Can psilocybin alleviate phantom limb pain? 5 questions with neuroscientist Fadel Zeidan

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5 Questions<br>Can psilocybin alleviate phantom limb pain? 5 questions with neuroscientist Fadel Zeidan<br>Zeidan discusses how magic mushrooms might help reduce amputees’ pain.

Shayla Love<br>May 18, 2026

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In 2016, a research scientist and National Geographic Explorer, Albert Lin, was in a car accident and had his lower right leg amputated. Like many other people who lose part of their arm or leg, Lin started to feel pain where his leg used to be, a phenomenon known as phantom limb pain. For around two-thirds of amputees, the sensation is severe. Lin felt like this phantom foot was stuck in a tightly flexed position at the ankle, and felt extreme pain several times per day.<br>He sought the help of V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at University of California San Diego who has done research showing that when a mirror is placed so that it reflects the other limb, it creates an illusion that the amputated limb has been restored and provides relief. But the relief sometimes only lasts as long as the mirror is in position. Lin wasn’t responding to pain medications, and decided to try psilocybin mushrooms, which he had heard anecdotally could help. In a case study from 2018, Ramachandran, Lin, and their colleagues reported that the combination of mirror visual-feedback and psilocybin led to “a striking and long-term reduction of pain.”

Photo of amputees using mirror therapy. Image by TANG CHHIN SOTHY/AFP via Getty Images<br>Lin’s success was just a case study. To figure out if psilocybin can help others with phantom limb pain, neuroscientist and professor of anesthesiology at UCSD, Fadel Zeidan, ran a small study in nine more amputees; five received psilocybin and four received niacin as a placebo. The trial’s goal was primarily to show that it’s safe to give psilocybin to amputees, yet the preliminary results were promising: those who received the drug experienced a 50 to 75 percent reduction in pain. Zeidan recently received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to do a clinical trial with a larger sample size. The Microdose talked to Zeidan about his initial study, and how he thinks psilocybin reduced this mysterious kind of pain.<br>How did the research on phantom limb pain and psilocybin begin?<br>Albert Lin is a professor and a National Geographic Explorer. He got into a really bad car accident, and they had to amputate his leg because he had an infection. This super active dude had crippling phantom limb pain, which is pain that emanates from a limb that’s missing; it feels like the limbs are basically being severed. Physiologically, it really makes no sense. It might be related to trauma, where the organism’s safety signal pain is still saying, ‘Hey, there’s something wrong.” Albert went to Joshua Tree with his girlfriend, took a massive dose of magic mushrooms, and after working with Ramachandran here with a mirror box, brought a mirror to the desert and coupled his psychedelic experience in Joshua Tree with the mirror. It essentially eradicated his pain. A case study was published on that, with a sample size of one.<br>My first talk at UCSD eight years ago, Albert was in the audience, and I had just come from North Carolina at Wake Forest University. He approached me after about my work on [the neuroscience of] meditation and asked me if psychedelics work on the same biological processes. After I looked around and saw there were no cops in the room, I said, “Yeah as a matter of fact, I think they do.” Because they both likely target mechanisms supporting egocentric appraisals of experience. He invited me to meet a bunch of other psychedelic researchers that had been in the underground that were working with rodents. And they got a gift from a philanthropist to study phantom limb, and we were able to carry out that work. It kind of fell in my lap.<br>I had heard of the mirror techniques to alleviate pain—do you think the psilocybin is enhancing its effect or doing something on its own?<br>Great question. I don’t know. Albert believes that the mirror was critical, and we had this dilemma: do we do this with the mirror? I didn’t want to because we still didn’t do the first pancake study, we don’t know the effects of psilocybin alone. I love Ramachandran’s work but the mirror box isn’t sustainable. It’s so cool how it works. It basically creates this illusion that your limb that’s missing is intact, which can give this exhale that tells this aberrant signal from the organism that it’s actually okay. But that’s not the truth. There is currently no cure for phantom limb pain. Mirror box has an immediate phenomenon, and perhaps coupled with the truthfulness that psilocybin can elicit, it can be uniquely efficacious.

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For the small study you’ve recently completed, as you said you didn’t use a mirror. What...