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Animal testing has been widely used as a tool for hallucinogen study. Of course, it is impossible to tell when — or if — an animal is hallucinating. But it is possible to train an animal, using standard operant conditioning techniques, to recognize the effects of a given agent. In other words, a rat can be trained to press one lever to get food when under the influence of a particular hallucinogen, and a different lever to get food when it is not.
One of the primary motivations for research into hallucinogens has been the hope that it might shed light on the cause and nature of schizophrenia. Such research is largely premised on the belief that hallucinogens generally are psychotomimetic — that is, capable of producing a model psychosis, which allows researchers to study the mechanisms of psychosis in non-psychotic subjects. This assumption is worth challenging.
Before thinking about the thorny question of how shamans heal, it is worth posing a logically prior question: do they heal? There are remarkably few data on this question. In particular, even moderately long-term follow-up is lacking. As anthropologist and medical doctor Gilbert Lewis puts it, “It is rare to find examples of anthropologists who record the frequency of therapeutic failures, do follow ups, or find out how many people do not bother to come back next time to the shaman.”