The research, study by study
We read every human study we could find on iboga and ibogaine, from addiction to brain injury to the heart. A second reader then opened each paper again to check every number. This page shows the results with the researchers' own figures where their licence allows, our own charts where it does not, and a plain word on how strong each piece of evidence is. Some of it is encouraging. None of it is proof yet.
How to read it
Medicine ranks evidence like the rungs of a ladder. The higher the rung, the more confident we can be that a treatment, and not hope, chance or time, caused the change. Most iboga research sits on the middle rungs.
Two more things to keep in mind on every result below. Almost all of these studies used ibogaine, the purified alkaloid, in a clinic; a Bwiti ceremony uses the whole root bark, and the two have never been compared directly (iboga vs ibogaine). And most of the human studies so far were run without a comparison group, many of them in commercial clinic settings, by teams who believe in the treatment. That does not make them wrong. It is why we call them early.
The evidence map
Every condition we write about, with the human research that exists for it today.
| Condition | Evidence | What exists in people | Read more |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opioid withdrawal and opioid use | Most studied | 8 studies, about 360 people, 1999 to 2024: withdrawal scores, relapse at up to 12 months, one safety trial with placebo | Opioids · below |
| PTSD, brain injury, veterans | Most studied | 3 groups of veterans, about 170 people, followed up to 12 months; brain scans, EEG | PTSD · TBI · Veterans |
| Depression and anxiety | Early | Measured as a second outcome in the veteran and opioid studies; no study of its own | Depression and anxiety |
| Alcohol | Early | A hospital pilot of 9 people, and 45 veterans who drank heavily | Alcohol · below |
| Cocaine and crack | Early | 89 people in one detox series, and a few in the alcohol pilot | Cocaine |
| Ketamine | Single case | One man, followed for 17 months | Ketamine · below |
| Multiple sclerosis | Single cases | One report of two people, with MRI | MS |
| Nerve pain | Single case | One man with long-standing pain after the nerves of his arm were torn at the spine | below |
| Parkinson's | Single case | One woman, 80 days of low-dose ibogaine; the idea comes from growth-factor research in rats | Parkinson's |
| Alzheimer's and dementia | Animal only | No human study | Alzheimer's |
| Heart safety | Most studied | Heart-rhythm studies, death reviews, and outcomes from 19,071 treated people | The heart · below |
No human study yet, for any of these: methamphetamine and Adderall, cannabis, benzodiazepines, kratom, smoking, chemsex drugs, gambling, food, porn, gaming, social media, shopping, OCD, personality conditions, grief, anger and loneliness. For these, everything we write is about the ceremony and what people tell us, not about research. More on the gaps.
PTSD, brain injury and veterans
In 2024, a Stanford team published the most cited human study of ibogaine to date, in Nature Medicine. Thirty male Special Operations veterans with repeated brain injuries took ibogaine together with magnesium, to protect the heart, and were assessed before, just after, and one month later. The same men were then followed for a year.
Average scores, before treatment, at one month and at twelve months
How to read this
Opioids
Ibogaine has been studied for opioid withdrawal since the 1990s. The studies agree on the first days: withdrawal scores drop sharply, and most people do not go back to opioids during the stay. The months after are more mixed, and that is the honest centre of this evidence.
Withdrawal score, before and 1 to 3 days after ibogaine
What happened in the months after
How to read this
Alcohol, cocaine and ketamine
Beyond opioids, the human research is thin. Here is all of it that we could verify.
Drinks a month, before and 3 months after: six people in a hospital pilot
45 veterans who drank heavily: how they drank after
1 month
6 months
Cocaine: in a detox series of 89 people dependent on cocaine, depression scores fell from 14.3 to 4.5 a month later, and there were no serious adverse events (Mash et al. 2018). There is no study of cocaine use after the first month.
The brain and nerves
For neurological conditions, the human evidence is a handful of case reports. The rest is animal research on growth factors such as GDNF and BDNF, which no study has yet measured in people after ibogaine.
One man's lesion shrank and his fatigue eased; a woman with progressive MS had small gains and more stiffness. See the scans.
Three people with lasting symptoms after concussion or lack of oxygen took iboga root bark in microdoses alongside other care. Headaches and brain fog eased in two. It is one of very few studies to use the root bark itself (Tabaac et al. 2026).
A 53-year-old man with nerve pain after the nerves of his arm were torn from the spinal cord reported pain scores 71 to 80% below his starting point, two months after a long ibogaine course (Dickinson et al. 2023).
A 52-year-old woman whose medicines were working less well took low doses of ibogaine, up to 75 mg a day. Her movement, quality of life, fatigue and mood scores improved; her sleep got worse (Erny et al. 2026). In rats, ibogaine raises GDNF, a growth factor that protects the nerve cells lost in Parkinson's. For Alzheimer's, there is no human study. Parkinson's · Alzheimer's.
Safety and the heart
If the benefits of ibogaine are still early science, its main danger is well documented. Ibogaine slows the heart's recovery between beats, which shows on an ECG as a longer QT interval. In rare cases this triggers a chaotic rhythm that can stop the heart. Every safety step in our protocol comes from this research.
14 people in a Dutch hospital study, one ibogaine dose each
QT above 500 ms
Given magnesium
Dangerous rhythm (torsades)
Deaths within 72 hours, 19,071 people treated in 11 clinics
What this research changed in our protocol
See the full medical protocol, iboga and the heart and can iboga kill you?
What we still do not know
No randomised, placebo-controlled trial has yet tested iboga or ibogaine for any condition. Until one does, no one can say how much of the change is the medicine.
Almost every study used purified ibogaine. There are no human heart-rhythm or blood-level studies of the root bark, so our physician applies the ibogaine data with extra caution.
The veteran studies were all men, and most addiction studies were mostly men. How women's hearts respond has barely been measured.
Gambling, food, porn, gaming, social media, shopping, OCD, grief, anger, personality conditions: no human study at all. What we offer here is the ceremony and its life review, not a researched treatment.
We will update this page as new studies are published. If you know of a human study we missed, write to us and we will read it.
Sources
Figures marked as reproduced are used under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY 4.0), resized, with our own captions. The other charts are ours, drawn from the numbers in each paper.
You've carried this long enough. Start with a conversation with our medical team.
