KETAMINE GUIDED FACILIATION

Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic that has been used since the 1970's in many different ways. Due to its excellent safety profile and the fact that it does not suppress breathing, ketamine has been used as an anesthetic to help with trauma and injury on the battlefield. It is used extensively in emergency rooms, and it also has a role in veterinary medicine.

 

Ketamine is most often used in hospital settings by anesthesiologists during major and minor surgical procedures as an anesthetic. Recently, lower dose (subanesthetic) ketamine has shown great promise in the treatment of mental health conditions, most notably depression, suicidality and PTSD.

 

Ketamine is one of the safest and most widely used anesthetic medicines in the world. Since 2000 ketamine has been studied in controlled clinical settings in patients with severe depression who are unresponsive to other antidepressants and it's impressively effective. In several studies, more than half of the patients show a significant decrease in depression symptoms in just one day, and approximately 4 out of 5 went on to feel significant improvement.

 

Ketamine is now used extensively for many chronic mental health conditions such as depression (not just treatment resistant), suicidality, anxiety, anxious bipolar depression (without mania), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive compulsive disorder, and chronic pain. Many clinicians, including us at Navigate Wellness, classify ketamine as a psychedelic, however it is not a classic hallucinogen like psilocybin, the compound found in psychedelic mushrooms, which also has many promising mental health benefits.