I have had 4 ketamine infusions done for trauma related physical injury. I have done a fair amount of research on this drug. It seems to be pretty safe as a one time measure. It also doesn't seem to last very long. Even this study only followed up with patients 24 hours and 2 weeks after the infusion.
The weird thing about Ketamine is that it acts as an anesthetic by inducing an extreme dissociative state. (
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18175098 and
Link Removed)
It can drastically increase dissociation symptoms in patients with dissociative disorders. It also tends to induce a very short term hallucinatory state in about 12% of patients.
However, studies such as this one,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18376165, show that vets who has ketamine as an anesthetic tend to have lower rates of PTSD than vets who had similar injuries and did not have ketamine as an anesthetic. "Contrary to expectations, patients receiving perioperative ketamine had a lower prevalence of PTSD than soldiers receiving no ketamine during their surgeries despite having larger burns, higher injury severity score, undergoing more operations, and spending more time in the ICU."
Ketamine is also abused as a street drug. Studies on those who have used ketamine over the long haul have shown it significantly damages the brain. (Liao Y, Tang J, Ma M, Wu Z, Yang M, Wang X, Liu T, Chen X, Fletcher PC, Hao W. (2010). Frontal white matter abnormalities following chronic ketamine use: a diffusion tensor imaging study.
Brain, 133, 2115-22.) An MRI before my ketamine infusions and an MRI after the infusions showed that it affected my brain after just 4 infusions. Other patients were getting many more infusions than that. Some were given the drug to take daily.
I didn't like the experience of the infusions, but it wasn't painful. For me, it did have the "side effect" of decreasing PTSD symptoms of anxiety and depression in the short term. However, it made me more much dissociative even after the drug wore off. In my case, it wasn't a long term solution for the physical injury, nor was it a solution to the PTSD. I am glad they are researching this drug more to see if it will help people as a one time intervention. However, I personally wish I had never done even just one single infusion.
