Safety and History of Medical Use Ketamine

Ketamine has gained popularity in the treatment of mental health conditions in the last three decades. However, the history of ketamine dates back to the 1960s.

How Safe is Ketamine Therapy?

When administered by a trained team of medical professionals ketamine is a very safe and effective treatment for numerous conditions that affect a patient's mental health. When used this way, ketamine produces minimal side effects in only a handful of patients. 

Ketamine is a controlled substance and should not be used recreationally.

How Ketamine Was Created

Ketamine was first introduced to clinical practice in the 1960s. Ketamine began with phencyclidine, which was first synthesized in 1956 by chemists at Parke Davis Company. Phencyclidine demonstrated safe and reliable anesthesia in humans however also caused prolonged emergence delirium. This delay in wakefulness made it undesirable for human use. Scientists directed efforts to synthesize shorter-acting analogs of phencyclidine that would have similar anesthetic potential with less emergence delirium. This led to the discovery of ketamine, a structural analog at one-tenth the potency of its parent drug phencyclidine.

Human trials using ketamine began in 1964. In the initial pharmacological study of ketamine in 20 humans, scientists found evidence that the drug could be safe and effective for clinical anesthetic use. A subsequent study reported anesthetic effects in 130 patients, aged 6 weeks to 86 years, undergoing a total of 133 surgical procedures. They found that ketamine could rapidly produce profound analgesia with a unique state of altered consciousness and a limited duration of effect that could be safely prolonged with repeated administration. They also reported minimal side effects and a lack of severe emergence delirium compared to phencyclidine. Ketalar (1970) became the first preparation of ketamine approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for human use.

Ketamine provides excellent analgesia with an impressive safety profile, making it a popular anesthetic medication in a variety of patient populations and settings. Although initially developed as an anesthetic, over the past several decades ketamine has been revealed to have greater potential in the field of medicine. A growing body of literature has demonstrated the clinical value of ketamine across diverse settings, with emerging roles in treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, PTSD and more.

Ketamine Therapy for Mental Health Treatment

In 1999, ketamine was labeled a Schedule III non-narcotic under the Controlled Substances Act. Shortly after, studies surrounding ketamine therapy for treating mental health issues started in the early 2000s and proved to be an effective alternative treatment for depression. 

In 2000 Intravenous ketamine was approved for clinical use to treat certain mental health and pain conditions. Since then, more research has been done on ketamine’s effectiveness and more clinics have opened. During this time ketamine has proven to be an effective treatment with multiple studies reporting 70% of patients seeing success from their treatment, compared to the 40% that see success from typical pills.