Episode 108. Ketamine Therapy with Ketamine Health and Wellness Clinics of Ohio
In this episode of the Naked Truth Therapy Podcast, we welcome back Dr. Bellanti to discuss the use and benefits of ketamine therapy for treatment-resistant mental health symptoms. The discussion covers how ketamine works, patient experiences, and the detailed process at their Dublin, Ohio clinic offering IV ketamine and Spravato treatments. Dr. Belanti shares insights on the controversy, effectiveness, and safety of ketamine-assisted therapy, including its potential for neuroplasticity and its impact on severe depression, PTSD, and anxiety disorders. The episode also features a walkthrough of their clinic, showcasing their commitment to patient comfort and care.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
01:33 Welcome Back to the Podcast
01:56 Clinic Location and Services
02:23 Meet the Team
02:49 Specialized Treatments Offered
04:00 Understanding Ketamine and Spravato
04:51 Addressing Concerns and Misconceptions
07:11 Screening and Safety Protocols
08:20 Holistic Approach to Mental Health
09:47 Mechanism of Ketamine and Spravato
13:06 Patient Experiences and Outcomes
16:52 First Visit Expectations
18:04 Optimal Ketamine Dosage and Safety Measures
19:23 Personalized Ketamine Treatment Experience
20:11 Private vs. Group Treatment Settings
21:09 Determining the Right Ketamine Dose
23:10 Insurance Coverage for Ketamine Treatments
24:31 Long-Term Effects and Booster Sessions
28:00 Neuroplasticity and Mental Health
30:49 Ketamine's Broader Impact on Mental Health
33:08 Clinic Tour and Patient Experience
FIND THE GUEST
Dr. Bellanti of Ketamine Health and Wellness Clinics of Ohio
➫ Ketamine Health & Wellness Clinics of Ohio
Today I'm gonna get a little bit of taste.
That is our trainer and it is empty.
Basically, ketamine works on the part of your brain that makes you realize that you are connected to your body and the rest of the world. We get a lot of people who say that they feel connected to the universe. They have this kind of realization that it's not just all one. There is more out there than what we see on earth.
You have the ability to change, grow, change the connections or growth or anything about the neurons in your brain that we initially didn't think possible. So it's possible to regrow your brain. Absolutely. They have discussions. with a loved one who has passed my trauma and what I went through is temporary, but this energy we will go on and live on and there's something else out there.
And for a lot of people, that's a very healing experience. I don't think it is just the, you know, medication or dissociation talking. I think that there is definitely something on a deeper level that people feel. And I do think that also contributes to the healing process of, of using ketamine, utilizing ketamine.
Dr. Belanti, you're such a nerd. And I mean it in the nicest way.
Dr. Belanti, hello again. Hey, welcome back to our Naked Truth, a therapy podcast. And by popular demand, folks demand it, that we bring you back and you tell us a little more about what ketamine is and how people can find you and where your office is. So please tell
us more.
Well,
it's good to see you again.
Thanks for having us back. And we're in our office this time. We are here in Dublin, Ohio. So we are a Northern suburb of Columbus and we are at 5060 Bradenton Avenue. So we're right near 270 and Franz road and Bradenton. We love our location because it's just so easy for people to get to really from all over central Ohio.
We tell people it's never more than a 20, 25 minute drive from almost everywhere. And such a beautiful office. Thank you. I appreciate that. As you walk
through, it's just decorated so nicely. Who did all the work?
So, um, I have to give props to Joanne Seiferth. She, uh, works with our office. You may, if you've ever called our clinic, you may have spoken with her.
She is just so knowledgeable about what we do. She helps you with appointments. She answers the phone and she also has great. great taste in furniture and everything.
She's an interior decorator as well. She really is. She is.
We'll see more of what she has helped us kind of curate and create when we walk through our clinic during this video too.
We are a true mental health clinic. We specialize in adult psychiatry and general adult psychiatry. So we provide traditional mental health diagnosis. evaluation and management. And we also really specialize in our niche is in cutting edge and newer treatments for treatment resistant symptoms. So that for right now in our office includes IV ketamine and Spravato.
And I know if you look at our website, we have some data about MDMA and psilocybin that we've written about. Those are kind of looking forward, looking into the future of what's probably coming down the pipeline soon. But for right now, no MDMA, no MDMA. Unfortunately, they have rejected. Did the initial request for MDMA to get approved, they're probably gonna have to redo the studies and blind the patients a little bit better.
That seemed to be a big part of the issue. So the
patients actually have to be blind to participate
in the study. ? Well, the. segment of people who received MDMA versus the ones who didn't. It seems like most of them were able to know and able to tell. And so the FDA looks at all those things and it's very important that they blind to their drug studies and research studies and everything.
So I do think that that is going to be coming down the pipeline in the future. What we have in our toolkit and our arsenal right now is IV ketamine and also Spravato, which is our FDA approved nasal spray, S ketamine, which is that little
baby,
which is that? Yes, that thing. And it's. People don't remember anything else about what I say today.
What I've been trying to tell patients is that if you have treatment resistant symptoms and your medications are not working, IV ketamine works. We know it works. That's IV us and going in your vein. Going in your vein, yes. Spravato. makes ketamine accessible to almost everyone and to a very, very large number of people.
A big question we get about IV is that I don't use ketamine. Ketamine was, is a street drug. It's a club drug. People know it from the 1990s. It was a big thing.
club music here to make people feel like it's a club drug. You can bring whatever music
and calming music you want to bring when you get your treatment.
A big thing about the way that we do ketamine here is that we are actually not proponents of at home ketamine. See, for several different reasons. We utilize the IV ketamine and the Spravato in office. There is no take homes. Everything is given in office. And I can't
take it home.
No. And a big part of the Spravato program is that it is actually under a risk mediation system.
There's at least 100, 150 plus drugs in the country that are also under very similar systems. Basically, with the Spravato. Once you take it, you have to be in our office for a minimum of two hours. We report patients blood pressures, and now we're starting to, um, report patients pulse, pulse ox, and blood oxygenation.
With that, to a central, kind of, mediated response. management symptom for Spravato that is nationwide. It's a REM system. Yes. So we're big proponents of ketamine, but we are big proponents of, you know, very controlled regulated dosing, evidence based dosing, and just using the system that the government has put in place.
So there is not diversion and abuse of ketamine, which I fully acknowledge, you know, can that happen? Absolutely. You know, I think there's nothing is absolutely great and perfect and nothing is absolutely bad either. You have to have some middle ground. So I don't believe in having at home treatments where it's not regulated, but I also don't think it should be completely, you know, banned and stopped because we are seeing phenomenal results with our patients in our clinic.
It seems like it's just really helpful with the treatment
resistant depression. Absolutely. So we're seeing consistently about a 70 to 75 percent response rate with both the Spravato and the IV Ketamine. And if you look at the research data that's been done since the 1990s on IV Ketamine, you're looking at about the same response rate, 70 to 75%.
That's what we're seeing in our office, no matter how many other trials patients have been on. So I would say the majority of our patients come in, many have been on 6, 8, 10 different antidepressants. They've tried TMS, they've had Steli Ganglion blocks, they've had ECT, despite all those things, we are seeing pretty consistent response rate to Spirato in with ketamine.
You just explained so much about the research and the data. And one of the questions that we received after the last podcast was, is it good for me? So the question was really a patient wanted to know, like, is this really something that's good for me or is there downsides to it? What's your take on that?
So
I think that the most important thing is to not think in. absolutes with any kind of treatment. So no treatment out there, whether it's for mental health, medical health is all good or all bad. A big important part of what we do is that we are mental health trained. We are mental health practitioners in our office.
So we carefully screen everyone who comes into our clinic. So we're doing consultations. Some can be done over the phone. Many and most are done in person. So a big thing is making sure you have the patient's diagnosis down correctly, making sure that they don't have any contraindications from a medical standpoint, from a substance use standpoint, from other mental health issues and other mental health disorders that would make it dangerous or just not effective for you to get ketamine.
So a big part of it is knowing your patients, being able to know that evaluation and that diagnosis.
What do you say to people that maybe it's too complicated? They hear all about the assessment for ketamine. They're like, ah, too much for me, either they go to the streets and find ketamine in some other form, or then there's the people that say, I'm just going to do a healthy diet and gym and exercise and I'm going to get over my depression.
Well, certainly
looking at mental health from a holistic standpoint, meaning that pills alone or medications alone are not going to be. the cure. We always tell people, please do not do ketamine treatment in a bubble. And that means a lot of different things. That's going to mean, you know, taking care of your body the best way you can.
I know it's very difficult when you have very treatment resistant symptoms and very severe depression, which most of our patients are coming in really struggling with. In addition to getting the ketamine, we tell people, please eat the most healthy way that you can. Yeah. get as much exercise as you can, try to be as active as you can, stay off of social media and the time that you're getting ketamine treatment, get the best sleep that you can.
But if you really look at the research and the data, if you are talking about true major depression, about 25 to 30 percent of people do not respond to what we consider to be traditional antidepressants. So your SSRIs, SNRIs, things like that. Just once you have been on. two good trials of antidepressants.
By the time you reach your third antidepressant trial or third treatment, that could be talk therapy. In the studies, they augmented treatment with lithium and thyroid and things like that. We're talking about the STAR D trial for depression. Once you've been on two different antidepressants, your chances of 14%.
So the reality is that SSRIs and traditional antidepressant treatment works for a big chunk of people. It also does not work for about 25 to 30 percent of people for reasons we don't completely understand yet. And so the ketamine and the spravato work in a completely different way. They are glutaminergic medications.
So they work on the glutamate system in your brain. And actually the huge majority of Of the neurons in your brain do not actually use serotonin, which is what our traditional antidepressants are targeting. Most of your serotonin is actually located in your gut. Most of your excitatory neurotransmitters actually utilize glutamate.
So when you take either Spravato, which is the ketamine spray. That's the one that's FDA approved. You get that covered with insurance or the IV ketamine. You are working on your NMDA receptors that are controlled when you take glutamate and have this surge of glutamate. And basically, it's much more complicated than this, but down the line, you are actually getting a protein called BDNF.
It's brain derived neurotrophic factor. That's That is actually causing neural growth in your dendritic spines. These are individual parts of a, a neuron and the neurons in your brain. So you are getting neuronal growth and plasticity. Um, where we didn't use to think that you had any kind of neuroplasticity once you were an adult.
If you had a neuron, it was there. You couldn't do anything with it. If it was damaged, there was nothing you could do. We actually know that that's not true. Dr. Belanti,
you're such a nerd, and I mean it in the nicest way. So out of all of this, you're basically telling me that the guy that says, I'm just going to do it the old fashioned way, get on a good diet and exercise.
Those two things by itself may probably not work for
everyone for everyone and and again, you don't want to think in absolutes There are people where if you are going through a period of time when your mood is low or you're going through something stressful Definitely having lifestyle choices and changes are gonna benefit you we're talking about people who really cannot function day to day due to the level of depression, the level of anxiety, the severity of PTSD, those sorts of things who are coming to our clinic and getting ketamine.
What do you say to some psychiatrists that say, Oh, I don't know about this glutamate business. Uh, you know, serotonin has been around forever and we have so many drugs that work on serotonin. I'm not buying this whole thing about glutamate. What do you tell them?
I would say that, you know, before we opened our clinic, we did all of our research.
We read all of the available articles, journal articles, case studies that we could possibly find on ketamine. And that is how we came up with our safety protocols in terms of timing, in terms of dosing IV ketamine. That's how we came to our decision that, you know, we looked at the data of Spravato and we looked at the many years of safety data they've had since they've come out with Spravato around 2019 2020.
And that has consistently shown that that using ketamine at the doses we use in our clinic are not neurotoxic, they are in fact safe. And that is how we, we feel really comfortable with that. There was also a study that came out last year, they put IV ketamine head to head against electroconvulsive therapy, ECT, which in the psychiatry world is the gold standard for very serious depression, very acute depression, psychotic depression, things like that.
It actually turned out to be. almost completely equal in efficacy without causing the memory issues and the muscle issues that stop so many of patients that I've seen from being able to stay on ECT.
What about the curious people that, that are maybe not exactly depressed, but maybe they're also not exactly happy, right?
It's life. Um, What if they're a little curious? Is this a treatment that people should try out of curiosity? So
in order to get approved for Spravato, again, it's an FDA approved medication. We utilize your insurance benefits and coverage for people to be able to get that and afford it. You have to go through a pretty long set of criteria.
The most important things are that when they did the Spravato research, They had all their patients, whether they got Spravato or not, on a new antidepressant. So, you have to be on an antidepressant currently, and you have to have failed at least two different trials of medication to get approved for Spravato.
Spravato is also actually only approved for acute suicidal ideation for major depression. When you're talking about IV Ketamine, there's been a lot of research done, again, since the 90s, about major depressive disorder, serious anxiety disorder, severe PTSD.
There's not great data on whether this is really going to help you if you do not fall into one of those categories. So really, you're looking at treatment for, you know, using this treatment for treatment resistant symptoms. If you are someone who is curious about wanting to utilize it in therapy and in psychotherapy, that's a completely different dosing and a different set of.
you know, regulations and a different set of, um, a set of things where if you're just utilizing it for psychotherapy.
Do you notice that people have any kind of unusual reactions to it or some people may be prone to having hallucinations or something else that happens, uh, while they're receiving the treatment?
Well, one thing we have to really screen carefully for is any history of psychosis. Because when you're taking ketamine, that can actually exacerbate and bring psychotic symptoms on. So, if you're talking about those sorts of things, we really have to do a very thorough job of evaluating and screening all of our patients who are getting ketamine.
That's part of the process we do as mental health providers in our clinic. When we talk about using any kind of ketamine, the two biggest risks that people have are sedation. So, sedation can happen. It can make you quite tired. That's a reason why you cannot drive yourself home after any treatment. You can't use heavy equipment the same day you get IV treatment.
Ketamine or Spravato, but people can have what we call dissociation. And basically ketamine works on the part of your brain that makes you realize that you are connected to your body and the rest of the world. So long story short. People can get a dissociation feeling when they feel almost an out of body experience.
For most people, as long as you're, especially if you're in a good mind frame and a mindset, it is not an uncomfortable thing. It can actually be something that is very healing and very therapeutic for people if they kind of lean into that. But for some people, it can cause an uncomfortable dissociation, especially if you're getting maybe a little bit high of a dose or too high of a dose sometimes.
So sometimes that's a indication that we need to kind of back up on your dose. Because you shouldn't feel scared or feel like you are disconnected from the world or yourself in a scary way while you're getting ketamine. We don't want that.
So it sounds like we are calling it dissociation, but it sounds like folks maybe even experience more of a connection to everything around them.
They do.
We get a lot of people who say that they feel connected to the universe. They have this kind of realization that it's not just all one. We're all you hear this very, very frequently for people and they'll say, um, you know, it made me realize that my trauma and what I went through is temporary, but this energy we will go on and live on.
And there's something else out there. And for a lot of people, that's a very healing experience.
It's beautiful. How does a typical
first visit look like for someone? So, for a typical first visit for someone receiving IV ketamine treatment, they've already had their consultation, they've already gone through any kind of contraindications, we've told them all of the requirements, we've gone through everything.
When you first step into our office. We will take you back to one of our rooms and you will have an individual room for your infusion room. We will get your IV started. And we have a phenomenal nurse practitioner, Jordan, who has 15 years of experience working in inpatient and ICU settings. So she is a phenomenal needle stick.
You will most likely get that done very easily. If you are someone who has a difficult time getting a needle stick, if it's hard to find your veins, one thing we offer that most other places don't is a handheld ultrasound system. So we can very easily and comfortably get an IV started on you. I would say 99 percent of the time.
The next thing we do is we make sure we have your body weight down and recorded because if you're getting IV ketamine treatment, it is dosed by weight. Anyone who is starting IV ketamine treatment, we start them at 0. 5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. And the reason for that is if you look at all of the evidence and all of the literature, going below 0.
5 milligrams has not really been shown to have any effect. any effect on mental health symptoms. So we'd essentially just be taking your money and you're not really getting a great effect. If you also look at the data, once you get above one milligram per kilogram of body weight, not only are you not seeing an additional effect or benefit on mental health symptoms, So, That is where you are really putting someone at risk for side effects like uncomfortable dissociation and from hypoxia and over sedation and things like that.
You can get yourself into a dangerous situation if you don't monitor things very carefully. And for that reason, we also have continuous vital sign monitoring in our office. That's another thing that a lot of places do not offer. We have a little finger probe. It's called the system is called caretaker.
We can put it around your finger. There's a very small device that fits on your wrist. Not like alien probes, right? No, no, this is just on little Velcro. It's a little Velcro, um, you know, sensor on your finger. And we are able to monitor you remotely on a tablet. So, and we have trackings and readings of all of that.
So, we're able to watch all of your vital signs. We even have the ability to put an EKG on a patient if we need to in our office. So, we're watching you, watching and monitoring you continuously. Once we find out what your ketamine dose is, it is mixed in a small bag, a 250 cc bag of saline. It's basically like a can of pop or a can of soda, you mix that all together, we get you set up in your room.
We have really nice lighting in there. We've got blankets, weighted blankets, everything that you might need. We encourage people to bring your, you know, you have your own pillow and blanket, your own music and things like that. And then your infusion actually runs over 40 minutes. So that's considered a very slow infusion compared to if you needed ketamine in an emergency room or an ICU setting.
Everyone, when they are finished with their infusion, you have to be in our office for a minimum of 20 to 25 minutes. Ketamine is very fast. on fast off. It metabolizes out of your body very quickly. And then you just need to have your ride, um, home after that and you can relax the rest of the day.
So I, I heard you say individual rooms.
I also hear there are clinics where they do more of a group treatment setting. Uh, what are the differences of, uh, those settings?
The way that we have been able to set it up in our office is that only one of our rooms is what we consider to be semi private. A lot of that tends to be with our Spravato patients.
If you are getting an IV ketamine treatment, you will have a private room because we have infusion pumps and things that are noisy and you're just kind of getting up and things like that. There are people who enjoy that group setting, you know, kind of like sitting in that circle or being around people, especially with Spravato.
It tends to not make a lot of people as tired. They can kind of function and be awake more. Again, there's some people who don't sleep well. the whole time. So it's very dependent on how a person breaks down and metabolizes the medication. But we have found that a lot of our patients like just kind of a more bigger and open room and either private or semi private.
So we try to accommodate patients, you know, to the best of what we're able to according to what they're asking for and what they want.
You also mentioned that there is a process of finding the dose. So It sounds like the dose may not be the same for every patient. Uh, do you ever get patients that, that need a higher, much higher dose than whatever the typical standard dose would be considered?
Again, we do, for IV ketamine, we do not go over one milligram per kilogram of IV's ketamine infusion. And again, the reasons for that are you're getting into a dose where it's almost acting like an anesthetic. Aesthetic and a sedative to the point where we don't wanna get people you know, in trouble from a medical standpoint, even though we are monitoring them.
And if you really look at the data, once you go above one milligram per kilogram of body weight of IV ketamine, there really is not a great benefit for your mental health symptoms versus the potential risk I could be putting you at, having you in an outpatient clinic getting a high dose. Now, when you're talking about Spravato, it actually only comes in two doses, either 56 milligrams or 84 milligrams, and there's no wiggle room, um, between that.
There's only two doses.
So, this treatment could be really beneficial for some folks that maybe have tried a lot of different medications for depression and have not seen any benefits from that. What kind of patients? Thanks. I mean, other than those, do you think there's any other kinds of patients that should consider this?
Yeah, we've had great
success for IV ketamine and our IV ketamine program in patients who really deal with very severe generalized anxiety disorder that is refractory to medications. That tends to be sometimes upwards of 50 percent of people don't respond to their initial anti anxiety medications. We can also use IV ketamine for severe OCD.
for severe PTSD and for bipolar disorder without psychosis. When you're talking about using this bravado treatment, that is only approved for treatment resistant depression and suicidal ideation. In the future, I don't know if they'll open it up to more indications, but that's where the limitation is, um, for insurance companies at this point in the research.
Is Spravato treatment covered by most insurances and then versus the IV ketamine treatment, how is that with the insurance reimbursement?
So when it comes to IV ketamine treatment in the state of Ohio, in general, because IV ketamine in particular is not FDA approved for mental health reasons, and it's considered to be off label or experimental by commercial insurance plans, in general, it is not reimbursed.
And there are you know, sometimes when you could request the infusion or some of the time reimbursed for that. However, when the insurance companies know that you are using it for a drug that is off label, that almost exclusively takes it off the table. So we do offer different types of payment plans and FSA and HSA accounts for people to try to afford IV ketamine treatment.
We've also gotten the treatment in low, as low of a cost as we've been able to, but really when it comes to affordability and accessibility of ketamine, that is where our Spravato program comes in because it is FDA approved. You pretty much need to go through a insurance plan in order to get that approved and paid for.
And it is a little bit longer of an authorization process, but if you look at the data over time. your response rate for IV ketamine versus bravado is nearly identical. It can just, for some people, take a little bit longer for the bravado to start working.
How about the length of how well it works for someone?
Does it last for, you know, a week after the treatment? Does it last for a year? Is it cure depression? Kind of a treatment or
well, that is a great question and it really runs the gamut and what we see pretty consistently In our clinic is that there is a chunk of people who complete ketamine treatment They said that they were responding their scores their depression scale is anxiety scales went down.
They were feeling very very great They're feeling a lot better And we do not hear from them again for a very long time or perhaps ever. We also have a group of people and another, I would say, segment of our ketamine population who come in once every several months. There sometimes is a seasonality to how severe their symptoms are.
Sometimes it depends on whether it's around a holiday, an anniversary of something significant, you know, things like that. And then we have another segment of people who do find that they require consistent boosters. And that can look different for different people. We have people who come in once every four to six weeks and either get an IV ketamine booster or Spravato.
There's also been a lot of research done on getting boosters of Spravato once every week or once every two weeks. So what we do is once we complete an induction series of either IV or Spravada with a patient, we really sit down and have a session with them and discuss, you know, what are your goals?
What is your schedule looking like? What are things looking like from a financial standpoint? Because in real life, all those things are very important to a patient and all that is going to impact, you know, when you will be back and whether you will be back. So we really try to individualize it and make it as flexible for people as possible.
One thing I do tell people when they finish their IV series and their induction series of six IV infusions. If you'd like to, we would offer to hold a spot for them four weeks after their last treatment if they do need a booster, but I tell people if you are feeling good and you feel like your symptoms are well managed, please do not hesitate to call us.
I do not want to take your money. Please do not come and get something that you don't need, but if you need us before, call us. We'll see what we can do. Work with your other providers and see if there's something else you may need or need to be doing and really kind of individualize a treatment plan that's best for every patient.
And
there's also something. that I hear about called K hole. Well,
that usually refers to when people have a really severe dissociation from taking medication. And traditionally that is when people are kind of using it as a club drug or a party drug or things like that. When you're talking about using either IV ketamine or Spravato, some of the risks can be number one, sedation, number two, dissociation, feeling like you are disconnected from your body.
If that gets to be severe or in, you know, kind of an uncomfortable way. One benefit of using IV ketamine is that we can slow down your infusion or we could stop it completely. Ketamine, no matter how you take it, is metabolized very, very quickly in your body. When you take the Spravato nasal spray, your usual peak concentration, your peak dose is about 40 minutes after your nasal spray.
So even though I cannot stop your infusion, there's nothing I can do to stop it once you take that nasal spray in. We really just reassure people that. It's not going to last that long. You know, you are going to be okay. And a lot of times just being very reassuring and calming to people is all that they need.
And again, the, one of the benefits of having an IV infusion is that we have control over that medication. We can stop it if we need to.
There's also some data showing that depression changes. the brain. And I know you talked about neuroplasticity, so maybe you can explain to us a little more about that process.
Yeah. Um, so neuroplasticity basically means you have the ability to change, grow, change the connections or growth or anything about the neurons in your brain that we initially didn't think possible. When I was in medical school, you were pretty much taught what you have as an adult. Those are your neurons.
If you have an injury, if you have an illness, There's nothing you can do about that. Once brain cells are gone, that is it. We also know that, you're right, depression, PTSD, anxiety disorders, actually have an effect on the volume of your brain in different areas, as does childhood trauma. It's very, very common for patients with severe childhood trauma to later have treatment resistant mental health symptoms.
They've actually done some studies with ketamine, and they have measured brain volume in the in the areas that are affected by PTSD, by depression and by adverse or traumatic childhood events. And there actually is an increase that is very, very measurable and very specific in brain volume in those places, like your amygdala, your hippocampus and areas like that.
We also know that when you use any kind of ketamine, whether it's the Spravato or the IV, when you are causing that surge of glutamate, it is then causing an increase in brain volume. brain derived neurotropic factor and that is causing your dendrites, your dendritic spines and your actual neurons themselves to grow and regenerate and make new pathways and new connections that just didn't exist before.
Wow.
Mm hmm.
So it's possible to regrow your brain? Absolutely. So glutamate is good for us?
Glutamate at very high doses can be toxic. It can be neurotoxic. Again, this is why we are advocates of having very controlled dosing and having ketamine being given in a very controlled medical setting.
Are there studies that show that ketamine is good for ADHD treatment?
That is a great question. And to the Best of my knowledge, I do not know of any study showing that ketamine or spravato help with ADHD treatment, you know, the executive functioning issues that go along with ADHD. What I can say is that we get a large number of people with treatment resistant depression, treatment resistant anxiety, where a symptom itself of having very poor and treatment resistant mental health symptoms is poor attention, so once you treat one, the other kind of gets better, which is not, again, not exactly showing that it's helping with ADHD, but when the concentration and the focus is impaired due to another mental health issue, ketamine can definitely help with that.
So, that's amazing. When you fix one problem, another one potentially gets fixed, too.
Absolutely. Yay. I've been a psychiatrist since 2013. That's when I finished my training. And to have patients come in and be off of disability, getting back to work. To have patients come in saying, this is literally the best I felt in 40 years.
To have patients say that they were acutely suicidal and they felt like they were ready for their lives to be over. and to have that turned around and to avoid being in the hospital or an inpatient hospitalization for other patients. That has been just one of the most rewarding things we have seen with patients.
When it comes to utilizing ketamine or Spravato, we talked a little bit about people feeling connected or feeling like there is like an energy that your energy is connected and there's some connection between things, not just. on Earth, but everything else in the atmosphere and in the galaxy that has, you know, some sort of continuity, um, it is not uncommon.
And some of it could be cultural that, you know, people say that they have these really enlightening experiences where they have discussions with a loved one who has passed. They have the connections with people they have not been able to. Interact with on earth for many years, people who have lost a loved one or a family member.
There's other people who say that they feel like they are going through chapters of a story or watching themselves go through something. And there is something that's definitely very healing about that. I think, especially with PTSD, when people are working through a very traumatic event that they have witnessed or gone through, realizing that there is Um, and I think it's really important that we understand that there is more out there than what we see on earth with our eyes, with our eyes, and that when people are not here, that maybe there, there is a continuous energy or something else is beyond that we cannot die, right?
Exactly. So yeah, so I think there's a lot of people who have these kind of revelations and experiences. I don't think it is just the, you know, medication or dissociation talking. I think that there is definitely something on a deeper level that people feel and I do think that also contributes to the healing process of, of using ketamine, utilizing ketamine.
That's just beautiful. Yay! It's really been
amazing.
Dr. Belanti, we cannot wait to walk through your beautiful office and show all of your potential new patients that want to make their life better where they can come. Absolutely. I'm excited to show you. Let's go. Let's go. Dr. Belanti, I am ready
for the tour.
Great. I can't wait to show you. Come on in. So this is our lobby and waiting area. We usually have some nice relaxing music on here and obviously you can wait here until we are ready to see you to want to come right on back. This is where our treatment area starts. And if you are getting an IV ketamine treatment, the first thing you're going to be doing is obviously getting your IV placed.
We have our nurse practitioner, Jordan, and our nurses who have been doing this for just years and they are experts at this. We've got our nice comfortable chair here for you. Get your IV started. We do also offer an ultrasound guided. needle stick. If you will tell me if I'm pregnant, we can't do that here, but I can almost guarantee you that if you are hard needle stick, we will get your IV on the first try.
And if you are getting an IV ketamine treatment, right, you would be sitting right in here. And a lot of times our Spravato patients are also coming into these rooms We have our infusion pumps obviously set up. Everyone who is getting IV ketamine treatment, and almost everyone getting a scruvato treatment is going to be in a private room.
We offer a call button in case you need us for anything. Oh. Yep. Oh. There you go. So you'll have someone to come in and help you right away. We've got really comfortable blankets if you have not brought your own. If you want a disposable eye mask, you'll have access to that. Remember And also a lot of people decide that they want a certain type of lighting.
So our lamps do either cool or a warm light, and then you can decide, you know, what level of light you want. Or a lot of people just like to relax and sometimes sleep during their treatment and they can have a light too, and that's fine. I might come in here to just relax. Isn't it comfortable? Our patients really love those chairs.
Oh, it even goes forward. Yeah. Very good. This is perfect. Now, if you do get Spervato treatment, one thing that can be very difficult for people is that I don't have any mints in this room right now, but we can give you some dissolvable have a bitter taste to it. My breath is so strong. The Spervato has a really bitter taste.
taste to it. So a lot of people don't like that. So this is where you begin your ketamine infusion. We believe in minimally stimulating ketamine treatment. So if you do want or need a staff member, a family member, a friend with you, absolutely, you can do that. We also know that you will just have a better experience.
Um, overall, if you do kind of just lean into your experience, have dark, dim whiting, um, have a nice, quiet, minimally stimulating room. So we give people the option, but we do believe in a minimally stimulating ketamine treatment. So no tech, no. No tech. Please don't scroll through your phone and watch videos while you're in here.
The other thing to compare to a lot of clinics is that we're not going to be coming in here with a blood pressure cuff and pumping it up on your arm or having to sit down. with you the entire duration of your infusion because we have a caretaker system and that's going to give you a continuous vital sign monitoring in room or remotely so we're not going to be coming in and taking your pulse ox and getting your blood pressure and everything it'll let you relax a lot better during that time.
Very
exciting. I think I figured out how to work this chair. So there you go.
Let's see. Look, you got on your first try. Might be bad. Now we also have a couple other treatment rooms in our office. For some people, they do actually want to be in with other people. We do have one. semi private room that we use for Spravato only, and that is done in this room.
Everyone getting Spravato needs to be in the office for a minimum of two hours after their first nasal spray and nasal treatment. So again, that If you need your tissues, your call button, your face mask, blankets, anything like that to make yourself comfortable. I like the call button for sure. And we just have really one other area.
If you do come in, we do offer general adult psychiatry and medication management at our office. So we've got our consultation room in our office here. And either Jordan or I, We'll be here and we can meet with you. So that is pretty much our clinic. Yes. Um, we really try to make it as just a kind of inviting a comfortable and calming space to everyone as we have Cat Alicia.
I'm so happy that we got a chance to interview Dr. Volante from ketamine health and wellness. And thank you so much for sharing all of this beautiful information with, with our patients. And thank you for letting us be in your beautiful space.
Well, thank you so much for having me. And it was great being with you again.
And I have a feeling our paths will cross again in the future.
