The Taproot Podcast - 💉Interview with Dr. Harrison Irons from Southern Ketamine and Wellness

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

Discover a wealth of free resources: 🆓💡 #FreeResources Learn about medical IV Ketamine treatment from Southern Ketamine and Wellness: 💉✨ #KetamineTreatment Dr. Harrison Irons sheds light on the process and benefits of ketamine infusions: 🌟🌿 #ExpertInsights Uncover the potential of ketamine in treating PTSD, panic disorders, dissociation, mood disorders, and chronic pain: 💪🌈 #HolisticHealing Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Please note that the resources, videos, and podcasts provided on the website and social media platforms are not a substitute for mental health treatment. It is important to seek assistance from a qualified mental health provider in your area. In case of an emergency, please contact the appropriate emergency services. Join the supportive community at Taproot Therapy Collective: 🌱   Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Check out the youtube: https://youtube.com/@GetTherapyBirminghamPodcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone]  Email: [e-mail] The resources, videos and podcasts on our site and social media are no substitute for mental health treatment. Please find a qualified mental health provider and contact emergency services in your area in the event of an emergency to a provider in your area. Our number and email are only for scheduling at Taproot Therapy Collective are not monitored consistently and not a reliable resource for emergency services. #Jung #Therapy #psychology #EMD #DepthPsychology #anthropology #sociology #philosophy #mythology #psychology #psychotherapy

Hey, I'm Joel Blackstock with Taproot Therapy Collective and I'm here with Harrison Irons, Dr. Harrison Irons from Southern Ketamine and Wellness. Thanks for having me. So we're both in the kind of trauma therapy or trauma treatment world. Ketamine treats some stuff other than trauma too. I'm not the expert in that. So if you wanted to say a little bit about ketamine, how it works. Yeah, absolutely. So we use ketamine therapy, IV ketamine therapy to treat not only PTSD, but treatment resistant depression, anxiety, and some chronic pain conditions that we won't get into. And how ketamine works is largely theorized. I don't think there's a certain consensus on exactly how it works,

but there's lots of different mechanisms on how it works, which are vastly different from your traditional oral medications for depression and anxiety, which is why I think it's so novel in the ketamine world work immediately as opposed to waiting for several weeks to months for medications to potentially make a difference or not. Yeah, I mean, I've got people who have a manic depressive episode or they're starting to realize they have bipolar disorder and they want to get medication,

but the medication is like you've got to try one, it gets in your system for three weeks, and then the psychiatrist right now, it's like you may wait six months to see somebody who can do the fancier stuff. You may be rapid cycling, you may be more manic or more depressive and the medication is the picture's all muddied when you do chronic pain treatment how does that how does the ketamine work does it change the way that the brain experiences pain or the way your ability to tolerate chronic pain or what what do you find to be the effect there i have probably the least experience with that so the leading pathophysiology on ketamine for chronic severe neuropathic pain

is when you antagonize the NMDA receptor, you dampen down what we call central windup and sensitization of the spinal cord, which makes your body like hyperalgesic where you experience pain to a much more heightened degree than you normally would. You're able to reverse the hyperalgesia involved in having those chronic neuropathic pain conditions. And there's also a lot of emotional component involved in the pain.

So it's kind of a two bird one, which you touched on. Because when you're able to tolerate the pain emotionally better, the physical manifestation of the pain is also lessened. Yeah, I think a lot of the new stuff or the kind of the good stuff, we figure out that it works and then we spend the next decade trying to figure out how it works. Yeah.

And that's how everything's discovered, by accident. Sure, yeah. I mean, when the, you know, what's his name is putting, you know, his, letting his petri dish mold and realizes that, you know, penicillin can kill, you know, this mold can kill the bacteria. It's just a messy lab, yeah. Yeah, so you gotta make some mistakes, you know. You don't wanna hire anybody who's, you know this mold can kill the bacteria. It's just a messy lab. Yeah yeah so you gotta make some mistakes you know you don't want to hire

anybody who's you know too perfect. No. You don't want to be a perfectionist. I guess it makes sense I mean when I treat chronic pain here in the past that's not really my area of expertise but I've done a little bit it seems like there's like two parts of it and one is that people almost get traumatized by the thing this is hopeless it's going to last forever it's coming back and so there's a panic response which of course makes the pain stronger because now like uh you know i'm panicking and physical sensation is heightened negative experiences are harder to to get out and more obsessive about them but then also that you

know stored trauma from ptsd and things is you know, the subcortical brain is under consciousness. It's the body brain. And a lot of that stuff has a strong somatic association. And so the tension in my back and the way that I felt when you treat that and the pain condition is less, even with chronic medical conditions that, you know, I can't fix, the response is better. What, I mean, can you maybe walk us through like what the experience of ket response is better. I mean, can you maybe walk us through, like, what the experience of ketamine is like? I mean, we've had, there's people that we've referred who've told me about it. I've talked to you a little bit about it. We do a lot of brain spotting, EMDR, somatic therapy, meditation here.

But it seems like, or my experience is, like, that the patients who have, you you know a dopamine disorder that's just making it too hard to even do talk therapy the depression is too hopeless or they're cycling too quickly and that we're not quite able to get brain spotting or something to take seem to have a strong benefit from the ketamine is would you be absolutely so we've you know been doing this for about a year and so we've seen a lot of patients come through and do ketamine therapy for a wide variety of conditions. And everybody has a different experience with ketamine

and everybody's experience with subsequent infusions are different. The first one's not the same as the second one. It's almost like the brain kind of knows what's locked up in the back of the mind that needs to be examined during that infusion and something may have been conquered the first infusion and the second infusion something else happens and we have people try and tell us you know while they're doing the infusion or they're seeing things vividly and they're trying to

kind of speak clearly as to what it's like but it's difficult to interpret um just kind of speak clearly as to what it's like, but it's difficult to interpret. I'm just kind of like a secondhand person, but a lot of people say they can imagine their life in layers, and their brain is processing layers at a time, or they have a deep hole full of depression and trauma, like a well. Sure. And ketamine will force bad stuff up out of the well, and they'll see it, and they'll deal with it, and it'll kind of bubble over. Yeah. And that is now gone, and they have to see what's left of the well and they'll see it and they'll deal with it and we'll kind of bubble over yeah and that is now gone they have to see what's left in the well but just from like a what the ketamine infusion is like it seems to be um like i said variable but overall very pleasant relaxing calming people do have a variety of emotions to it sometimes it's it's happy it's happy, it's sad, it's peaceful, it can be a little erratic and some people can get really

anxious initially and that's it's a lot of kind of how your head space is before we do the infusion can definitely influence how you have a reaction during the infusion. Yeah that's interesting I mean the two things there that kind of jump out is like one I think that you're kind of describing going into a part of the brain that isn't cognitive. It's not thinking and thoughts or language. It's just feeling an emotional experience and a physicality that's associated with that emotional experience. You know, that kind of one big reptile. So exactly. So a lot of times there's metaphors and symbols and stuff, you know, down there that don't quite fit into language and so it's like you're trying to explain what you're realizing but while you're doing that you're losing it because it doesn't quite work yeah the reptilian brain that doesn't have the eloquence of the rest of the cortex it doesn't need it you know the lizard is like this shade of moth brown means

eat it this shade of moth brown means an owl is going to eat me so my body and my emotional system just take over and um yeah that so it doesn't need to pontificate and wonder and it's just gotta move uh but yeah the experience of there being wares to trauma i think that's one of the things that's interesting about trauma treatment is it's like we come in with the symptom here but you're realizing how deep this feeling goes and a lot of times where it came from is not anything that you would ever get to because of my analysis you know if i was sitting back and trying to well maybe you smoke cigarettes because mom did this or whatever it's like i wouldn't get that right but you give somebody a neuro experiential treatment

like like brain spotting or meditation or ketamine. And then the brain wants to heal itself. It's smart. And you go back into that place and people have a wisdom that I would never be able to give them about their self from the outside. It has to be an introspective thing. They're on that journey. And I think that's really cool. It's one of the favorite parts of kind of doing this.

When I did brain spotting for the first time, I was pretty cynical about it. I was like, well, I'll take some stuff in this training but you know like you know i've never really found anything that was super hook line sinker loved it i always take a little bit of everything and put it together and i dissociated and then i felt like this feeling under my life of like not being good enough or being able to connect or something and it was like i'd never looked at that i was like running from and by being funny or being able to connect or something. And it was like, I'd never looked at that. I was like running from and by being funny or being smart or reading or having something to help people. And it was like, Oh my gosh, like this, I'm really having to sit with it. Um, but

I mean, it was more effective. Yeah, absolutely. You know, any kind of like somebody saying, well, you know, you know, exercise or lift weights when you're anxious and really kind of going into the the place uh i mean you you called it the shadow but really going into the places that we never had mastery over we feel unresolved about we spend our life kind of running from and it's where you find yourself and your gifts and your strengths and and i don't know it sounds like a kind of medicine that i've seen be very effective at helping people sounds it's like a very similar to to brain squatting. You have to identify what's the underlying cause.

You can't treat the symptom unless you know what's causing it from the ground level. There's also good healthy habits you can put in place, like exercise and dieting, but unless you know what's causing the sadness, you can do things to try and treat it but unless you address it and uncover it and I'd say that you know patients that come see us you know they do well a lot of time ketamine is not perfect but we've seen clinically about 80% response rate which has been really cool but the ones who do the best they have done they've done work with people like you before and they've kind of dug into what's causing their depression what's causing their ptsd and they've made big gains

but you know ketamine can maybe be the thing that helps push them a little bit more and then they go back to talk therapy and explore what was uncovered during that psychedelic experience yeah i think um and and the research too is like sometimes research isn't perfect and that it's almost like too small in scope you know like you'll see therapy modalities that are more depth oriented research compared to like cognitive therapy and they'll say like okay well this person came in for a headache and you read what's actually happening when they do like psycho analysis or something and the person's like I didn't even know who I was this

changed my life whatever they did your headache symptoms improve i mean a little bit but blah blah and the person's like gushing on the tape but then the researcher is like okay moderately effective but the headache was when they were studying so i mean i i'm sure there's added benefit to ketamine because you know you're saying 80 successful but i but it's not just a drug that treats one thing. Somebody has an experience. You were saying earlier you felt more empathetic afterwards and you felt more patient. I wasn't so impatient that I was going to get the ketamine,

but yet my life has improved on these levels because I was able to do a more holistic medicine. A lot of people will come in and they will do a more holistic medicine. A lot of people will come in and they will do a single infusion and they will kind of discover all these things, just have this big enlightening moment. And they don't necessarily need to pursue further treatments. They just needed to see what was going on that was causing problems. And then they kind of go away and reason through things. And they seem to be a lot better.

Like a lot of people who do, you know, go seem to be a lot better like a lot of people who do you know go down to South America and do like a high wasco retreat or psilocybin retreat and yeah you know they learn all these things they have this this gross introspection without you know associations the ego kind of similar to ketamine they can see like oh wow like you were saying like there's the something that's down there that's kind of triggering things and once you can see it you know how to really actually face it and deal with it sure that's I don't know it seems like that's an important thing to do too because we only get one life you know if you can

really know who you are and really grow into not I'm the only one that can run this experiment of becoming whatever I'm supposed to become and you can avoid it for a long time or kind of get distracted. And it seems like the good medicine is something that is helping you do that, not just for one symptom, but in a more kind of holistic and integrative way. So I guess maybe some of the details about ketamine. I mean, one, it's not covered by insurance right now in Alabama. That's correct, yeah. Unfortunately, the FDA doesn't recognize the authorable use of IV ketamine.

Sure. So we've had some people submit to their insurance, like a super bill of services, and they've gotten some reimbursement on the back end. Okay, I didn't even know they could do that now. Well, I guess it's worth a shot to see if you get any. Yeah, it doesn't hurt to ask. Yeah, and do you want to say anything about kind of why that is or why it is that ketamine is something that isn't being pushed as hard as,

you know, insurance pays for antipsychotics, they pay for antidepressants, they pay for some other things. I mean, systemically, you know, what's going on there that makes that? I think it's a little too new right now, and the FDA has has a very very rigorous uh approval process typically things that are approved in like europe and australia are on the market for like 10 or 15 years before our fda has approved it um and i can also get into like you know the wealth of pharmaceutical companies and the yeah is it patentable right i

mean we research things that somebody owns a patent on. Exactly. Something like N-acetylcysteine, that's just an amino acid that, you know, if you drink too much or you take too much of the Tylenol overdose for suicide, you get an act at the hospital, you know, but that's very helpful for cholesterol. It's very helpful for liver enzymes. It's helpful for a lot of things, but there's not a lot of research in it, except for a couple of countries.

I mean, Switzerland, Germany tend to research non-patentable medications but here it's all you know if somebody has a patent they pay for research if they don't then nobody knows that it works and get it means old you know the drug was discovered in the 60s patent 70s for you know anesthetic use in the operating room and then so this is a whole off-label use of it which we use often off-label uses all the time for different medications but there's there no money to be had in it because, like you said, it can't be patented. Is it a common domain?

Yeah. Or is that the word for it when it's an older drug? I think so. It's like, you know, it's just a generic form now. But they did patent Spravato. That's the intranasal ketamine because every molecule has two isomers. There's like a left and a right isomer, and it's just the left side of an antimer of ketamine. So they can patent that because it's something that's specific.

You know what Prilosec is too? It's like just one rasmer of the same proton. Yeah, that's what they do is they change the isomer and they repatent it. The body doesn't know the difference. It's just that the molecule is at a 45-degree angle and stuff. But patent law allows that to be a new drug. so all of a sudden there's money put into it yeah every five years or whatever the time that runs up they'll tweak it and the repatented it so they can make sure that they keep charging you know for the non-genere kind of the

drug but yes the problem is that you know there's no insurance coverage right now and it's provided is not well covered at all in this state even though it does have you know the patent do you see a huge difference in the way IV and ketamine works versus the way Spravato or something like that works when you're treating trauma or treating chronic pain? Spravato it seems to be well it only comes in two doses so you can't really titrate in the dose it's definitely not the gold standard of administration where you give it in the vein, you have to give it to the nose, and then it kind of just disseminate there. Would different people uptake a different

amount of the medication through the nasal cavity or is it pretty consistent? It's consistent in how the body absorbs it through the intranasal pathway, but the coefficient is still less than than giving in an IV like you can eat something but you have first-pass metabolism in the liver and so the the half-lives that you get in the plasma is just not as predictable IV is a pretty consistent experience very consistent experience yeah I used to work with schizophrenia before I had taproot and did therapy and one of the or did private practice therapy and like we had a lot of med school students that would

like come through the thing and we would like them working with that it was like the mental health or a part of that and generally that was more interesting than just being in the ER it's like so but like I always talk about the way that we need antidepressants. We need more antipsychotics and we need more antibiotics, but that's a risk that a pharmaceutical company doesn't want to take because you have to go out and play with this whole

new thing and then spend a million dollars or millions of dollars and then maybe you don't even discover the drug. We have all these conditions that we can't manage that in the case of something like antibiotics are getting worse. We have all these super germs that we can't kill and no one will spend money to make the drug whereas like a statin is pretty easy to make because it's just a sugar molecule and you played with it a little bit now it's different enough to patent but you know really all of the statins are the same like there's not any benefit but before it goes into

the generic you can kind of fudge research a little bit and say well this one's slightly better for your liver and then you make all this money and everybody with insurance you know is sitting in front of the tv watching the commercials getting the drug and everyone's on it everyone eats the same you know diet that's not great yeah and so it's just this gold mine even though like what are there like 10 of them now i mean we really need them and they're still researching more and more. Yeah, more and more and more. And, yeah, you know, we do have a lot of heart disease in this country for the obvious lifestyle reasons, but there's a lot of mental health that's been kind of stigmatized. Until recently, I feel like it's melting away a little bit more.

It's being addressed and awareness is being raised, but hopefully that will be the catalyst to get more research. Well, the interest is there, and I think especially the younger generation that we're kind of gearing our practice to trying to engage and help, they don't have the same hang-ups about, you know, admitting that there's an unconscious or starting to try and, you know, go to therapy. I mean, what attitude is different? But the economics of it are almost worse. I mean, therapy is more expensive. It's harder to get insurance to pay for it, the interest in trauma drugs and medicine, at least I haven't seen it change that much.

No, no, it hasn't changed much at all. There's, you know, very little that's evolved with that, unfortunately, as of late. Well, so, I mean, is there anything that we don't hit on? It seems like a good overview. I guess maybe people are curious if I am a patient and I've been in therapy and I feel like this conversation has made me want to be interested in getting ketamine, what am I looking at? What do I do?

Like Southern Wellness and Southern Ketamine and Wellness is the name of it? Yeah. You can Google us. Check us out. You got a website that is easy to say? I think it's easy enough. Yeah, okay. It's just southernketamine.com. Southernketamine.com.

You can Google us, and there's a place to do your own research. We try and link a lot of articles. We've got a blog, a lot of frequently asked questions, and then there's a place just to submit information for more information. We can contact you and kind of discuss what to expect. Ketamine is, like we say, it's not covered by insurance. It's not the most affordable thing in the world right now, unfortunately. Each infusion is 375.

The literature that we have is not super vast. And so what we have to look at is that doing an infusion six times in two to three weeks works well for the most people so that's kind of like the general recommendation amongst all ketamine clinics sure to kind of get started individualizes needs pop up exactly but you do see a benefit in somebody who wants to do ketamine also being in therapy oh absolutely and i guess they're because i know that there's i'm starting to see therapists and just in birmingham that work with like they'll help if somebody's going to do an ayahuasca ceremony or psilocybin or whatever they're therapists that are open to that medicine even though they can't prescribe it or do it but they

work with you to help integrate and understand the experience yeah i mean it seems like they're i haven't heard as many people say they work with ketamine but that's something that is findable you know yeah yeah uh yeah we hope to kind of do it more. We've had, you know, some physicians and psychologists and counselors want to learn more about it, come in and check out the facilities. And so hopefully the word, you know, kind of gets out there and that means really safe. Sure. We administer it.

We have a vital sign monitors on, can administer oxygen, can treat, you know, very small adverse effects if they were to arise. Okay. And the whole process from start to finish is usually, you said, about an hour or how long? Yeah, about an hour and a half. Okay. You come in, get an IV, and then start the microdose of the infusion.

The actual infusion's about 40, 45 minutes. They give you some time to kind of recover afterwards. It can be a little groggy, of course. And then once you feel like you're ready to go, get back with your driver. You can't drive, of course, because we gave you an anesthetic drug. It's not safe to drive the rest of the day. And then, yeah, see how you do. A lot of people, you know, we tell them that, you know, the recommendation is six infusions.

But a lot of people want to come in and see what one's like and then they'll be like oh my gosh that was great or I didn't really notice much and so we don't want them to commit to something that they're comfortable with of course yeah well that's that's great well I mean I hope that that's helpful if anyone is curious and wanting to get help in that area or just wanting to kind of providers that want to learn how to work with other providers to get patients with what they need. You said southernketamine.com? Yeah, southernketamine.com. So southernketamine.com if you want to go see Harrison and gettherapybirmingham.com if you want to come see me. But thank you so much for coming and talking to us.

Yeah, thanks for having us. We appreciate it.