One in five adults has chronic pain. Of those, 7% have severe pain, forcing them to significantly limit their daily activities. No matter what causes your chronic pain or where it falls on the pain scale, conventional medical care may not provide the relief you need.
Thanks to ketamine, there is still hope for relief. Ketamine is a safe, effective medicine used for decades as an anesthetic and to treat acute pain. Now, it’s been shown to be effective for reducing chronic pain.
At Palo Alto Mind Body, we specialize in ketamine therapy, giving us the expertise to determine if you’re a good candidate and recommend the best treatment protocol for your unique needs.
Ready to get your life back on track? Here’s what you need to know about ketamine infusions for relieving chronic pain.
Ketamine has been used as a surgical anesthetic for well over 50 years, giving a decades-long history on how the medication can be safely utilized. Because of its favorable safety profile, it’s often preferred for many children’s procedures.
In lower doses than used for surgery, ketamine is a potent pain reliever. Healthcare providers use it for many reasons such as relieving postoperative pain and the excruciating pain caused by severe burns and wounds.
Ketamine also reduces chronic pain. When chronic pain doesn’t respond well to other conventional medications and therapies, many patients can finally experience relief with ketamine.
It is hypothesized that Ketamine uses several different pathways to ease chronic pain and reduce central sensitization. Central sensitization is a condition that occurs when chronic pain changes the nerves.
As a result, the nerves become hypersensitive and overly reactive, triggering pain in response to the slightest stimulation.
These are three primary ways ketamine is thought to relieve your pain:
Nerves carry pain signals, using neurotransmitters to communicate and cause the sensation of pain. Neurotransmitters must attach to receptors (specialized locations on nerves) to trigger the nerve signals.
Glutamate, one of the primary neurotransmitters involved in pain, binds with specialized N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors.
Ketamine attaches to the same NMDA receptors, blocking glutamate and preventing it from activating the nerve. As a result, pain signals stop, and your pain improves.
Ketamine can also bind with opioid receptors to decrease pain, similar to your body’s natural painkillers, known as endorphins.
Ketamine can reduce inflammation throughout your body. It does the job by regulating the inflammatory response and inhibiting the immune system’s production of pro-inflammatory proteins.
There’s no doubt that ketamine can reduce inflammation. However, the extent to which its anti-inflammatory effect relieves pain is still being studied.
Ketamine can ease chronic pain caused by numerous conditions, including:
In 2018, guidelines on using ketamine for chronic pain were published by the American Academy of Pain Medicine, the American Society of Anesthesiologists, and the American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine.
After evaluating existing studies, the group concluded that the evidence supports ketamine’s effectiveness in treating chronic pain.
Though ketamine often results in significant pain relief, they noted that the results depend on the dose, and the evidence is stronger for some conditions. However, the evidence likely supports certain health conditions because they’ve been studied more than others.
For example, many researchers have explored ketamine’s effectiveness for neuropathic conditions and fibromyalgia. By comparison, medical professionals have only recently started to explore its use for conditions like rheumatoid arthritis.
IV ketamine infusions are the gold-standard treatment for Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), a severe pain condition that can overwhelm your body’s senses and can cause severe disability when undertreated. CRPS was previously more commonly referred to as Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD). For those who have long struggled with CRPS/RSD, IV ketamine infusions offer a new level of long-term pain control, allowing them to get back to their full lives.
The ketamine experts at Palo Alto Mind Body have modeled our CRPS treatment regimen around the extensive research done by Jijun Xu, MD, PhD and colleagues at the Cleveland Clinic, who have published a Q&A for those with CRPS: When Nothing Seems to Help Your CRPS, Ketamine Pain Treatments May Bring Relief.
When treating chronic pain, we administer ketamine through an intravenous (IV) infusion. An IV infusion allows us to precisely control the dose and the speed at which we deliver ketamine into the bloodstream.
Both variables affect the results, highlighting why it’s essential to seek treatment from a ketamine expert.
Your dosing schedule and the number of infusions we recommend depend on issues such as the pain type and severity, how long you’ve had chronic pain, and how you respond to the infusions.
If you struggle with chronic pain that hasn’t responded to conventional medical care, it’s time to learn if ketamine can improve your life.
Call, text, or email Palo Alto Mind Body or complete the online form to request an appointment and learn if you’re a candidate for ketamine.
