Ketamine Therapy for Chronic Pain: What to Expect From This Innovative Treatment

Each morning you wake and, before you even get out of bed, you make a few tentative movements to see how much pain you’ll be dealing with throughout the day.

If this scenario sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Nearly one-quarter of adults in the United States are dealing with chronic pain.

Instead of shrinking your life to accommodate the pain, the team at Apex Pain Specialists has a better idea: pain relief through ketamine infusion therapy. Thanks to the forward thinking of Dr. Naveen Reddy and Dr. Maziar Massrour, we’ve helped many patients to find meaningful and safer paths toward a life without pain through ketamine and we may be able to help you, too.

The roads to chronic pain

Before we dive into how ketamine works and some of the advantages of this approach to pain management, let’s quickly review some common conditions that lead to chronic pain, such as:

• Back pain
• Sciatica
• Arthritis, which affects 1 in 4 adults in the US
• Neuropathy
• Fibromyalgia
• Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS)

Unfortunately, what many of these conditions have in common is that they’re progressive, so the pain often gets worse over time.

What they also have in common is the fact that many of the options for pain management are risky, such as opioid-based painkillers or surgery.

So, as pain management experts, we’re thrilled to have better options, such as ketamine infusion therapy.

The power of ketamine in stopping pain

Ketamine isn’t a new drug and has been around for decades as an analgesic. What is new are the recent discoveries in how ketamine is helping people to break free from some tough conditions, such as chronic pain and mental health issues like depression (and there’s plenty of crossover between the two).

In brief, ketamine blocks N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors in your brain, which are often overactive and overstimulated thanks to chronic pain. In fact, that’s been one of the biggest challenges with chronic pain: it can take on a life of its own and spiral out of control along certain pathways in your brain. As a result, you become oversensitized to pain and stuck in a never-ending cycle of discomfort.

With ketamine, we can not only block these pathways, the drug stimulates the release of glutamate in your brain, which can create healthier neural pathways that don’t circle around pain.

Not to mention, as an analgesic, ketamine can provide you with near-immediate pain relief at the same time as it's also working to rewire your brain away from pain.

Undergoing ketamine infusions

At our practice, we offer ketamine infusions, which we deliver intravenously for better effect. These treatments last for about an hour, at which point we evaluate your response. (Please note that you need someone to drive you to and from your ketamine infusion appointments.)

Our patients undergo a series of ketamine infusions to stop the cycle of pain and return periodically for maintenance treatments to maintain pain relief.

To give you an idea about its success, studies show that ketamine is relatively safe and highly effective in treating chronic pain syndromes.

To see for yourself how ketamine can help you plug back into a world that isn’t centered around pain, please call our office in Chandler, Arizona, at 480-820-7246 today to schedule a consultation. You can also book an appointment online.