Why I am so excited about Ketamine Therapy

Hi, this is Dr. Joy Kahn. So I've been talking a lot about stem cells, but I don't know how many of you know that. I actually started my medical career as a psychiatrist. So after finishing medical school at ucla, I became a board certified psychiatrist and then I went into addiction medicine, became, became board certified in that, and then went into anti aging and regenerative medicine and got another board certification. I think I'll stop right there. So. But you know, suffice to say, I am extremely interested in mental health and in the brain. So what I want to share with you today is that I'm very excited about this new therapeutic modality that's used in enhancing brain health and helping with mental health problems, and that is ketamine therapy. So ketamine was approved as a treatment for treatment resistant depression in 2019. So very recently, and it's the first medication with psychedelic potentials that actually became FDA approved. And just a little bit of background about ketamine, it actually was discovered in 1962 and it was a used as an anesthetic and is actually regarded as one of the most, the safest anesthetic there is. Has an incredible safety profile actually for a lot of patients that undergo cardiac surgery. You know, things that the kind of patients that surgeons are most concerned about crashing. Ketamine is actually, you know, a preferred anesthetic to be used in those circumstances because it maintains the safety level for the lungs and the heart. So anyhow, it's actually categorized as a essential medication by who. So that's how incredible this medication is and how helpful it is. So the patent had run out, so there's no, you know, not a whole lot of incentive. It ran out in 2002, so not a whole lot of incentive, you know, as far as commercial incentive. And they came out with a nasal form. There's mirror image of ketamine and the, the one that's, you know, you know, one side of the mirror image has been patented and that's the nasal formula for ketamine. But the, you know, there's, you know, from what I've heard from physicians who have used a nasal form and also use just the traditional ketamine, that the ketamine itself through IV injection is more effective than the nasal formula. So that's what I've heard from doctors and from patients alike. So what's really interesting about ketamine is that it opens up the, this whole new way of treating mental conditions. So, you know, as a psychiatrist, I've prescribed a lot of medications, you know, antidepressants, anti antiblytics and antipsychotics, mood stabilizers and all that. A lot of these medications take a while to work and let's just say for the case of depression it takes two to three weeks to see a result because they rely on, you know, increasing more serotonin or norepinephrine type of activity or dopamine or decreased dopamine. So rely on those receptor activities. And the problem is that if you bombard a synapse with certain kind of neurotransmitters, the receptor is going to downgrade, so it's going to downregulate. That means there are going to be less and less receptors to receive those signals. So that's one reason that a person can start needing more and more medications or for a lot of people simply don't work about 30%. So usually the effective rate is about 30%. If I prescribe a medication to a patient, about 30% of them will receive benefits. So that's not very impressive. And then what happens when patients come back? Then you know, if it doesn't work, I give them another medication. So that's another 30% of chance it works. And then if it still doesn't work, maybe you add the medication. So you're enhancing the possibility that may work. So it could be a long arduous process. But ketamine works in a whole different way. So ketamine actually works on a whole different type of receptors and MDA receptors and enhance brain derived neurotropic factor secretion. So that actually help enhance the neurons growth growing of synapses. And actually there's a way of reorganizing the neuronal network. And also it does not downgrade or down regulate the receptors. So there's no such concerns. And it works very fast, so it works, can work within hours. So suicidal thoughts, it can take people's suicidal thoughts away within hours or days. And we don't have anything like that before ketamine. So so potentially it can be, you know, life saving literally. So it has been shown not only very helpful in depression, right, very treatment resistant depression, people were feeling hopeless. I can't think of anything worse than depression. People can suffer all kinds of physical illnesses, but to suffer mentally, that takes the joy out of life. I can't think of anything worse. And ketamine has also been found to be very helpful for anxiety, also for ptsd. So I worked at the veterans hospital for four years. During my training days I've treated veterans, you know, From World War II veterans to Korean War to Vietnam War to the Gulf War, ptsd, Post traumatic stress disorder is one of the hardest conditions to treat. I've had numerous therapy sessions with veterans. I've given them medications. It's one of the most stubborn and just difficult conditions and very, very disruptive for people's lives. Yet under ketamine the response can be drastic, can be rapid. Within one to two sessions I've seen people receiving incredible benefits, getting over some of the long term traumas. So that is just beautiful, right? If we can do that for people, for our veterans and for anybody that suffers from trauma. And then it's also helpful for addiction. I've seen people getting, getting better from alcohol addiction, from smoking. It can be really incredible because, or sugar addiction, carbs help me with that because it actually help. You know, we still don't know enough about how it works. We have all kinds of guesses and their conferences and theories about all these receptors. But I think it's more than just receptors because I want to tell you about what happens when a person is on ketamine. So it's, it's classified as a dissociative. So when you're taking ketamine at a sup anesthetic dose, so it's not giving you anesthesia, so you're fully conscious. This is conscious sedation, you're sedated. And what is happening to you is this somewhat out of body experience that you're tapping into kind of a different, different level of existence. And what they found is that there's change in brain waves and there's a high level of gamma wave activity. And what happens when do you get high gamma activity? So we are in a sustained, you know, very, very strong focus. There's gamma activity when you're in a zone or in the flow. You have high gamma activity when you're meditating, especially when you're a true meditator that has done it for a very, very long time, you're able to achieve that level. Or they found out that when people are solving a problem, let's say a math problem, and about a millisecond before you solve the problem, there's a burst of gamma activity. So it's really interesting. And you know, one study they've done is on Buddhist monks. And these are the monks who have had over 10,000 hours of meditation. And they connected their brain with apparatus that can detect their brain waves. Then they also invited these college students and trained them on how to meditate for a week. What they did was they asked either the monks or the college students to meditate on compassion, then they were looking at their brainwaves when both groups were meditating. And what's interesting is that for these Buddhist monks and that meditative state, they have this high gamma activity. And what happened to the college students who were just taught how to meditate when they meditated, what you saw were these lot of alpha wave activity, which just means they're really relaxed. So there's something very special about these gamma waves. So that is the physics level that I've been talking about that as doctors, we need to start to think as physicists and not just chemists. So healing may not just exist on these receptor, on these molecule, you know, billiard ball things, you know, lock and key level. There may be a lot more than that. So what's gamma wave? What's going on there? I want to find out more. But the key is that what happens with ketamine we have not encountered before with all these drugs used in psychiatry, in mental health. So that's revolutionary, right? I, I'm all about breakthroughs because it can get better. Healing is an art. It can get better. Current medical system has not been very successful at treating chronic conditions and depression, anxiety and ptsd. These are chronic conditions. And we have not been very good at treating it. But now, you know, I love stem cells. Stem cells is one way to help with chronic conditions. And then ketamine tremendous in helping with brain conditions. So I don't know how many of you know that I was found out to have traumatic brain injury on this functional brain scan, spect scan. So I actually started using ketamine to help myself with my brain condition. Knowing the science, right? It's all about knowing the science and knowing the research. So. So if ketamine can help with the wiring of the brain and with establishing new neural connections and with neurogenesis, right. Promoting neuron formation and growth, then if I have traumatic brain injury, I can utilize that property of ketamine to help my brain to heal. And what happened is that it worked. So I've done stem cell therapy, I'm sure had helped my brain, you know, quite a bit. But ketamine very targeted toward the brain. And that has done something that's really remarkable because what I did was two months after I started using ketamine to help with my brain, I did a repeat brain scan and the result was pretty, pretty encouraging because most of the areas where I had, you know, lesions that that's been shown to have low blood perfusion. So I had you know, abnormal blood flow, very low blood flow. Those were gone. Those were normalized. And there are a couple areas that were, you know, also had low blood flow, had significant improvement, and there's some normalization going on. And the results were. Were pretty impressive, especially considering I had only been trying to heal my brain for two months. Because I asked, actually I asked the imaging company, I said, have you seen results like this? And what I was told was, nobody gets a repeat scan in two months. People usually get a repeat scan in six months or 12 months. So because I was in a hurry like usual, in two months, I saw these drastic improvements. So I think we can bring about some tremendous healing to people. And I just want to get information out there. So I hope you enjoyed the little tidbits of information about ketamine. And we're offering it at our clinic with some really innovative ways of administering ketamine and combining with other modalities to really, really accelerate. Accelerate the healing of the brain. So that's it for today, and thank you so much for watching, and I will continue to share information that's, you know, that's going to make a big difference in people's health. Okay, thank you very much.