AMERICANALMANAC (Jonah Adams) - Americans are abandoning conventional medicine for toad venom and mushrooms — and a $193 billion industry is cashing in
A growing number of Americans are turning to psychedelics, spiritual ceremonies, and other alternative treatments after losing faith in conventional medicine, a trend now backed by a nearly $200 billion global industry. Sly Young chose toad venom over antidepressants. She made that decision deliberately, fully aware of how it sounded. During the pandemic, her conventional […] The post Americans are abandoning conventional medicine for toad venom and mushrooms — and a $193 billion industry is cashing in appeared first on American Almanac .
A growing number of Americans are turning to psychedelics, spiritual ceremonies, and other alternative treatments after losing faith in conventional medicine, a trend now backed by a nearly $200 billion global industry. Sly Young chose toad venom over antidepressants. She made that decision deliberately, fully aware of how it sounded. During the pandemic, her conventional treatments for neurodivergence and chronic PTSD stopped working as well as they once had. So she went looking for something else, and found shamans, sacred ceremonies, and microdosed mushrooms supplied by a friend. Young's story, profiled by USA Today , is not an outlier. It sits inside a documented national shift away from mainstream Western medicine and toward a…Open