Fans of Super Mario play with them. Doctors study them. Chefs all over the world cook with them. They appear overnight, disappear just like fast and leave no trace of the visit. Students with this world are called mycologists and now, the fungus has been looked at as a possible treatment for cancer, PTSD-post-traumatic stress disorder and some psychological disorders.

Mushrooms, sometimes called toadstools, are fleshy bodies of fungus that grow above ground on soil or on a food source. They are separated from the plant world in a kingdom all their particular called Myceteae because they cannot contain chlorophyll like green plants.

Without the procedure of photosynthesis, some mushrooms obtain nutrients by breaking down organic matter or by feeding from higher plants. These are called decomposers. Another sector attacks living plants to kill and consume them and they’re called parasites. Edible and poisonous varieties are mycorrhizal and are found on or near roots of trees such as oaks, pines and firs.

For humans, mushrooms can do among three things-nourish, heal or poison. Few are benign. The three most popular edible versions with this ‘meat of the vegetable world’ will be the oyster, morel and chanterelles.

They are used extensively in cuisine from China, Korea, Japan and India. In reality, China could be the world’s largest producer cultivating over 50% of all mushrooms consumed worldwide. Shroom chocolate  The majority of the edible variety in our supermarkets have been grown commercially on farms and include shiitake, portobello and enoki.

Eastern medicine, especially traditional Chinese practices, has used mushrooms for centuries. In the U.S., studies were conducted in the first ’60s for possible approaches to modulate the immunity system and to inhibit tumor growth with extracts used in cancer research.

Mushrooms were also used ritually by the natives of Mesoamerica for tens and thousands of years. Called the ‘flesh of the gods’ by Aztecs, mushrooms were widely consumed in religious ceremonies by cultures through the Americas. Cave paintings in Spain and Algeria depict ritualized ingestion dating back in terms of 9000 years. Questioned by Christian authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, psilocybin use was suppressed until Western psychiatry rediscovered it after World War II.

A 1957 article in Life Magazine titled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” spurred the interest of America. The next year, a Swiss scientist named Albert Hofman, identified psilocybin and psilocin since the active compounds in the ‘magic’ mushrooms. This prompted the creation of the Harvard Psilocybin Project led by American psychologist Timothy Leary at Harvard University to study the results of the compound on humans.

In the quarter century that followed, 40,000 patients were given psilocybin and other hallucinogens such as LSD and mescaline. Significantly more than 1,000 research papers were produced. Once the government took notice of the growing subculture ready to accept adopting the utilization, regulations were enacted.

The Nixon Administration began regulations, which included the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. The law created five schedules of increasing severity under which drugs were to be classified. Psilocybin was put in the most restrictive schedule I along with marijuana and MDMA. Each was defined as having a “high possibility of abuse, no currently acceptable medical use and too little accepted safety.”

This ended the research for almost 25 years until recently when studies opened up for potential use in working with or resolving PTSD-post-traumatic stress disorder along with anxiety issues. At the time of June 2014, whole mushrooms or extracts have been studied in 32 human clinical trials registered with the U.S. National Institutes of Health due to their potential effects on many different diseases and conditions. Some maladies being addressed include cancer, glaucoma, immune functions and inflammatory bowel disease.

The controversial part of research is the utilization of psilocybin, a naturally occurring chemical in certain mushrooms. Its ability to greatly help people struggling with psychological disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, PTSD and anxiety are still being explored. Psilocybin has been shown to work in treating addiction to alcohol and cigarettes in certain studies