Ketamine has 'fast-acting benefits' for depression • Hacker News Board

Re: Ketamine has 'fast-acting benefits' for depression

#211

Post by goldenkey » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 8:26 AM UTC

GordonS wrote: post #209

goldenkey wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One part of it, at least for me, is the psychadelic "converging on rebirth" feeling. It's a very geometric type of high, most likely due to the NMDA agonism, induced dissociation / depersonalization. Much shorter duration than LSD, and less chance of bad thoughts/actions since you are pretty much sedated and unable to panic. Ketamine is really therepeutic mentally.

The doses given therapeutically are lower than recreational ones.

That's not true. I've done ketamine recreationally and also through an MD via infusion. The infusion had me in a k-hole for an hour or two. Recreationally, I've been in a k-hole for maybe 15-30 minutes.

Re: Ketamine has 'fast-acting benefits' for depression

#212

Post by ergothus » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 4:02 PM UTC

patricius wrote: post #117

ergothus wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: consumers are notoriously ill-informed, companies are good at propaganda and fake "clinical" evidence, and finding out if medicines ate effective AND safe is really complex. How do you imagine abolishing the FDA would improve outcomes instead of increasing supplies (and marketing) of snake oil?

You know who is also good at propaganda? Government and state. Can you prove that FDA improves the outcome? Is FDA somehow free from lobbying, or are the people working there consistently uninfluenced by certain counterproductive incentives? How could we go about ever proving that the absence or existence of a government agency has improved conditions overall? Sorry if this comes off as lecturing, but these are quest…

> It is self-evident that making something more expensive to do reduces the incentive to do it (weighed against the potential profit).

No argument - but you didn't answer my questions at all other than to say "FDA is fallible!"

I can't prove the FDA is non-evil/non-fallible. I don't have numbers to share, so I'm going off of very fallible impressions. However, those impressions are that the FDA has done a better job of keeping crappy products off the market than a free-market world.

You complain about the opposite - good products being prevented because of lack of incentives. It's impossible to measure what hasn't happened, but do we have evidence that lack of incentive cause more harm than preventing crap/toxic/poisonous products that we have a recorded history of?

We have a solution today, a solution with problems, but a solution that I'm confident is better than the original problem. What is your basis to claim that removing the solution will in fact be better than the problem?

Re: Ketamine has 'fast-acting benefits' for depression

#213

Post by ergothus » Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 4:10 PM UTC

DenisM wrote: post #125

ergothus wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an incentive to insurers only if they are paying the price or if the lower costs to a specific group of consumers increases their market share. Since most costs are passed on to the consumers and most consumers don't get to pick their insurance (in the U.S.) , the incentives aren't there.

Employers do pick insurance companies, and cost is a big factor.

But if the cost is passed on to employees, that cost does not impact the employers.

If said cost applies to only some of the employees, the employer won't have much in the way of even indirect incentives.

Re: Ketamine has 'fast-acting benefits' for depression

#214

Post by GordonS » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 8:49 AM UTC

goldenkey wrote: post #211

GordonS wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The doses given therapeutically are lower than recreational ones.

That's not true. I've done ketamine recreationally and also through an MD via infusion. The infusion had me in a k-hole for an hour or two. Recreationally, I've been in a k-hole for maybe 15-30 minutes.

Others here in this thread agree that therapeutic doses are smaller, and after a brief search it seems papers do too.

Perhaps your effects were down to the ROA?

Re: Ketamine has 'fast-acting benefits' for depression

#215

Post by antihero » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 10:37 AM UTC

enkephalin wrote: post #112

antihero wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How easy would it be to do this at home by snorting half a gram but over the course of an hour?

half a gram seems pretty excessive to me. if you snorted that over the course of an hour, with zero tolerance, you'd very likely knock yourself out.

I was just going by the amounts someone mentioned.