Evaluation
To make your ketamine procedure as effective as possible, Veritas MindHealth starts all treatment courses with an intake session. You’ll go over your psychiatric and medical history with our Medical Director and psychologist so we can build a customized treatment plan. Intake sessions generally take just over an hour, with 45 minutes devoted to psychiatric history and about 20 minutes to discuss medical history and answer any questions you may have about what to expect. Most patients are able to proceed with infusions the same day as the intake session.
Customized Treatment Plan
Each infusion can range from relaxing to stressful, so we recommend that patients try to minimize distractions (including cellphones), leave preconceived agendas at home, and start each treatment with an open mind. To facilitate this, each treatment in your ketamine procedure will take place in a quiet, peaceful individual room where your vitals will be monitored and our MD will personally check in on you.
Each ketamine infusion treatment lasts for 40 minutes. People do experience a phenomenon called dissociation during treatment, marked by feelings of detachment and distance; this is both normal, since ketamine is a dissociative drug, and a mark of success for the treatment. Veritas MindHealth benefits from our Medical Director’s extensive experience with ketamine in this regard – with over 30 year of experience administering ketamine in an anesthesiology setting to draw on, Dr. Miller is able to effectively assess a person’s responsiveness to ketamine and adjust treatments based on their specific needs.
Our ketamine procedure follows JAMA/Psychiatry protocol and uses the recommended 0.5MG/KG dosage. We ask that patients have nothing to eat for 6 hours prior to the infusion, and nothing to drink except for sips of water 2 hours prior to infusion.
Follow-Up
Once your ketamine procedure is complete, we’ll have you stay in the office for 30 minutes to get over any acute affects. Everyone reacts differently; some people just want to sleep while others get very chatty and gregarious, so we recommend that people make a point of taking good care of themselves after infusions.
Ketamine leaves the system within 2 hours of treatment. Many people start noticing beneficial effects 12 to 36 hours after treatment; we recommend 6 infusions over 2-3 weeks to ensure that patients see sustained improvement in their baseline mood.
Unlike SSRIs and other medications, which manipulate the levels of neuroreceptors in the brain, ketamine works by improving the brain’s neuroplasticity and helping to revive dormant neural connections, or connections that have been damaged by trauma or depression. As such, while there is no set timeline on which if or when the effects of ketamine infusion therapy may wear off, current data suggests that sustained ketamine infusions over time really do bring about sustained mood improvements.