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I suppose this was inevitable, given the half century residue of the sixties drug scene and the increasing preoccupation of psychiatry with symptoms and symptomatic treatments. Even the accompanying slides of the little rat neurons growing pseudopods on Ketamine look a lot like the psychedelic art and tee-shirts from the age of bell-bottoms. <\/div>\n
The articles are full of testimonials, people depressed for years<\/em> finally achieving relief. Such stories are hard to argue with. They are diagnosed as having Major Depressive Disorder or Bipolar Disorder based on their reports of being depressed for years<\/em>. And those of us who work in Clinics can see in our minds a line of patients who have been depressed for years<\/em> asking "Is Ketamine right for me?" And psychiatrists will be asking the question, "are we treating disease?" or "are we treating dis-ease<\/em>?" "does it even matter which?" The articles make analogies to ECT – an empirically derived treatment that is both vilified and praised. "It damages the brain!" "It’s benign!" I suppose the difference is that there are no lines at ECT Clinics. It is usually used on recommendation of a physician rather than sought by clamoring patients, and for the most part is limited to use in refractory cases with fairly clear syndromatic diagnoses.<\/p>\nHaving lived through the sixties as a person and the age of pharmacology as a psychiatrist, the things that bother me are the frenzy and the entrepreneurialism. This is touted to be a time when the pharmaceutical industry is abandoning CNS drug development, and yet these articles make it clear that there’s no shrinking from Ketamine or its derivatives. The drums are beating and it’s already on the market<\/em> for the wealthy. One can even hear a fledgling ketaminergic hypothesis<\/em> of depression being formulated as the new chemical imbalance<\/em>.<\/p>\nSo whether you naturally fall into the skeptical
uh-oh<\/em> camp or the enthusiastic gung-ho<\/em> camp, I think probably the right place to aim for is the don’t-know<\/em> camp. We have no idea whether those little pseudopods on the nerve in that image are a reaching out<\/em> or a gasping cry for help<\/em>. And this is not the stuff a six-week clinical trial against placebo will resolve. <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small And the ones that mother gives you Don’t do anything at all… From Club to Clinic: Physicians Push Off-Label Ketamine as Rapid Depression Treatment Is Ketamine Right for You? Off-Label Prescriptions for Depression Pick Up in Small Clinics Ketamine, A Darling of the Club […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39989"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40014,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39989\/revisions\/40014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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