Ketamine for Pain?

In response to the opioid crisis, researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) are looking for alternate ways to reduce pain after orthopedic procedures.

In an innovative pilot study that was recently completed, investigators led by Michael P. Ast, MD, hip and knee surgeon and Chief Medical Innovation Officer at HSS, showed that a combination of oral ketamine and aspirin was safe and had few adverse effects in people undergoing total knee replacement surgery.

Based on these findings, the team is planning a much larger, randomized clinical trial to compare it to standard opioid treatment.

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Psychedelics- An Update

Psychedelic Science 2023 brought together 12,000 registrants in Denver, Colorado, four times as many people as the previous conference in 2017, crowning the movement to rehabilitate psychedelics for therapeutic use against depression and other disorders.

Science unveils unsuspected mechanisms of brain reconfiguration and ends decades of research bans imposed by the war on drugs, but serious obstacles remain to be overcome.

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Psilocybin, Cancer and Depression

The HOPE trial (A Pilot Study of Psilocybin Enhanced Group Psychotherapy in Patients with Cancer) is an Institutional Review Boards-approved open-label feasibility and safety pilot study examining psilocybin-assisted group therapy in cancer patients with a DSM-5 depressive disorder (including major depressive disorder as well as adjustment disorder with depressed mood).

This pilot study demonstrated the safety, feasibility, and possible efficacy of psilocybin-assisted group therapy for cancer patients dealing with depressive symptoms.

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SSRI's and Psilocybin

New research from Compass Pathways says that:

“It has long been thought that SSRIs could interfere with the potential therapeutic effect of psilocybin.

This data is exciting because it provides a preliminary signal that this is not the case, and that patients could remain on their SSRI antidepressant medication and experience the same effect from COMP360 psilocybin treatment as people who are not on SSRIs.”

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