125. The Wise Body: What Women's Hormones, Cycles, and Lived Experience Have to Teach Psychedelic Medicine
Stephanie Karzon Abrams of Galilea on why psychedelic care must account for women's cycles, life stage, and the knowledge that predates clinical trials.
Episode Summary
The research on psychedelics was built around male bodies. Women were treated as a confounding variable — their cycles, hormones, and life stages filtered out of study designs rather than centered in them. The result is a clinical landscape where practitioners are guessing, women are underserved, and the knowledge that has existed for generations in women's bodies and lineages is treated as anecdote rather than data.
Stephanie Karzon Abrams is the co-creator of Galilea and founder of Beyond Consulting, a practice focused on psychedelic-informed female care: what it requires, what the research does and doesn't tell us, and what women's lived experience is already teaching practitioners who are paying attention.
🔵 Key Takeaways
Hormonal landscape will influence a woman's psychedelic experience — but the research is contradictory enough that we cannot yet say with certainty in what direction.
GLP-1 medications slow gastric emptying and interfere with the onset of prodrugs like psilocybin, which must be metabolized into active psilocin in the gut.
The distinction between knowledge and knowing is the foundation of the Wise Body framework. Knowledge can be published and replicated. Knowing is generational, intuitive, lived.
Psychedelic therapy is more like surgery than a prescription. It requires preparation, skilled practitioners, and mandatory aftercare.
We don't yet have adequate data on how diversity, culture, comorbidities, and socioeconomic background affect outcomes. And the ecosystems and communities that hold these medicines are not ready to be scaled.
🔵 Timestamps
🔵 Resources
Stephanie Karzon Abrams | Galilea, Beyond Consulting
Psychedelics & the Whole Self: A Gathering for Womxn
Ep. 33 | Therapeutic Psilocybin Use: Tea, Lemon Tek, and Healing
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