How to Evaluate an Ibogaine Clinic

This site names no clinics and recommends none. What follows is a method, and it starts with a fact most people looking for a clinic do not know.

There is no accreditation. Three sources say so.

Not our characterisation. Three independent documents, each from a different kind of body, state it directly.

The guidelines themselves. The Clinical Guidelines for Ibogaine-Assisted Detoxification are the document nearly every provider gestures at. Their own disclaimer reads:

It is not intended, and is not suited to be used as, legally or medically sufficient and necessary standards.

The wider field’s own professional guidance. A 2023 practice-guidelines document for psychedelic-assisted therapy states that the field has yet to establish an accreditation mechanism to set standards for educational programmes or the institutions that sponsor them, and that there is no requirement that practitioners complete such programmes.

A national health regulator’s independent expert. Investigating a death at an ibogaine clinic, the New Zealand Health and Disability Commissioner’s medical expert wrote that any comment on the appropriateness of ibogaine therapy and training must be made in the context of there being no accepted and robust guidelines on these matters, the manual referred to being more a collection of anecdotal experiences.

What happened to the body behind those guidelines

We checked the public register rather than repeating what circulates.

GLOBAL IBOGA THERAPY ALLIANCE LTD, company number 14848341, incorporated 5 May 2023, registered office in Bristol.

There is no healthcare activity code, no professional-body code, no accreditation code. The organisation is registered for organising conferences, its filings are overdue, and the government has begun the process of removing it from the register.

What a regulator found when it actually looked

In 2013 a woman of 45 died at an ibogaine clinic in New Zealand, the one country where ibogaine can lawfully be prescribed. The Health and Disability Commissioner investigated and published in 2015.

We name the company because an official regulatory finding is one of the few things that permits it. Iboga New Zealand Limited did not operate safely, and breached the code by failing to provide services with reasonable care and skill.

The findings are worth reading closely, because each one is a question you can ask any provider.

The protocol was exceeded and nobody wrote down why. The clinic’s own protocol allowed no more than 1,600 mg over four hours. She received six doses over about 24 hours, 2,200 mg in total, and the Commissioner records that there is no note of the rationale for that departure.

The procedures were one page. In the Commissioner’s words: for such a complex and intensive treatment, the documented policies and procedures were minimal, and amounted to only one page.

And the summary judgement, verbatim:

The lack of comprehensive protocols and failure to comply with what protocols were in place give the overwhelming impression that it was a sloppy operation with little regard for professional standards.

The monitoring gap, which nobody advertises

This is the most useful thing on the page and it comes from comparing published documents against each other.

Now set that against the risk window. Published deaths occurred up to 76 hours after dosing. The metabolite has a half-life of 28 to 49 hours. In documented cases the QT interval has taken seven to eight days to normalise.

No published protocol monitors for as long as the risk window it describes. That is not a criticism of one clinic. It is true of every protocol in print, including the academic ones.

And screening does not close the gap. In a Dutch university hospital, with cardiac exclusions applied and serial ECGs, half of the patients still crossed a QTc of 500 milliseconds, and in six of fourteen the prolongation was still there beyond 24 hours. Pre-treatment screening covers why a normal result is not a clearance.

The questions

Replace impressions with facts. Every one of these has an answer that is either true or false, and a provider who cannot answer precisely has answered.

Monitoring

• How many hours of continuous cardiac monitoring, from the moment of dosing?
• How many leads, and does anyone record the readings?
• Who is watching the monitor at four in the morning, and what is their qualification?
• What happens on the second night and the third?

People

• What medical qualification does the supervising person hold, in which country, and under what registration number?
• Is anyone on site certified in advanced cardiac life support, and how many people at once are they responsible for?
• Does the same person who screens you also decide whether you are treated?

Equipment and distance

• Is there a defibrillator, is it tested, and who is trained to use it?
• Is intravenous magnesium immediately to hand?
• How many minutes to a hospital that can manage a cardiac arrhythmia, and has anyone timed that drive?

Screening

• Which tests before dosing, and which correction formula for the QT interval?
• Are potassium and magnesium measured and corrected on the day?
• What result would mean you are refused, and how often does that happen?

The awkward ones

• Has anyone ever been seriously harmed here, and what changed afterwards?
• What is the protocol, in writing, and may I read it before I travel?
• What is the maximum dose, who decides to exceed it, and is that decision recorded?

That last cluster is not rudeness. A regulator’s finding turned on exactly those three things: an undocumented departure from a dose ceiling, one page of written procedure, and nobody recording observations.

What good looks like, as far as anyone has published it

The only peer-reviewed attempt to identify what makes ibogaine safer is a systematic review of twelve clinical studies. Its conclusion is general and it is the best that exists: controlled settings, supported by trained professionals and equipment allowing rigorous medical, psychiatric and cardiac monitoring, are essential to promote safety.

There are no numeric thresholds in it, no checklist, and no audit standard. That is the ceiling of what the literature offers.

One useful artefact does exist. The 2016 guidelines reproduce an Ibogaine Patient’s Bill of Rights, which includes the right to be informed of the name, position, experience and credentials of the person in charge of your treatment, and the right to file a grievance. Those are reasonable things to ask for in writing before you pay anything.

The comparison to hold on to

If you were choosing a surgeon you could check a public register, read a regulator’s findings, and see outcome data. None of that exists here.

What exists is a market with no accreditation, guidelines frozen in 2016 whose publisher is being struck off, one regulator’s finding that describes a sloppy operation, and a monitoring window that every protocol in print closes too early.

Ibogaine and the heart is the page to read before this one, and why there is no success rate is the page to read before believing any figure a provider quotes you.