making myself bleed everyday. I forgive myself, the past is the past. But in the future, this is a beautiful vessel, it’s an amazing microcosm. I have to take care of it.”
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“I felt like I was reborn. I felt like a new person. I felt that my way I expressed it to people was that I was born, I was reborn at my age. Totally clear head, totally brand new. Just totally…it’s insane what it does. It’s really, it’s a miracle when you do the treatment and you come out of it. You know, the first thing I think is miracle.”
A Clean Start
While the patient is undergoing the psychedelic portion of the treatment, the root bark of a little shrub from Africa — the iboga tree — is essentially doing surgery on their brain by resetting the neurons back to baseline; essentially where the brain was before the patient began using drugs. When they finish the treatment, they are no longer addicted to heroin. But in addition to that, the old neural pathways are temporarily taken offline, giving the patient a break from their old habits — enough time, hopefully, to allow them to form new, healthier habits.
How Does Ibogaine Work?
In addition, says Carerra, ibogaine affects the patient’s “hardware” – “receptors in the brain and in the neurotransmitter systems,” he writes. “Ibogaine can promote the release of small proteins called “neurotrophic factors” in some parts of the brain.” Neurotrophic factors, explains Carrera, are substances that promote “survival, repair, and protection processes in the brain tissue.”
Neurotrophic factors can also promote “neurogenesis (the generation of new neurons from progenitor cells) in the developing nervous system and in some areas of the mature human brain,” he writes. “These substances are of vital importance for the development and function of the nervous system.. . .Since ibogaine can promote the release of these neurotrophic factors in some regions of the brain, it is proposed it could repair and protect the damaged neural circuits involved in drug addiction.”
