When used for chronic pain, ketamine has also been reported to cause dizziness, lightheadedness and nausea.
But ketamine is not widely used and has not always found to be helpful for all types of pain.
Some psychiatrists believe ketamine or drugs like it will be helpful in emergency rooms with patients who are actively suicidal.
Certainly there are many reports of people with various types of chronic pain getting relief from one or more infusions of ketamine.
On March 6th Britain's Home Office announced a possible ban on methoxetamine, a new drug based on ketamine, which is not yet classified.
Pierre Blier, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Ottawa in Canada has given ketamine to about 25 patients in the last 18 months.
So my best answer for your first question is that yes, ketamine might help your pain, depending on what type of pain problem you've got.
AstraZeneca and Naurex say their new compounds deliver the rapid benefits of ketamine without the disturbing side effects because they act differently on the NMDA receptor.
Richard Shelton, a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral neurobiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has been conducting a small study and has used ketamine this way in 16 people.
In a small but groundbreaking study published in 2006 in the Archives of General Psychiatry, 17 people with major depression who had failed to get adequate relief from at least two other antidepressants were given a single injection of ketamine.
To get to your question, the antidepressant potential of ketamine was discovered serendipitously in patients receiving the drug for the treatment of complex regional pain syndrome, or CRPS, a miserable condition characterized by severe pain, swelling and changes in the skin.
Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in ketamine because of studies showing that at much lower doses than required for anesthesia, it appears to be a rapid and powerful antidepressant agent, presumably because it blocks an important type of receptor in the brain, known as the NMDA receptor.
应用推荐