A Brief History Of Ketamine And How Can It Be Helpful?

Ketamine is used for anesthesia induction and maintenance, including dissociative anesthesia. It is a trance-like state that provides pain relief, amnesia, and sedation.

What is ketamine?

Ketamine is dissociative anesthesia, used by doctors to induce general anesthesia for medical procedures, which doesn’t require muscle relaxation. You will find ketamine origin had begun in the late 1950s in the USA. It was the time searching among cyclohexylamines for a perfect anesthetic agent with analgesic properties. General anesthesia denotes a state of being in a sleep-like condition, while dissociative refers to the feeling disconnected effect.

Ketamine produces hallucinations, similar to the other drugs, such as PCP and LSD or angel dust.

The effects of ketamine

There are most common side effects that you may feel when induced by ketamine according to the prescribed dosage, including:

  • Drowsiness
  • Double vision
  • Nausea
  • Confusion
  • Dizziness
  • Vomiting
  • Unease feeling

Ketamine produces an extensive range of other symptoms affecting many parts of the body, but they are not so common.

The therapeutic uses

The FDA has approved ketamine used for general anesthesia only. But, the drug has some off-label uses, which means only doctors know. Here are the helpful details that you must understand about ketamine:

  • Inducing general anesthesia. Doctors are using ketamine to induce general anesthesia alone or any other general anesthetics, like nitrous oxide. It is used in the emergency department to set to produce short-term sedation:
  • Treating joint dislocations
  • Reducing fractures
  • Fixing wounds in uncooperative persons, such as kids
  • Pain treatment. Practitioners are using low doses that don’t produce dissociation to relieve serious pain from the following conditions:
  • Trauma
  • Fractures
  • Arm or leg pain
  • Abdominal pain
  • Low back pain
  • Status epilepticus treatment. It is when a person has a seizure that lasts longer than five minutes or more than one seizure in five minutes. RSE or Refractory Status Epilepticus is a form of status epilepticus not responding to standard antiseizure drugs. It is a serious disease causing brain damage or death.

There was a study performed last 2015 regarding ketamine treating RSE. But, further research is a requirement to verify the study findings and prived the safety of ketamine when used for treating the condition.

There are more conditions found to get treated by ketamine, such as depression and anxiety. Research and clinical studies were conducted and they found the efficacy of ketamine in treating these conditions. You may explore more of the benefits of ketamine to learn more about it.