How it works
After receiving ketamine, the mood improves—sometimes dramatically.
Ketamine doesn’t work how conventional antidepressants do. While antidepressants improve mood, they only have a 40% success rate of doing so. They use a combination of serotonin and dopamine, require daily ingestion, and can cause an array of side effects. Alternatively, ketamine has a 70–80% success rate while only administered occasionally to stimulate your glutamate neurotransmitter system—the most efficient way to improve the mood. It also has no severe or permanent side effects and is very safe, commonly used by first responders around the world.
We administer two routes of ketamine therapy: troches and intramuscular treatment. Troches, small dissolving tablets, are a low micro-dose, affordable alternative that works for some patients. We usually recommend intramuscular ketamine, a slightly higher dosage, for severely depressed patients.
The Process
1. Evaluation
Ketamine therapy is appropriate for some, but not all, patients. Each patient will meet with our board-certified psychiatrists for a thorough understanding of how the treatment will take place and results to expect. We will go over the value of ketamine therapy and the symptoms it will relieve, and provide a detailed description of the psychedelic effects that you may experience.
2. Medical Eligibility
Patients will then meet with our nurse practitioner to ensure that there are no medical contradictions to ketamine, and receive a walkthrough of their first treatment day. This will include how to prepare for treatment like substances to avoid, how to minimize motion sickness, and the importance of taking magnesium (a co-factor at the NMDA receptor) to enhance the results of your sessions.
3. Scheduling
We schedule the first treatment and provide detailed printed resources for the patient to use in communication with their talk therapist to make the most of their experience. These resources include preparation procedures as well as how to establish the right mindset for chemically-induced mindfulness and healing.