Seriously? I mean I guess its no surprise, as like one in a million doctors know, and actually care to use Ketamine for anything other then off the wall shit like immediate anesthesia as needed when nothing else is available or slipping it some cocktail of lotion. I know some Docs, such as yourself out there know the true gem that Ket truly is but.....WTF? I mean honestly, its like what listed as one of the most essential chemicals by the WHO standards and that.....
So many facets.....an anesthetic that doesn't affect heart rate or depresses breathing like the majority of others do, not to mention the million other applications ketamine has..... its like a universal key in comparison to most, can completely annihilate pain without fucking with the respiratory system to badly...... so sad that they have to use deference tactics just to get it out of the gate!
The whole "kids snorting large animal tranquilizer to cop a buzz" thing sure didn't help ketamine's image.
It's thought of as an anesthetic of last resort by emergency docs, surgeons, and anesthesiologists. It's in the first aid kit of any doc certified in wilderness medicine. But even in the ED, I've only seen it used when etomidate is contraindicated.
And when it comes down to it, it's ketamine's psychoactive effects at doses needed for twilight anesthesia (approximately drug-naive recreational doses) that make doctors say 'yuck' to this drug. Medical literature files the headspace created by ketamine under 'psychosis', and psychosis is an absolutely unacceptable side effect of any drug or medical intervention, period.
Apparently it's an acceptable side effect in pre-pubescent children, who, according to the best available evidence (or at least longstanding hearsay!) are able to better be unfazed by, integrate, and soon forget a ketamine experience than us world-weary and well socialized adults can. This of course carries the implicit assumption that a drug with the power to strip away every layer of our conditioned assumptions and leaving bare our luminous core of pure self-aware consciousness for a twenty-minute-long eternity is something to be avoided, from a psycho-social perspective. I, of course, am one of the few physicians who doesn't buy that party line.
That said, there are people who should not use ketamine because the psychological risks outweigh the benefits. But that's not saying much, because this is true for any drug with psychoactive effects.
