• Voidance [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    6 months ago

    Maybe it helps through neuroplasticity - also I feel like thats just the new pharma speak go to for when they don’t really know if or why certain drugs work. But regardless of how they work, I think looking at this as brainwashing adjacent is not the right perspective. We have to live in the world as it exists and that means adapting to it, which doesn’t mean ‘reprogramming’ as such, humans are not robots. At least it’s no more reprogramming than if you started going for a run every day before work so you went in in a good mood. And ketamine is probably safer and more useful, and certainly more expansive and less numbing, than most of the traditional junk pharma meds (although pharma companies are already trying to fuck it up by modifying it for patents, eg esketamine)

    • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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      6 months ago

      I mean, have you researched it. Ketamine acts as a dissociative. The term “k-hole” exists for a reason. It’s so numbing it’s used as a general anesthesia or part of a general anesthesia regime.

      It’s therapeutic use for depression is incredibly tightly dosed, more so than any drug I know. A little too much and it has almost no therapeutic effect because it just drops the patient out. The reason it works for depression is because it literally creates neural conditions for creating new pathways, but that requires actual good behavior to occur daily after treatment and it requires multiple treatments with continued behavioral changes. Taking K and then going back to work means creating good coping mechanism at work while your brain is forming new neural connections.

      It is entirely, fundamentally different than running every day before work.

      • Voidance [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        6 months ago

        The therapeutic effect of Ketamine (according to the psychiatric consensus anyway) works independently of the experience of being on Ketamine (in the sense that, it shouldn’t matter if you have some kind of incredible trip or were just knocked out completely - not that that would happen under normal circumstances - but the effect will occur regardless). But by ‘numbing’ I meant to contrast the effects of Ketamine (both in terms of the inner journey while taking it, but also the antidepressant effect afterwards) with more constrictive psychiatric drugs (anti-psychotics for example) which seem to exert beneficial effects precisely because they do numb people psychologically to the point there preoccupations don’t worry them so much anymore.
        Neurogenisis happens all the time. If you run before work, start to feel happier at work, start doing your job better - that’s effectively ‘neurogenisis’ in the sense of creating new pathways. The reason I say it’s unclear how important this is to Ketamine is because pharma companies often claim their drugs work nowdays by neurogenesis, but it’s not necessarily accurate. My understanding is you could dose a patient with heroin and then do a brain scan showing neurogenesis, but that doesn’t necessarily give a good indication of its function or effects. It reminds me a bit of the old serotonin theory of depression/medication which they used to push and which is generally understood as a gross oversimplification nowdays