The benefits of ketamine for selected psychiatric patients

Dr Maria Dobreva, a private specialist psychiatrist in KwaZulu-Natal, calls on medical schemes to support comprehensively the “Holy Grail of antidepressant treatments”, which is much cheaper than hospitalisation.

Dobreva writes:

My relationship with ketamine started in 2014 at a conference sponsored by Cipla. A young Cape Town psychiatrist presented a few case studies and I was intrigued.

I did some research on ketamine infusions and started treating selected patients at my rooms. I would book an anaesthetist to administer the infusion and monitor vital signs. The process worked reasonably well, although we were unaware of certain critical “do’s and don’ts”.

We weren’t aware that the therapy should be administered in silence and with minimal external stimuli; preferably with noise-cancelling headphones and eye-shields. The importance of background music, not disturbing the patient and keeping totally quiet, was not on our priority list. Avoiding concomitant benzodiazepines (and probably lamotrigine and topiramate) because of potential GABA/glutamate conflict, was one of the nuances of which I was not aware.....more