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About this resource
This page closely follows the online survey published by Majić and colleagues in 2021. The study captured how people who had experienced kambô recalled and evaluated their motivations for use, ritual settings, acute physical and psychological experiences, and later changes. It was not a clinical trial collecting medical diagnoses, measurements of secretion composition, or objective indicators before and after treatment.
“Participants perceived a benefit” is different from “kambô improved a disease.” Self-report is primary data for understanding the meaning of experience and cultures of use, but it cannot establish pharmacologic effects independent of expectation, selection, memory, and ritual setting. This was also a survey of experiences in which whole secretion was applied to burn wounds, not a test of efficacy from isolated-peptide research.
Study design
The survey was conducted on SoSci Survey in English and German. It was designed to take approximately 30 minutes and asked about demographics, number of kambô experiences, use of other ritual plants and substances, spiritual practices, motivations, expectations, the number of application points and setting in a representative session, acute experiences, and longer-term changes in life. Some acute-experience items came from the Mystical Experience Questionnaire and Challenging Experience Questionnaire, and some persistent assessments from the Persisting Effects Questionnaire.
Recruitment used emails from kambô practitioners and experts, Facebook, Reddit, psychoactive-substance websites, healing festivals around Berlin, and related channels. Eligibility required being at least 18 years old and having actually received kambô. Data were excluded if fewer than 75% of items were completed or the response took less than 10 minutes. After applying these criteria to 439 records, 386 were analyzed: 212 responses in English and 174 in German.
Content
The 386 analyzed participants had a mean age of 38.08 years; 234 were women (60.62%) and 148 were men (38.34%). Europe was the place of residence for 279 participants (72.28%), and mean education was 15.69 years. Many practiced meditation, yoga, prayer, or other spiritual practices, with mean importance rated at 85.4/100. Lifetime ayahuasca experience was reported by 67.88%, showing that the sample was not representative of the general population.
Mean age at the first kambô experience was 36.09 years. 80 participants had used it once and 161 had used it 2–4 times; 316 (81.86%) had experienced it within the previous 12 months. Settings included participants’ homes, friends’ homes, healers, healing facilities, and natural environments. 70 participants (18.13%) described a ritual setting involving ayahuasca or another ritual plant.
Motivations allowed multiple responses. The most common included general “healing” at 65.03%, physical detoxification at 62.18%, improved overall well-being at 61.14%, spiritual experience or growth at 58.55%, and psychological or emotional cleansing at 52.59%. Specific health problems such as depression, fatigue, addiction, anxiety, infection, and autoimmune disease were also named as motivations, but these were participants’ intended purposes, not confirmed diagnoses or treatment outcomes.
Results
For a representative session, participants recalled physical reactions including intense vomiting and comparatively mild psychoactive effects. 41.97% reported feeling “connected to the spirit of the frog.” The authors treated this item as a subjective and cultural experience reported by participants, not as contact with an externally verified entity.
In the overall long-term assessment, 87.31% self-reported increased current well-being or life satisfaction, and 64.26% rated the experience as having at least “very great” spiritual significance. At the same time, 2.85% attributed a long-term physical problem and 1.81% a long-term mental-health problem to kambô. Many reported changes such as more health-oriented behavior, but these changes were not verified through prior measurement or medical records.
Retrospective confidence before the first experience that it would have a “positive effect” was 70.55/100, rising to 85.05/100 after the first experience. The degree to which expectations were fulfilled was 81.35/100. All of these values were reported later at the same survey time, not measured prospectively before treatment. A high attribution of meaning and positive responses may have influenced each other.
Limitations
The largest limitation is self-selection. Recruitment occurred through people and media connected with kambô, natural therapies, and psychoactive plants. The sample centered on European residents with long educational histories and frequent spiritual practice or ayahuasca experience. People who left the community after a negative experience, or who were too impaired to respond, may have been less likely to be captured.
Because this was a cross-sectional retrospective survey, changes in memory, expectations, relationships with practitioners, group ritual, co-used substances, natural history, and simultaneous treatment cannot be separated. Disease names were self-reported, and the investigators did not independently verify diagnosis, laboratory values, source or concentration of the secretion, or point size. Positive long-term ratings cannot be used as a cure rate or clinical response rate.
The survey primarily depicts use reinterpreted in Western settings and does not represent the diversity of practice among Indigenous societies in the Amazon. Care is required not to collapse culturally different contexts into one image of a “kambô user.”
Safety
A small number of respondents attributed longer-term physical or mental-health problems to kambô, and intense physical reactions were common acutely. Because the sample consisted of people able to complete an online survey, it cannot estimate the frequency of serious emergencies or deaths. The fact that many responses were positive is not a guarantee of safety.
Whole secretion contains multiple bioactive constituents, while ritual practice combines burns, water intake, vomiting, syncope, and sometimes other substances. The study did not establish a safe amount, contraindications, screening, or emergency response and cannot be used as a self-administration guide.
Source and rights
Original source: Majić T, Sauter M, Bermpohl F, Schmidt TT. Connected to the spirit of the frog: An Internet-based survey on Kambô, the secretion of the Amazonian Giant Maki Frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor): Motivations for use, settings and subjective experiences. Journal of Psychopharmacology. 2021;35(4):421–436. DOI: 10.1177/0269881121991554. PMID 33663248; PMCID PMC8058834.
The original article is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). This page follows the study design, principal numbers, and interpretive boundaries without reproducing the complete questionnaire, every table cell, figures, or free-text responses verbatim.