Ketamine Clinics of South Africa are now open in La Lucia Ridge, offering new hope to treatment-resistant patients trapped in a cycle of dark despair.
The suicide rate in South Africa – already one of the highest in the world – has increased alarmingly since lockdown began almost a year ago. Depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders are burgeoning during these uncertain times.
When Dr Alan Howard, a Consultant in Emergency Medicine in the Northwest of Ireland for 12 years, returned home to South Africa at the end of 2019 to launch Ketamine Clinics of South Africa (KCSA), little did he know that Covid would strike a few short months later and the need for an effective treatment for resistant depression, suicidality and anxiety would grow like never before.
Ketamine, the party drug known on the street as “Special K”, is a dissociative anaesthetic that has been around since the 1960s and is on the WHO’s list of essential medicines. It was not until 2006 that ketamine’s remarkable ability to improve mood and reverse suicidal ideation in up to 80% of patients – even after a single infusion – was realised. Numerous studies and clinical trials have been undertaken since and a nasal-spray version of ketamine was approved by the FDA in 2019 for use in depression. This version of ketamine is prohibitively expensive, not yet available in South Africa, and still needs to be administered in a controlled clinical environment. There is no evidence that it is more, or even as effective as the intravenous ketamine administered as a 40-minute infusion at KCSA outpatient clinics around the country.
KCSA’s flagship outpatient clinic opened its doors in December 2019 at Hilton Life Hospital in the KZN Midlands, and to date, more than 1 100-infusions have been administered. Such was the demand from other regions around the country that KCSA opened a further large infusion clinic in Bedfordview, Gauteng in October last year, and now turns its focus towards the KZN North Coast and the Western Cape.
Dr Howard explains that, although ketamine has an excellent safety profile and few side effects, it remains an anaesthetic agent and, as such, must be given in an appropriate clinical environment by medical professionals familiar with its use. KCSA employs such doctors and anaesthetists at its clinics who are assisted by a team of ICU-trained nurses.
Almost all patients treated at KCSA clinics are referred by psychiatrists and GPs who recognise ketamine’s remarkable potential to offer new hope to treatment–resistant patients trapped in a cycle of dark despair.
Ketamine works by increasing levels of the neurotransmitter glutamate in the brain, which has a more immediate effect than more traditional antidepressants which may take weeks to work, if at all. Dr Howard describes that, specifically for this reason, ketamine is being used more and more as rescue therapy in newly diagnosed depression rather than simply in those patients who haven’t responded to the usual cocktail of medication over time. Studies show that areas of the brain damaged by mood disorders can recover when serial ketamine is administered through a process called synaptogenesis and dendritic sprouting (new nerve fibres and junctions). Ketamine is also used to treat certain types of chronic neuropathic pain.
“I’ve never been more excited about anything I’ve done during my 30 years of practising medicine,” says Dr Howard. “The results have been extremely gratifying and heart–warming”.
WHAT PATIENTS HAVE TO SAY
- “Over two weeks I felt a growing strength, energy, balance, clarity of thought and purpose.”
- “I saw my problems in compartments. They became insignificant. I had absolute clarity.”
- “I now want to have a successful life, rather than just ending it.”
FOR MORE INFO:
- uMhlanga: 087 813 7778/073 608 1050, 5 Pencarrow Crescent, La Lucia Ridge
- Hilton: 087 702 8542; Bedfordview: 087 265 7479; info@ketamineclinics.co.za;
- www.ketamineclinics.co.za
Pictured: Dr Alan Howard, the founder and medical director of KCSA.