My Story
I initially hesitated on giving out too much of my personal experience with ketamine, but then realized that I’m asking you to allow a stranger (me) into your home to give you a medication that will temporarily alter your consciousness. You deserve to know my story…
I graduated from Medical School in 2004, and finished my Emergency Medicine residency from Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis in 2007. After residency I jumped straight into the workforce and until 2024, I worked full time at various large and medium sized trauma center Emergency Rooms in New Mexico and Utah as an ER doctor. I was married with three kids, and from the outside had the perfect white-picket fence American Dream. Unfortunately, like many people, my mental health did not match the “perfect family” on display.
I started feeling burned out and looking back, I realize I was depressed. I wasn’t having huge emotional lows, but I also wasn’t having emotional highs. I was in a place where I was just going to work, taking care of the kids, and getting through every day without much enjoyment. I saw a couple different therapists and tried antidepressants with little improvement.
As an ER doctor, I have been using ketamine in the ER for my entire career to sedate patients for all kinds of various procedures (think setting broken bones, repairing complex wounds, or intubating someone/putting them on a ventilator). I had heard some of the data over the last 15 years or so that was coming out about using low dose ketamine for mental health, but I honestly didn’t pay much attention to it. Treating depression/anxiety/PTSD/OCD etc., was not something that I would be using ketamine for in the ER, and with different trends that come and go in medicine, ketamine for mental health kind of went in one ear and out the other. I was putting ketamine into the same category of pseudoscience as I.V. vitamins or liver detox supplements or fad diets.
That is until 2023 when I came across a study that changed my view. Researchers took a bunch of mice and implanted tiny glass prisms into their brain and came up with a novel imaging technique where they could use a fiberoptic microscope, into the glass prism, to look at neurons in the brains of the alive mice, in real time. They then caused the mice to become depressed.
It sounds kind of silly to say that they caused the mice to become depressed, but there is a pretty big field of study regarding depressed mice. You can force chronic stress onto the mice by flooding them with the mouse equivalent of cortisol, the “stress hormone.” The mice will then show symptoms of depression such as showing less interest in treats, swimming less vigorously, or showing less social behavior in interacting with the other mice. At the same time researchers were able to visualize that the neurons in the mice’s brains regressed and lost connections/synapses between the cells.
They took the depressed mice, with the prism in their brain, and gave half of them a single dose of ketamine, and half of them a placebo (saline). The ketamine mice not only showed rapid improvement (within a few hours) in their depressed behaviors, but they also showed a significant regrowth of the previously lost synapses. The ketamine literally re-grew neuronal connections.
This may not be a perfect comparison, but I looked at that study and at those depressed mice, and thought, that is me. Chronic stress, bizarre hours in the ER, flooding my brain with cortisol for 20 years, and my behavior was similar to the depressed mice. I wasn’t feeling happiness with the things that used to make me happy, I had decreased motivation, less joy.
I immersed myself in reading every study I could get my hands on regarding ketamine and mental health. This regrowth of synapses, and even new neurons, with increased/new neural pathways after ketamine, has been repeated in multiple studies, from reputable Universities and credible researchers. This is the neuroplasticity that you’ll see mentioned if you do some reading about ketamine.
Study after study show about 60-70% of patients have a rapid and significant improvement in depression and other mental health symptoms after even a single dose of ketamine.
Because the data was so convincing, in 2023 I went through a series a ketamine treatments myself, and it changed my life. Now, this is no promise that you will have the same results, but for me the change was miraculous. I had a new pep in my step. My depression lifted and I was able to look at life in a new light. I was enjoying the little things again, and had new drive and ambition. It worked so well that I couldn’t stop reading about and thinking about ketamine.
My experience in the clinic was fine. They had a cozy setup with a comfortable chair, and the staff was nice, but it was not MY environment. The dissociative psychedelic experience with ketamine can be quite powerful, and having the right mindset and physical setting can be the difference between a good/meaningful experience and an uncomfortable one. I did not like needing to get an Uber or friend to transport me there and back. I did not like that I was left in a room by myself with no one next to me to guide me through the process. At the end of each treatment, I was nauseated and drowsy, and all I wanted was to be in my own bed instead of a doctor’s office. Not to mention, many of the people who may need treatment the most cannot easily travel to a clinic due to mobility issues, costs involved, or their mental illness itself being a barrier to going out of their home.
Then I started to question why I was continuing to work in the ER, something that I had long ago burned out on. I realized that I was uniquely positioned to be someone who can bring ketamine to other people that are suffering the same way I was, or in most cases, suffering worse than I was. I’ve given ketamine at high doses, so many times and am trained to deal with, and have dealt with, all the possible side effects and adverse reactions (which are exceedingly rare at the doses used for mental health treatment). I realized that I was exactly the type of doctor to be offering this treatment. I also realized that I could be a house-call doctor who brings ketamine to YOU, in the right setting, and not in a sterile clinical environment.
In February of 2024, I took the plunge and started this business. My goal is to find people who need relief from the prison of depression/anxiety/PTSD/chronic pain and more, and offer them a new possibility. One that I believe in, and one that worked for me personally. If you are searching for help with your suffering, my in-home ketamine treatment can offer something that might help.
— Nathan Unkefer MD