Treating chronic pain with ketamine

CLEVELAND, OH (Ivanhoe Newswire) – Almost 52 million Americans have dealt with chronic pain, a debilitating pain that persists for months or years. Chronic pain can be caused by anything from an illness to an injury, but many people suffer in the absence of any past injury or illness. Cleveland Clinic is taking a different approach to treating chronic pain with a well-known drug that’s typically used as an anesthetic agent.

At 19, Emily Ryan was your typical college freshman, playing tennis, taking classes, and enjoying her friends, until one night.

“I went to bed completely healthy, no issues, and I woke up completely paralyzed from the waist below and had peed the bed,” she says.

That was the start of her 10-year journey with chronic pain.

Cleveland Clinic’s Pavan Tankha, MD explains, “The conventional treatment of chronic pain is through the biomedical approach. So, here’s a medication, here’s an injection, here’s a surgery, oftentimes, not addressing the other components that are associated with it.”

That’s why Dr. Tankha took a different approach to treating Emily, he used ketamine.

“You would come into the infusion suite, we would start an IV, and then based on your weight, we would infuse an amount of ketamine over 40 minutes. We repeat that process five days in a row. The pain relief effects of ketamine may be immediate, or it can take up to three to four weeks to show up,” he says.

Since starting her ketamine treatments, Emily is back doing things she loves and even started a flower business.

Emily explains, “What’s really special about us, at the end of all our events, all our flowers go back to health care workers and patients. Ketamine has truly given me my life back.”

Doctor Tankha says patients with unstable angina, uncontrollable high blood pressure, very significant coronary artery disease, extensive liver failure, psychosis, or delirium are not good candidates for ketamine infusions.

Contributors to this news report include: Adahlia Thomas, Producer; Videographer; Roque Correa, Editor.

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