Ketamine Treatment near Granby CT
In 1707, a 22-year-old man was busily working alone in his shop in northern Connecticut, weaving cloth for area community members. He was good at it and enjoyed the praise he received when neighbors bought his cloth. His home was isolated and he enjoyed visits from wildlife who stopped in to see him out of curiosity.
He was busy building his dream, and his thoughts wandered as he worked with imaginings of the day when he would marry, enjoy the companionship of a beautiful wife, and hear the laughter of children playing outside as he worked.
One day, quite by surprise, his musings were interrupted by the sounds of intruders rushing into his home. They took him by force, overcame his strength, tied and gagged him. Then, swiftly, they carried him off. A neighbor heard the noise and ran outside to see them galloping away on their horses.
A hastily gathered posse followed but was unable to catch them, and finally gave up.
Little did he know there was a long trip ahead. They traveled for more than 30 days, tying him to saplings at night so they could sleep. They finally reached their village in Canada and required him to run a gauntlet.
As he neared the end, with clubs pounding him at each step, he ran into a wigwam to avoid any more beatings. Inside he found a widow who lost her son and husband during a war, and wanted companionship and help for her care. She adopted him as her son…and there he remained for years.
After several years though, she died, and the tribe sold him to a French man for his skill at weaving. He continued his weaving, and again won the favor of his owner, who paid him a small wage. It only took him two years to earn enough to buy his freedom.
Resilience
So a decade after his kidnapping, he finally returned to Connecticut, married, settled on a farm, and raised a family.
In the years that followed, he became a prominent member of the community, as well as the local church at Salmon Brook, which later became known as Granby. What a story of resilience!
It’s easy to forget the investment others before us have made, to tame the land we enjoy.
With all that life experience, you can imagine he brought extra wisdom to the development of community affairs in this small town.
Small Rural Town in the Foothills
Granby, CT is a small, rural town in the foothills of the Litchfield Hills of the Berkshire mountains. With a population of a bit over 11,000 people, Granby lies within Hartford County, along with Hartford, and South Windsor. The town center is known as Salmon Brook, the name of the area where the first settlers built their homes.
And while the primary source of income in the area is farming, there are plenty of restaurants and shops to entertain visitors to the area.
Granby is beloved by her residents. It’s listed the #3 best place to raise children in the US by Security Systems Compare.
But.
As peaceful a community as it is, it’s also the location of severe suffering.
The Suffering of Psychiatric Disorders
That suffering is something the residents of the town – or any town – are mostly unaware of. It’s the suffering a family experiences when one of their members suffers from depression or anxiety, and traditional treatments have offered little to no help at all.
The discoveries of the 1990’s, like Prozac and all those antidepressants that followed, helped so many people feel better that the 34% who weren’t helped seemed almost swept under the rug at times.
Except in rare cases, where the psychiatrist was truly engaged and compassionate for her patients, and wouldn’t give up.
Doctors like Lori Calabrese, MD, of Innovative Psychiatry. Early in her career, she established her expertise for mixing, combining, titrating, and adjusting medicines, stressing the importance of nutrition and the microbiome, or replacing medicines that interfered … whatever was required to help each patient get better.
Ketamine Treatment Helps People Truly Feel Better
Some decades later, a new way of treating psychiatric disorders like depression, anxiety, opioid use disorders, alcohol use disorders, bipolar disorder, PTSD, OCD, and suicidal thinking emerged. The more researchers tested ketamine, the more excitement grew in the psychiatric community.
When Dr. Calabrese could see there was enough reassurance in the neuroscience community to offer this new treatment to her patients, she cautiously began to bring it into her already-full practice. She had too many patients who needed something more …she had to try it.
Now years have passed. IV ketamine treatment has gained lots of press, and Dr. Calabrese quietly continues to treat her patients with all the advanced and novel treatment options available.
She has attended every gathering of neuroscientists and psychiatrists she could find to learn more. She has called and emailed researchers and other doctors to compare notes. Her quest has been to help her patients get better.
And hundreds of patients have happily thanked her for their new lives of initiative, emotional and physical energy, and the power to enjoy the moments in their lives.
But there’s a problem that troubles her.
Not Every Doctor is Equipped to Provide Ketamine Treatment
Dr. Calabrese is a leading psychiatrist in New England. She completed medical school at Johns Hopkins and trained at Harvard, at Mass General…with years on the clinical faculty at Harvard and Yale. She’s felt the pulse of the research community as ketamine was being tested for psychiatric disorders.
It’s about who is qualified to offer ketamine treatment for depression, as opposed to providing it to treat pain…or using it in the operating theater.
She knows the risks that go with treating severely ill psychiatric patients, what can happen, and the training and experience necessary to respond to those events and treat them effectively. She also knows the eventual outcome if they aren’t effectively treated.
She’s in agreement with the rest of the psychiatric community that seasoned, experienced, psychiatrists who have been schooled in the nuances of ketamine for psychiatric disorders should be the only ones providing it.
Anesthesiologists Lack the Training to Treat Psychiatric Patients
The problem is that there is a growing number of anesthesiologists and anesthetists and ER doctors providing ketamine for psychiatric disorders.
Since anesthesiologists have been providing ketamine in surgery settings for nearly 50 years, they certainly feel qualified to give it. They may even feel they’re the MOST qualified because of their extensive experience with this medicine. But the fact is, their experience is about inducing and maintaining sedation or treating pain.
This is not the experience a physician needs for safely treating psychiatric disorders.
What is necessary is the expertise to adjust the dose and rate so precisely as to ensure the patient is receiving enough of the medicine in his brain to affect change and restoration of synapse structures, but not enough to cause unpleasant or even dangerous side effects.
A properly managed ketamine infusion requires a state-of-the-art infusion pump, to begin with. And it requires a psychiatrist with years of training and deep experience treating psychiatric disorders. Someone who’s also adept with titrating and adjusting doses and rates for the best possible patient relief.
Ketamine Treatment near Granby CT
Ketamine treatment near Granby CT is available just 24 minutes down CT-20 E and I-91. It’s a short drive, and well worth the few extra minutes when you consider the importance of specialized and skillful treatment of your brain.
Since one size doesn’t fit all, but each patient’s brain is unique, request ketamine treatment from someone with the expertise to individualize your psychiatric treatment and the number of infusions you need to get well.
Don’t expect to need another infusion every month or two. When the dosage, rate, and the number of infusions in the initial treatment are expertly tailored to your brain and your needs, you may go several weeks, 4 months, 8 months, a year or longer without needing another.
If you’d like more information about Dr. Calabrese or her deep expertise in providing ketamine treatment for psychiatric disorders at Innovative Psychiatry, call us or send us a quick email.