Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, IFMCPPresident at Five Journeys, Functional Medicine & Wellness Provider, Best Selling Author, Passionate Champion for Health

How Functional Medicine Enhances Ketamine's Benefit

13 Nov 2025 · 1 min

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0:39

A brief YouTube interview excerpt (speaker: Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, IFMCP) arguing that typical ketamine clinic approaches achieve only ~30–40% effectiveness, but integrating functional-medicine assessments (hormone panels, magnesium, carnitine, lifestyle/integration work) can raise response rates to roughly 70–80%. The speaker criticizes ‘drive-by’ ketamine clinics that lack integration and emphasizes addressing fundamentals alongside ketamine treatment.

Chapters

In general, ketamine practices are only about 30 or 40% effective. However, if you do things like look at people's hormones, look at people's magnesium levels, look at carnitine levels, what I would call a functional medicine. Light. He came to it himself, which was really cool. You can get it up to 70 to 80%. So there's a lot of ketamine clinics that are what I call drive by academy clinics. All they do is they want you to come in, get your academy and leave. And that has no integration. That's not looking at the lifestyle. That's not really fundamental. Doing the fundamentals. So I'm really happy here that you bring all those components in, because without all of it, it doesn't make sense.