Take a quick 5 mins quiz to get a personalized plan on how to treat your condition with ketamine therapy at home.
P.S. quiz takers save 40%!
Ketamine’s uses in the ER go well beyond safe sedation. It can also provide significant benefits during traumatic events.
What You’ll Discover:
- Why ER physicians use ketamine in the emergency room.
- Ketamine’s impact on anxiety and why it’s beneficial in an ER setting.
- The benefits of ketamine’s sedative capabilities when someone is experiencing trauma.
- The amnestic properties of ketamine that can be useful in the ER and afterward.
For decades, ketamine has been used to sedate patients for surgeries. It’s considered a highly safe sedative due to the fact that it doesn’t suppress the respiratory system. In fact, it can help open airways.
But today, ketamine therapy is used for many other purposes, including in ER settings.
Dr. Jedidiah Ballard, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Augusta University in Georgia, noted in an article for the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) that, “ketamine is unique among pain and sedative meds in that it both separates one from the memory of the painful procedure and actually blocks the pain at the receptor level.”
Dr. Ballard is a full-time emergency physician at a level 1 trauma center with many years of experience seeing the effects of ketamine in different settings. His observations are similar to those of many ER physicians, which is why ketamine is now used for more than sedation. It’s used for physical and mental pain relief as well.
Reducing Anxiety During Emergency Situations
One of the many benefits of ketamine is it can quickly alleviate anxiety and help calm the mind. Emergency physicians find this to be extremely helpful for patients that are experiencing a traumatic event. In the ER setting, heightened anxiety needs to be controlled to keep an emergency situation from getting worse.
An example would be a patient that is having difficulty breathing. It’s a situation that can easily heighten anxiety and make matters much worse in terms of patient safety and getting a person’s breathing back to a normal state. In that instance, a low dose of ketamine can be administered to alleviate the anxiety, calm the patient down and help improve breathing.
It can even be argued that controlling anxiety in ER patients has a ripple effect. The last thing ER physicians and nurses want is for an anxious patient to negatively influence other patients, causing them to become more worried or concerned with their own situation.
What physicians have found in the ER holds true in other settings. Here at Choose Your Horizon we’ve helped many patients with anxiety disorders find relief through at-home ketamine-assisted therapy.
Subduing Combative and Delusional Patients That Pose Risks
A 2023 research study titled Ketamine in Trauma: A Literature Review and Administration Guidelines concluded that “Ketamine use in trauma management has a wide range of potential benefits, both physical and psychological. In a multifaceted approach to trauma care, ketamine plays a valuable role in amnesia, analgesia, and sedation.”
One of the benefits for trauma care that was specifically noted was rapid sedation to manage patients that are highly agitated, combative or delusional. For obvious reasons, a patient in this state can pose substantial risk in an ER to themselves and to others.
The primary goal of the emergency room is to reduce the risk of harm. When a patient comes in that is in a dangerous state of delusion or agitation, whether due to trauma or other means, ketamine is an effective tool.
Subduing the Memory of Pain and Trauma With Ketamine
One key factor for administering ketamine in an emergency situation that’s been noted above is its memory altering properties. In higher doses, ketamine can help the mind completely detach from physical reality. This is possible because ketamine is an NMDA antagonist that blocks the receptor.
Ketamine also has amnestic properties for the same reason. That means it can cause amnesia or the loss of memory. In many circumstances, amnesia isn’t considered desirable. However, when a person is suffering trauma, whether it be physical or psychological, dulling of the memory can be beneficial in the moment and in the future.
In the moment, the amnestic properties can help to calm a patient. But the after effect can be more beneficial. Because the person doesn’t remember the trauma they experienced, or at least remembers it more vaguely, there is less risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
If someone does experience PTSD after a traumatic experience in the ER ketamine can also be used to improve the symptoms and help the person recover. At Choose Your Horizon we’ve seen dramatic improvements in patients that suffer from PTSD after just one treatment. It truly is an effective treatment for overcoming the lingering impact of going through trauma for those who didn’t have the benefit of receiving ketamine in the ER to make use of its amnesic effects.
The use of ketamine in and out of emergency rooms is still being explored. The one certainty is that it has proven to be highly beneficial in the treatment of trauma. As more ER physicians open up to the idea of using ketamine for more than sedation we’ll know more about how it can be used to help patients during an emergency and long afterward.
