Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist, Eric Christensen.

Thank you so much for listening today. I hope you enjoy this episode. As always, go to real life

pharmacology.com. Subscribe there. Get your top 200 study guide. It's a 31 page PDF where I lay out some of the most important clinical practice

pearls that you're actually going to see out there and things that I have certainly seen in practice.

So again, absolutely free to you. And we'll simply update you when we've got new products coming

out as well as obviously new podcasts and free materials as well.

So again, real-life pharmacology.com.

All right.

So the drug today was a request from somebody, I believe, on LinkedIn.

And I wanted to cover it a little bit.

So it's ketamine, which is kind of a unique drug that's

historically been used in veterinarian medicine. It is technically classified as an anesthetic. So in humans,

I guess, it's potentially useful as an alternative in general anesthesia.

Other off-label potential uses, maybe kind of a last-line therapy, rapid treatment in unipolar depression.

Maybe see it off-label, agitation purposes, sedation purposes, maybe rarely for analgesia management as well in the ICU.

So there's a lot of kind of unique things with ketamine, which make it really challenging.

And somebody experienced with using ketamine definitely is recommended.

It's got a couple of different primary mechanisms on how this drug works.

So it's got some opioid agonist activity, you know, generally not to the extent of a true

full opioid agonist, such as, you know, fentanyl, for example, or morphine. But that's one of the

mechanisms that it works by, and it makes sense that there may be some pain relief and sedation associated with that.

It also can block glutamate, which if remember glutamate, it's an excitatory neurotransmitter

...