What is Ketamine?
Ketamine is the only legally available medicine to be administered for psychedelic assisted therapy currently in the USA. MDMA and Psilocybin currently undergoing trials for FDA approval.
Ketamine is a medication that is primarily used for anesthesia. Recently, ketamine has been found to be an alternative treatment for depression and other mental health conditions.
It is classified as a dissociative anesthetic, which means at high doses it produces sedation and detachment from normal reality (that’s the dissociative aspect). At Innerbloom Healing and other ketamine assisted therapy clinics we utilize much lower doses of ketamine to induce a non-ordinary state of consciousness that allows for exploration of one’s psyche.
Ketamine was first synthesized in the 1960s, and was initially developed as an alternative to phencyclidine (PCP). PCP is another anesthetic that was used regularly at that time but had many unwanted side-effects. Ketamine was found to be a much safer alternative with a tremendously lower side effect profile. Today ketamine is used thousands of times daily throughout hospitals and clinics to induce conscious sedation for both adult and pediatric patients.
In the last decades ketamine has been seen to have rapid and significant antidepressant effects, especially in individuals who have not responded to traditional antidepressant medications.
Recently scientists have discovered naturally occurring ketamine in nature, by way of a certain fungus. Can we now say that ketamine is plant medicine? This is still debatable :)
