Please Sign The Change.Org Petition To Get The Government To Release Research.
What is the government not sharing with you?
What if there were a perfectly safe, very effective treatment for illnesses whose current drugs are ineffective with bad side effects?
What if all you had to do to save a life was to sign a petition?
Twenty thousand signatures could save 20,000 lives a year. Help find out what you have already paid taxes to discover.
1. Many pharmaceuticals made for emotional illnesses work no better than placebo:
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2. There is an inexpensive, generic drug that is 50 years old that has been proven to relieve most of the symptoms of Depression and PTSD.
Think of our Veterans and your family members who are suffering because people in key places in government may not be looking out for your best interests when their financial motivations run counter to your health needs.
Please read and sign the Change.org petition to force the government to release the data they have gathered over the last 15 years from their own clinical studies on the use of Ketamine for Depression and PTSD.
Many of you know of Ketamine as a club drug. It is abused that way sometimes. But 99.9% of the drug that is manufactured goes to medical purposes.
Many of you believe that the best way to health is through healthy living. I strongly agree. But sometimes that is not enough. Sometimes, illness is caused by genetic or environmental factors that the best of intentions cannot overcome. I think we all get a little confused on this topic when the subject is mental health. We all have brains and personalities, and the healthy cannot always understand why for them what is a passing mood is so hard for an ill person to deal with.
Scientists now know that mental illness is caused by the combination of genetic vulnerability and life stressors. As that combination is unique for each of us, each of us has a unique experience with mental health. Your experience, your solutions for a good mood, simply do not work for a person with mental illness. That's what makes us ill.
The unique action of Ketamine is that it heals nerves that have been damaged by depression in as little time as an hour.
Ketamine is a medicine that was developed in the 1960's as an operating room and battlefield anesthetic. In many ways it is considered the safest anesthetic ever developed because it does not interfere with breathing even when the patient is unconscious. Unfortunately, that also makes it a possible party and date rape drug at high dosages. Most of you will know of it as a "horse tranquilizer" although little of it is used on horses and it is not a tranquilizer, it is an anesthetic.
The most common use of Ketamine continues to be as an anesthetic in operations. It is used on tens of millions of people a year for the past 50 years at moderate dosages. Without any side effects that last past the time of administration. It has also been used for the last ten years to treat Complex Regional Pain Syndrome.
For the last 15 years, scientists at the National Institute for Mental Health have been looking at very low doses of Ketamine for the treatment of depression and other emotional illnesses. Trial patients report excellent results but they are told not to seek Ketamine treatment privately, but to instead practice mediation and other healthy living techniques even if the person has had a lifetime of depression with nothing other than Ketamine helping. Seen the movie Awakenings? - These people are living the emotional equivalent of that.
Finally, in 2012 several private physicians started offering Ketamine treatment. There is probably a clinic near you (full disclosure - I started a Ketamine clinic in AZ, but as most of my patients are not in the Daily Kos demographic this post is not a marketing effort - it is a cry for compassion). There are now over 1,000 patients in the country who have found relief through carefully controlled Ketamine treatment.
At our clinic, we have as patients one psychiatrist, two other physicians, two psychiatric nurses and two psychologists. We have had patients come from as far as Australia and France to come to Arizona in the summer. This is a little unusual, to say the least.
The people in the know or in the dough are getting the treatment, the people out of the loop or out of the green are continuing to suffer.
The key to change will be to get the data that will convince insurance companies that it is in their best interests to accept the coverage. The government already has the data.
You can put the two together and save a life. Won't you?