Pasithea

I do eat some milk thistle extract before eating new mushrooms. It's been shown to reduce the effects of amatoxins.

But I'm also very very cautious. I spend a lot of time identifying them. I consult 3 different books and typically between 2 and 4 websites. I look at dozens of pictures of the mushroom I plan to eat and all possible dangerous look-alikes. I run tests like checking the reaction to KOH and such (if applicable) and I won't eat anything I'm not completely sure of.

Before I eat them, I nibble a tiny bit and spit it out, then I rub a bit on my wrist (soft skin) and keep an eye on it for a day to make sure there's no skin reaction. The next day I eat a little bit and wait another day before I eat a full mushroom's worth.

The more potentially dangerous similar-looking mushrooms one might have, the less likely I am to consume it. If it's not super easy to identify and 'rather tasty', I'm generally not very interested in it. For instance, I found lots of sullius that are 'edible' but most of them aren't very tasty, so I don't bother collecting them.

I also found a batch of agaricus which were _probably_ agaricus silvicola but the morphology of agaricus is such that it can be a bit difficult to tell which variety is which. Some of them will upset your stomach, others will not. There are also several poisonous look-alikes. (Agaricus are the family that button mushrooms belong to) Finally... I don't particularly _like_ the agaricus I have eaten so I tend to pass them up because they're in the 'more trouble and risk than they're worth' category.

Anyhow... As for protections from poisoning... Not really. Milk thistle extract is a 'just in case' but if I've failed to identify something which has amatoxins in it, odds are I'm going to need some new organs in a couple of weeks. Most of the time, amatoxins don't make you feel sick until it's much too late. Orelline poisoning is the same way.

Muscarine is another common mushroom toxin but you have to eat a fair bit of it for it to kill you. It will make you convulse to death. You die of fatigue. How cool is that? :) Death from it is pretty rare though. You'd have to eat a LOT.

I studied one mushroom while on holiday that causes massive hemotosis (makes all your red blood cells explode so you die of internal hemmoraging) It's a very easy type of mushroom to identify though and there don't seem to be any others which do that to you. Supposedly it's edible if thoroughly cooked but I wasn't inclined to find out.

There's also coprine poisoning. I found some of coprinus mushrooms growing right by the mailbox for my apartment... ... Actually, technically, coprine isn't poisonous... It just makes ethanol toxic. You can eat the mushrooms and as long as you don't have any booze for a week, you're fine.

Most other mushroom poisons are themselves purgatives and will just make you puke your guts out.

Or they're hotter than the hottest hotsauce or really bitter so you just don't want to eat them.

Oh! There's also the mushrooms that make you talk to trees and see little men everywhere but whether that can be considered 'poisoning' or 'desired effect' is purely up to the person eating them.

I'm very very cautious about what I consume. Long slow agonizing death is really not on my todo list right now. I've only eaten two mushrooms that were in the category of 'easily confused with things that cause agonizing death' and that's been plenty. It's just too nerve-racking. I now stick to things that are 'supposed to be pretty tasty and if you mis-identify, the worst that's going to happen is an evening with your head in the toilet'.

Besides. What fun is life without a little risk? And for that matter, I probably put myself at far greater risk on a daily basis by being a bicycle commuter.