The first time I heard a person describe phantom limb pain, it was through a support group post—raw, unfiltered, and heartbreakingly clear. “It’s like lightning bolts shooting through my missing foot,” they wrote. “I wake up screaming because something that isn’t there feels like it’s on fire.” I couldn’t look away. I didn’t have a prosthesis, or chronic pain, or any first-hand experience with limb loss. But something in their description—a body betraying its own absence—hooked into me.
At first, I approached the subject with curiosity and distance. I had dabbled in psychedelics—mushrooms for depression, ayahuasca for ancestral grief—but pain? That was new territory. My own aches were the emotional kind. Still, I knew what it was like to be trapped in a feedback loop you couldn’t think or will your way out of. That’s what caught my attention: not just the pain, but the invisibility of it. The way it refuses to be named by conventional medicine.
When I read about Dr. Albert Lin’s study at UCSD—using psilocybin to treat phantom pain—I was skeptical. Psychedelics for what? But as I dug deeper, something shifted. This wasn’t about escapism. It wasn’t about numbing. It was about perception. About rewriting the mind’s attachment to pain, its stubborn belief in a limb that’s no longer there. Suddenly, it didn’t seem implausible—it seemed obvious.
Because if psychedelics can help us rewire trauma, dissolve depression, soften identity—then why not pain? Why not this particularly cruel, ghosted form of it? I started asking questions I hadn’t considered before: What is pain, if not a story the brain keeps telling? And what if mushrooms, with their strange magic, could help us rewrite the ending?
READ: Microdosing Psilocybin for Postoperative Pain Management in Women: An Emerging Path to Healing
The Unseen Agony of Phantom Pain
Phantom limb pain is as paradoxical as it is cruel. The limb is gone—amputated, lost to war, accident, disease—but the pain remains. Often, it gets worse over time. Up to 80 percent of amputees report these symptoms: searing heat, stabbing pulses, electric jolts, or the sensation of a hand clenched tightly in a fist that can’t be opened. Pain without a wound. Presence in absence. The body misremembering itself.
For decades, medicine has tried to solve this problem like a riddle. Mirror therapy, which uses visual illusions to “trick” the brain into believing the limb is intact, helped some. Opioids helped others—but at a cost. Antidepressants, spinal stimulators, nerve blocks: all brought marginal or short-lived relief. The nervous system, it seems, has a will of its own—and it doesn’t always respond to logic.
What I hadn’t realized until I began speaking with amputees was how deeply this kind of pain seeps into identity. “It’s not just that it hurts,” one person told me. “It’s that it makes me feel like I’m broken all the time.” The pain becomes a phantom in more than one way. It haunts the sense of self, warping one’s relationship with the body, with autonomy, with memory itself.
As I listened, I began to understand that phantom pain isn’t just a neurological glitch—it’s a kind of trauma. The body’s map doesn’t match reality, and the brain fights to reconcile the difference. That fight becomes the pain. And perhaps—just perhaps—psychedelics offer a way to lay down the sword.
The UCSD Study: Where Lived Experience Meets Neuroscience
The new study, quietly revolutionary, was led by Dr. Albert Yu-Min Lin—a scientist, National Geographic explorer, and amputee. After losing his leg in an accident and suffering debilitating phantom pain, Lin turned not to pharmaceuticals, but to psilocybin. His first journey was transformative. The pain that had been screaming in his phantom foot fell silent.
That personal revelation became the spark for a formal investigation. At UC San Diego’s Center for Psychedelic Research, Lin and a team of clinicians launched a clinical study: administering high-dose psilocybin in a controlled, therapeutic setting to a group of amputees with chronic phantom pain.
The results were nothing short of astonishing. Participants reported pain reductions of 50 to 75 percent—and those reductions grew over time. In contrast, the placebo group saw minimal change. Brain scans revealed something equally compelling: reduced activity in the default mode network, along with changes in regions tied to self-representation and sensory prediction.
In other words, the pain didn’t just fade. The brain’s relationship to pain appeared to change. Participants described feeling like they were “re-inhabiting” their bodies—letting go of the old neural map that kept insisting something was wrong.
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The Ego and the Body: A New Theory of Pain
It’s not just that psilocybin dulls pain (it doesn’t). It’s that it seems to reorganize the mind’s relationship to the body—especially in cases where that relationship has been fractured. Phantom pain, by its very nature, is a story the brain refuses to stop telling. Psilocybin, through mechanisms we’re only beginning to understand, may offer a way to rewrite that story.
The Default Mode Network again takes center stage. This brain system, associated with self-narrative and rumination, has been shown to go quiet under psychedelics. What takes its place is often described as “ego dissolution”—a temporary loosening of identity, of the self-model that keeps us bound to past injuries and definitions.
For an amputee, that might mean shedding the internal expectation that a missing limb still hurts. For someone with fibromyalgia or CRPS, it might mean releasing the identity of being chronically broken. Psilocybin doesn’t erase pain. But it may decouple it from the self.
This idea—that identity and pain are entangled—feels radical. But it’s not new. Somatic therapists, Indigenous healers, and trauma-informed practitioners have long pointed to this connection. Now science is beginning to catch up.
READ: Somatic Therapy: Signs Your Body Is Releasing Trauma
Neuroplasticity as Liberation
I used to think neuroplasticity was a buzzword. A shiny concept thrown around in self-help books and TED Talks—”Change your brain, change your life.” But the more I learn, and the more I listen to people who’ve experienced deep shifts from psychedelics, the more I realize: neuroplasticity is survival. It’s not just about cognition. It’s about permission. The brain can change. And when it does, everything else can follow.
In the context of phantom pain, that change is nothing short of revolutionary. The brain’s persistent memory of a missing limb becomes a trap—an endless loop of expectation and disappointment. Pain becomes the signal that something is missing, even when everything rational says otherwise. Psilocybin, it appears, helps break that loop. By relaxing the predictive coding system—essentially, the brain’s assumptions about what should be there—it allows for a new signal to take root: safety.
Neuroimaging in the UCSD study showed increased connectivity between regions of the brain that don’t typically talk to each other. Some participants described the experience as being “reintroduced” to their body. “It felt like I was shaking hands with myself again,” one person said. That kind of reconnection—sensory, emotional, existential—is not something a painkiller can provide. It’s not about sedation. It’s about sovereignty.
That realization made me reevaluate my own relationship with pain—not just physical, but emotional, ancestral, inherited. What loops have I mistaken for truth? What old maps am I still using to navigate a life that no longer resembles the terrain? If psilocybin teaches anything, it’s this: the brain can adapt. And in that adaptation, maybe, is where freedom begins.
Reflection: What If Healing Isn’t Numbing—but Knowing?
One of the most disorienting things about chronic pain is that it becomes familiar. You begin to orient around it, define yourself by it. It governs your choices, shrinks your world, tells you who you’re allowed to be. Over time, the pain becomes part of your identity—like furniture in a room you stopped rearranging long ago.
That’s why the idea of psychedelics as a reorientation tool felt so poignant to me. They don’t just reduce symptoms—they dissolve certainties. They pull up the rug, change the lighting, knock down the walls of your inner architecture. And in that openness, something new can emerge. Not always joy, but space. And in that space, choice.
I’ve heard people say that psilocybin “shows you what you’re ready to see.” For someone living with phantom pain, that might mean confronting the grief of loss, complex trauma, or even the fear of being whole again. That confrontation isn’t easy. But it’s honest. And in a medical system that often silences or numbs, honesty is a kind of medicine all its own.
For me, the most powerful takeaway from the study wasn’t the data—it was the testimony. The way people spoke about their bodies with reverence again. The way pain became a teacher, not a tormentor. That, to me, is the essence of psychedelic healing: not escape, but intimacy. Not forgetting the pain, but learning how to hear what it’s trying to say.
READ: Transforming Trauma: Recognizing The 7 Stages of Trauma Healing
Reclaiming the Body, One Journey at a Time — With Magic Mush
If pain lives not just in tissue, but in memory—etched into the neural maps of identity—then perhaps true healing begins not with suppression, but with transformation. For those who live with phantom limb pain, or any chronic condition that mainstream medicine has failed to soothe, the idea that mushrooms could do what opioids can’t isn’t just revolutionary—it’s a kind of quiet, radical hope.
What the UCSD study reveals is something those of us in the psychedelic community have long suspected: psilocybin doesn’t just distract from pain—it changes our relationship to it. It dissolves the stories that keep suffering locked in place. It invites us to return to the body—not as a site of damage, but as sacred terrain worthy of tenderness.
At Magic Mush, we’re deeply committed to walking that path with you. As Toronto’s most trusted provider of magic mushroom products, we offer more than just access—we offer care, curiosity, and connection. Our offerings include rich, delicious chocolate-infused mushrooms for those seeking a gentle, palatable entry point; dried magic mushroom bundles for traditional journeys and ceremonial use; and carefully dosed psilocybin gummies designed for microdosing or subtle exploration.
Each product is crafted with intention—because we know that set and setting don’t begin when the journey starts. They begin with the care you take in preparation. With the quality of what you ingest. With knowing that the people behind the product believe in more than just sales—we believe in the sacredness of the experience.
So whether you’re exploring psilocybin for pain relief, personal growth, or simply to reconnect with your own body, Magic Mush is here to support you. We invite you to explore our offerings, read our guides, and step into this new paradigm with open eyes and an open heart.
