Should You Try Ketamine Therapy?

Ketamine’s popularity comes with its ability to put users into a trance-like state, changing the way their environment looks and altering their mood. While hallucinogenic drugs like LSD can induce highs that last for several hours, a ketamine high is relatively short, with its effects only persisting for around thirty minutes to an hour. While it might at first seem that ketamine is a safer alternative to other substances, those who frequently abuse the drug can begin to develop a tolerance, needing more of it to achieve that same initial feeling. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic most commonly used for medical purposes, such as treating severe pain or sedating patients before surgery.

Demand for ketamine has sent prescriptions soaring more than 500% since 2017, according to Epic Research, which analyzed the trend using a database of more than 125 million patients. In each year, pain was the No. 1 condition for which ketamine was prescribed, though depression has been rising quickly. We do not receive any commission or fee that is dependent upon which treatment provider a caller chooses. Using ketamine can be highly unsafe, and it is important that you make yourself aware of some of the risks that come with continued use. “Prescribing it for at-home use is irresponsible, because it needs to be taken under supervision by trained professionals,” Holmes insists.

Ketamine can do more than a typical antidepressant.

In fact, some users experience ongoing behavioural abnormalities as a result of their addiction, with others losing contact with reality even when they are not using the drug, which can lead to psychosis-like symptoms emerging. While you might not think that your drug use is a cause for concern, there is no ‘correct’ dosage for ketamine and any recreational use of the substance should be a cause for concern. This is because ketamine is illegal and has the potential to be highly dangerous if not administered by a medical professional.

It’s certainly part of the harm reduction approach, which I am an advocate of. We’ve covered the major neurobiological aspects of how ketamine works, so we can now introduce some hypothetical psychological ways ketamine addiction ketamine may also help with suffering. At certain doses, ketamine can result in a mystical or spiritual experience. One may experience oneness with the universe, or feel they are a part of something greater.

Drug Addiction Rehab

Since its establishment in 2008, iX Biopharma has used its patented wafer-based delivery platform technology, WaferiX, to develop novel sublingual drugs for pain and other conditions. The company’s lead drug candidate utilizing WaferiX is Wafermine, the world’s first patented sublingual racemic ketamine wafer for the treatment of acute moderate to severe pain and major depressive https://ecosoberhouse.com/article/what-is-alcohol-abuse-how-to-treat-alcoholism/ disorder (MDD). According to the toxicology data network, there are no medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat a ketamine overdose, but medications can provide management of agitation and psychosis. Benzodiazepines such as lorazepam and diazepam can alleviate agitation, psychomimetic effects, hypertension, hyperthermia, and seizures.