ketamine

Listen to article(2 minutes)Elon Musk takes ketamine. Sergey Brin sometimes enjoys magic mushrooms. Executives at venture-capital firm Founders Fund, known for its investments in SpaceX and Facebook, have thrown parties that include psychedelics.Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8 Listen to article(2 minutes)Elon Musk takes ketamine. Sergey Brinsometimes enjoys magic mushrooms. Executives at venture-capital firm Founders Fund, known for its investments in…

The "dissociative anesthetic" ketamine looks ever more promising as a safe and effective treatment for intractable depression.A new randomized trial from researchers in the United States has shown that injections of ketamine are at least as effective as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) when treating non-psychotic forms of major depression.After starting ECT or ketamine therapy, patients in the trial reported an almost immediate improvement in the quality of their lives. Side effects like nausea and poor memory were common…

New research this week is the latest to find that ketamine can help people with difficult-to-treat depression. The study has found that people with treatment-resistant depression responded as well to ketamine therapy as those who were given electroconvulsive therapy, a commonly used intervention for these cases.Twitter Is Shifting Right | Future TechKetamine has been employed as an anesthetic in medicine for decades. It can also be used as a recreational drug with euphoric and dissociative effects. But more recently, it’s…

Ketamine is a powerful anesthetic and sometimes recreational drug that causes people to feel dissociated from their own bodies. Recent studies suggest the drug may help treat people with depression who have tried more conventional treatments without success. But there are major questions about what makes it work. Is it the weird dissociative experience? Some molecular effect on the brain? Or just the experience of being in a clinical trial? In a new study that is…

This story was originally published in Group Therapy, a weekly newsletter answering questions sent by readers about what’s been weighing on their hearts and minds. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.For the past two weeks, we’ve traversed the burgeoning frontier of psychedelic-assisted therapies, from the thought-pattern shifting potential of psilocybin to the self-compassion-provoking effects of MDMA.Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration hasn’t approved those drugs for medical use, they are well on their way.…

Ketamine is a medication that is primarily used as an anesthetic in surgical procedures and veterinary medicine. However, it also has potential therapeutic uses as an antidepressant and in treating chronic pain.According to a new study by researchers at Penn Medicine, ketamine, which is well-known as an anesthetic and is becoming increasingly popular as an antidepressant, dramatically reorganizes activity in the brain, almost as if a switch were turned on. The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, found that after…

A patient sits in their home with ketamine tablets, provided through the company Mindbloom.Photo: ED JONES/AFP (Getty Images)Around 2.8 million Americans suffer from treatment-resistant depression, and though research has shown that IV ketamine can significantly improve their quality of life, these ketamine treatments are expensive, and access to them is limited. Early in the covid-19 pandemic, the Drug Enforcement Agency loosened restrictions on remote prescribing for Schedule III medications like ketamine. In response,…

Electroconvulsive therapy is a psychiatric treatment that involves electrically inducing a generalized seizure to treat mental disorders.Electroshock therapy, which is unfavorably depicted in movies and TV shows, consistently produces better outcomes for depression that is resistant to treatment.According to an analysis of six studies that recently published their findings in JAMA Psychiatry, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is better than ketamine in quickly relieving major depression.According to the World Health…

Startups are prescribing ketamine online to treat serious mental-health conditions, raising concern among psychiatrists about the safety of taking the mind-altering anesthetic without medical supervision, sometimes at high doses that raise risks of side effects.Ketamine is approved by the Food and Drug Administration to anesthetize people and animals and has been used safely in hospitals for decades. The out-of-body, hallucinogenic sensations it produces made it popular as a party drug known as Special K. Some doctors…

According to the research, the medicinal usage of ketamine has a low risk of addiction.Scientists have demonstrated that ketamine causes just a brief increase in dopamine and has no effect on neuronal communication.Ketamine is a common anesthetic in medicine which is also increasingly prescribed to treat depressive symptoms. This very fast-acting psychotropic drug is particularly suitable for the treatment of individuals who have become resistant to standard antidepressants.However, there has been disagreement about its…