Let's be absolutely clear here, ibotenic acid is a toxic excitatory neurocompound, it has no accepted therapeutic use. Anyone telling you it is “actually amazing medicinally” is wrong and feeding you information that is unfounded, easily disproven with even cursory research, and potentially dangerous.
Now at the same time let's not be melodramatic, this doesn't mean if you eat a gram of amanita you are going to immediately get a brain lesion. Ethanol is also a neurotoxin, a lot of things we encounter every day are neurotoxic, such as air pollution. That doesn't mean it's safe or smart to go downing bottles of everclear and sucking on exhaust pipes.
What’s actually happening here is not “confusion in the science,” it’s poor critical thinking about sources. A
clinical toxicology report built on verified exposures, symptom patterns, and medical outcomes holds a little more weight than "Amanita Dreamer" an influencer with something to sell you that needs to put disclaimers on her website to prevent being held legally accountable for spreading misinformation: "
Requests for mental health help, medication advice, natural alternative medication, any advice, will not be answered. In the US this is practicing medicine without a license and is a serious offense."
The study posted earlier is useful because it’s measurements under defined conditions: temperature, pH, time, and observed changes in ibotenic acid and muscimol. That kind of data is inherently more reliable than “someone in a group says boiling does nothing,” because the claim can be checked, repeated, and falsified.
Let’s use this as an opportunity to actively engage critical thinking: evaluating information quality, incentives, bias, and fallacy, and understanding why the scientific method and peer review exist in the first place. They exist to prevent anecdotes and belief from being mistaken for evidence when real risk is involved.
