Kate Showalter's 5-year-old daughter is suffering from a rare and aggressive form of leukemia.
Showalter is taking part in a major new study at the University of Colorado that's testing a psychedelic drug called psilocybin that could help ease her daughter's anxiety.
She tells Colorado Public Radio that she lost her own mother to cancer when she was just a teenager and that she "had this endless well of patience" for her daughter but lost that patience when she got sick.
Now Showalter is taking part in a major new study that's treating up to 200 cancer patients with a combination of talk therapy, placebo drugs, and large doses of psilocybin.
It's the first major study to use psilocybin to treat cancer, and researchers say it could help ease the anxiety of cancer patients who are dealing with debilitating side effects of chemo, including panic attacks and forgetting the names of their loved ones.
Showalter is one of the patients taking large doses of psilocybin along with talk therapy, and she tells Colorado Public Radio that her biggest fear was whether her daughter would remember her.
"I don't want her to go through what I went without mom," she says.
"So I wanted to see Read the Entire Article
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Jim Fruchterman founded the now 24-year-old social enterprise Benetech, a nonprofit tech company that focuses on developing technology for social good. Fruchterman has also launched a new initiative called Bookshare, which is a membership-only crowdsourced online library for people with disabilities.