The Therapy for Black Girls Podcast is a weekly conversation with Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed Psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, about all things mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves.
When you think of psychedelics, you may conjure images of magical mushrooms and colorful hallucinations, but did you know that psychedelics are being used in the healthcare space to treat individuals who suffer from chronic pain, anxiety, and depression? To dive into the world of psychedelics and their medical utility, this week I'm joined by Dr. Danielle Doyle, a double board-certified anesthesiologist and pain doctor dedicated to providing comprehensive integrated wellness, psychedelic education, and services for individuals dealing with chronic pain. During our conversation we discussed how psychedelics such as ketamine are effective for patients who deal with chronic pain, how Dr. Doyle and others are working to increase equity in psychedelic care, and how to discover if ketamine care is the right course of treatment for you.
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Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Doctor Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to find a therapist in your area, visit our website at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. While I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional. Hey, y'all, thanks so much for joining me for session three twenty of the Therapy Black Girls Podcast. We'll get right into our conversation after a word from our sponsors. Which friend are you? And your sister circle? Are you the wallflower, the peacemaker, the firecracker or the leader? Take the quiz at Sisterhoodhels dot com slash quiz to find out, and then make sure to grab your copy of Sisterhood Heels to find out more about how you can be a better friend and how your circle can do a better job of supporting you. Order yours today at Sisterhoodheels dot com. When you think of psychedelics, what comes to mind? Is it images of magical mushrooms and colorful hallucinations. Did you know that psychedelics are being used in the healthcare space to treat individuals who suffer from chronic pain, anxiety, and depression. To dive into the world of psychedelics in their medical utility, I'm joined by doctor Danielle Doyle, a double board certified in caesiologists and pain doctor dedicated to providing comprehensive and integrated wellness, psychedelic education and services for individuals dealing with chronic pain. Danielle is also the co founder of Culture Therapeutics, a specialized ketamine and psychedelic practice that offers comprehensive solutions for mental health and chronic pain to underresourced populations. In our conversation, doctor Doyle and I discussed how psychedelics such as ketamine are effective for patients who deal with chronic pain, how doctor Doyle and others are working to increase equity in psychedelic care, and how to discover if ketamine care is the right course of treatment for you. If something resonates with you while enjoying our conversation, please share with us on social media using the hashtag TVG in Session or join us over in the sister Circle to talk more about the episode. You can join us at community dot therapy for Blackgirls dot Com. Here's our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today, doctor Doyle.
Thank you for having me on, Doctor Joy.
So I want to hear a little bit about your formal education in how you got introduced to the world of ketymines.
Sure. So, I'm doctor Doyle and I'm a double board certified anesesiologist and pain doctor. I'm from the DC, Maryland area. I'm a proud Howard University graduate and I went to the University of Maryland for med school and I also went there for my Interventional Pain fellowship. And while I was there, I had one of the only black women as a fellowship director, doctor Thelma Wright, and I had an interest in Ketymine therapy and she encouraged me to study that for my fellowship project. And I saw how many people could get relief and benefit with Ketymine for pain management. As an anesthesiologist, I had used Ketymine in the operating room and I'd had patients for cover from catastrophic injuries and their pain was so well managed with ketymine, and it really left an impression upon me. And also I have an interest in health equity, and I wanted this medication and these sort of substances and medicines to be available for all people with our full consents and with our full permission. So most recently my role as an assistant professor in DC, and I helped teach residents, patients, and medical students about pain management and about ketamine care. And I helped run DC's most inclusive ketymine care program for the last several years and it was just amazing being able to help patients with pain and mental health in that way.
So what is kenemine, doctor Doyle? And it feels like we are going to get into this, but it feels like there's a lot of misinformation about what it is and how it's used. But it's clearly something that has been used in medical settings. You're saying you've used it as a part of your work as an anesthesiologist. So what is ketamine and how is it traditionally used?
Ketamine is a medication. It's considered what we call an anesthetic medication. So it was originally developed in the early nineteen sixties, so about sixty years ago. Ketamine is considered by the World Health Organization as an essential medicine, so that means that it's a medicine that they think every patient should have access to. And when they used it for anesthesia for humans and for animals, they noticed that patients were getting intense pain relief. And also along the way they noticed that it really helped with mental health and depression. And so now it's very common to use ketamine in the hospital to treat acute and sometimes chronic pain, and it's also being used more and more in the mental health setting to treat depression anxiety PTSD along with other mental health conditions.
Got it and what kind of class of medicine is it?
So it's a Schedule three medication legally, that means you need a prescription for the medicine. It is a medicine that is made in a lab. It's synthesized in a lab by chemists and experts, so that means that it's made in a very controlled way, So that means somebody comes in, there's a protocol on how to make it. They have a certain mixture of chemicals, there's a certain protocol that everyone's washing their hands, bottling the medicine in the same way, putting an expiration date on it, storing the medicine in a certain way, and then there's regulations on how the medication should be dispensed and used and also disposed of.
Gut it okay, okay. So how does kenamine impact the body?
So Kennybine can be taken into the body in several ways. I've prescribed it as a cream that patients can put on the skin if they have nerve pain. It can be used internasally through the nose for pain or for mental health. It can also be taken by mouth as a tablet or a pill. And it's most powerful, and the way that I prescribe it most commonly is through an iv or an intravenous route into the body. That's if you get blood drawn, or if you look and you see the veins in your hands, that means we put a little iv in and we give the medicine so it can flow through the body. When that ketamine hits your bloodstream, it is absorbed by the brain and by the spinal cord, and that is really where things start to get interesting. It works in the brain on a receptor called the NMDA receptor, and it causes a downflow effect that increases a substance called BDNF, or brain derived neurotrophic factor, and that factor helps kind of almost make some of the connections in the brain very malleable or changeable. And it means that for mental health and for pain, some of those processes in the body that are perceiving pain, that are perceiving the way you interpret your mental health or the way your body processes move it can help change those processes.
Got it, And that is how you use it most often. And your work is with chronic pain.
It's with chronic pain. There's a lot of overlap with chronic pain and depression and anxiety. So chronic pain is if you have pain for more than three to about six months. At that point, the pain can sometimes get almost ingrained into the nerves and into your nervous system. It's kind of like if you get a shirt with a stain on it. The longer it sits there, the harder it is to get out. The body treats chronic pain the same way. So if we're not able to treat and cure that pain immediately, and sometimes it can get harder and harder to treat. So I'll typically use ketamine for chronic pain, but most of my patients, unfortunately, once you get into that chronic pain setting, about seventy five percent of people will develop depressive and anxiety symptoms.
You mentioned that you typically like to prescribe it intravenously as opposed to like appeal. Is there a peal form of ketamine?
There is a pill form of ketamine, and ketamine can be made by a compounding pharmacy into a pill form. It's not a brand name medication. It's not an over the counter medication. So if your doctor even gives you a pill prescription and you walk into your average pharmacy, they probably won't have it. But it is made into a pill form by special compounding pharmacies, and I have used it for patients sometimes that use ketamine infusions, but the effects wear off after a few months. Sometimes I'll prescribe a ketamine by mouth or pill to take several times a week until they can get in for their next infusion. So I've used it a lot that way, but I've used it a little more in the infusion form. It's also available as an injected form, so we can just inject it into the muscle. And so that's another way that we can use ketamine as well.
Got it okay? And who is typically going to be a good candidate for kenemi as treatment?
So typically with ketamine therapies, we want someone that is not allergic to ketamine, no history of severe heart disease issues. That means no heart failure, no irregular heart rhythms, no severe kidney or liver disease. You don't want to be pregnant while you're taking ketamine. You want to make sure patients that have a history of psychosis or schizophrenia that you closely evaluate those patients for ketamine candidacy and will often collaborate with their psychiatrists or psychologists to make sure that that's a possible choice. Many times it may not be, and so you want to do a full medical screen before you introduce ketamine. But ideally the patient has a reason to use ketamine, meaning that they have a chronic pain syndrome like nerve pain. Things like diabetes or radiation therapy autoimmune diseases sometimes can increase risk for nerve pain, cancer related pain. I've used it for sickle sell related pain, pain after amputations, migraines, fibromyalgia, or mental health issues like depression or anxiety.
So it doesn't sound like ketamine is necessarily like a first choice for pain, Like you may try a couple of things before you go to ketymene. Or would you start somebody at ketamine even on their initial appointment, not as.
An initial therapy. I would hold off on using ketamine until the patient has tried traditional therapies. But you want to make sure that traditional therapies are tried carefully. So as an interventional pain doctor, I take a very multidisciplinary approach to pain management. So someone comes in, I want to ask them, have you tried physical therapy? What kind did you try? If you didn't like that kind, let me find you a kind that will better suit your needs. Have you tried medications? There are several classes of medicines that we often use for migraines, nerve pain, cancer pain. If you've tried them, were you on the correct dose for the correct amount of time to give it an adequate trial. Also, I've done a lot of interventional injections and implants for chronic pain syndromes, and I see if the patient wants something like that, or if they want to trial that, sometimes that can be effective too. So it's really having an open and honest dialogue with the patient to say, these are all the things that I can do to help treat your chronic pain, and you can kind of choose the things you're comfortable with, or if you're uncomfortable with something, let's have a conversation about maybe why you're uncomfortable, and then we work collaboratively to come up with the plan. And I may mention that, yes, we do have ketamine as an option, so we'll start with option A option b obstion C. But typically ketamine is reserved for patients that don't respond to traditional therapies.
Got it, And the list of things that you shared when I who would be a good candidate and the kinds of things you're screening out for leads me to believe like this is a pretty strong medication, right, Like it sounds like there may be some heart impact, like kidney and so it sounds like it can be a pretty hard medication on the body.
It depends. It's all dose dependent, so all substances can be dangerous if they're not used at the right dose with the right patient, with the right supervision. That's something I explained to patients when I have them undergoing anesthetic. Like many years ago, everybody was very scared of propofol because of everything that happened with Michael Jackson. Propofol is a wonderful medication. If you're giving me or my family member a general anesthetic, I would prefer you use that versus the alternatives. But when patients come to me with that concern, you really have to validate them and say, I understand why you would be apprehensive about using something like that, But because I know your medical history, I know exactly the dose to you, I know exactly how to monitor you, and how to treat any side effects of the medicine, we can come up with a plan that's going to be the safest for you.
Got it more from our conversation after the break. So what do these sessions typically look like with a patient? Like if you're doing an infusion, what do the sessions look like?
So it depends on the indication or the reason that we're doing the session. So in my new company that I've co founded, Culture Therapeutics, we're bringing safety, expertise and culture to the ketymine care experience, and so we want to have a setting that is conducive for all types of people to benefit from keteviine. So we pay a lot of attention to the setting where the patient is getting the infusion. So you want to meet with the patient beforehand, do a careful medical screening. You want to have a setting where the patient feels relaxed, feels comfortable and respected, and they know what to expect. Generally, if you're using ketamine for pain relief or for mood, we'll set an intention with the medication and we'll say this is what we can reasonably expect to happen. Do I have a particular therapeutic goal? Do you want to sleep better? Do you want to be able to walk a little bit further? Do you want to have more social interactions? Do you just want to be able to kind of sit and watch TV without as much pain? Because we have shown with ketamine that setting an intention can be very powerful. And then during the infusion itself, we try to have things around that are comforting to the patient, so we may provide call me music and music is very often personal and cultural in nature, so we make sure that that is something the patient can really benefit from. A lot of times when people think about psychedelics or ketamine therapies, they kind of imagine like more eurocentric euro American type music, Pink Floyd and things like that. But we use more traditional drum therapies, more R and B, more soul music for patients or whatever their preferences. And after the infusion, we have the patient do some after work and that means they kind of go back to that initial intention that they set and they start keeping track of their pain scores and their mood scores, especially for the first seventy two hours after a session.
How long did the session last?
It depends for mood. Usually the session will last forty five minutes to an hour. For chronic pain will often go up to three to four hours, And for chronic pain often our doses much higher.
And is it kind of like you would if you were getting like a blood infusion, Like you're just laying there with the ivy and like letting the ketymene kind of.
Drip exactly, so the ketemy would be given over an exact certain period of time through the ivy infusion. Like if you know anyone who gets iron infusion, or hydration infusion or if you know you're feeling dehydrated, and people will go and get IV hydration infusions. It infuses in over that time and then when it's done, you remove the IV, put a band aid on. The patient will be evaluated for about a half hour to an hour, and then they have someone take them home.
Got it. And when you said for those like first seventy two hours after the session, are they kind of like journaling? Are they meeting with somebody every day? How does that work?
So, depending on what their diagnosis is, they may have a meeting with their psychologists, they may do some afterwork and therapy workbook that we have for the patient. And it doesn't have to be an extensive set of homework. It's not meant to burden the patient, but it's really just taking some time during the day to think about what happened and to think about the therapeutic goals.
Got it? And typically, how are people reporting feeling after sessions? Like what can someone expect after they've had a session.
So the day of the infusion or the day of the session, you may have a little bit of grogginess. So we tell patients not to drive or to sign any contracts that day, and you may want to go home with someone with you, eat a light dinner or a light snack later in the day, be on the lookout for any nausea. Some people get a little bit of nausea with ketamine, but usually I would provide an anti nausea medicine to either go home with or take before they leave. And then patients usually report that they sleep very well that night because they're still a little bit sleepy, and over the next several days they really pretty much feel like back to baseline.
Got it okay? And as they are getting the infusion, are you or someone else sitting there talking to them or is it kind of like a silent thing and they're just listening to like the music list that they may be prepared.
Typically it's the music list they've prepared, so if they have depression or exactnciety or PTSD, sometimes we do provide additional guidance during the infusion itself. People can get varying levels of sedation with it, and sometimes getting stimulation or talking to them too much during it can be a bit too much, so I'll usually say make sure your morning's really calm. If you tend to be in an anxious state, will be with you. And if you feel a little anxious during the infusion, because sometimes it does cause a little bit of anxiety. Sometimes people might see really mild hallucinations. It can be a very vulnerable time for the patient. So if someone is feeling a little anxious, will evaluate them for an anti anxiety medication that they can receive, and we'll kind of just talk to them a little bit and we'll say, hey, doctor Doyle, I'm sitting right here with you. I'm feeling fine. You're in the office, you're safe, your vitals look perfect. Take a couple deep breaths, and if you're not feeling better in a minute or two, I'll give you an anti anxiety medicine. But you're doing great, And usually that works about ninety percent of the time.
Okay, And how soon would they need another session? Like how long do you expect the impact to last?
So at culture Therapeutics, we typically follow the best evidence treatment protocols. So for chronic pain, when I was a professor, we would do two to three sessions of a higher Joe's ketamine within a week and patients would get good reliefs. Sometimes for three to six months with that. For mental health conditions, the typical protocol is six sessions over about three weeks, and that can last up to six to twelve months depending on your response.
Got it okay? So in your experience, have you noticed or observed a reluctance from black patients to trying ketamine.
I think so, and I think it's justified distrust. I think being a doctor, especially a pain doctor especially, I've always worked in areas where I'm within my own community in DC, or in Baltimore or in Georgia, and so I think we do have to acknowledge that it's been a very fraught road for black people to deal with the medical system, and when it comes to things like pain and mental health, we have to really address it at the forefront. So at Culture Therapeutics and at my prior practice, we always have the idea that you have to get belief to get to relief. So it's that belief to relief pathway. It's hard to treat somebody for something if you don't believe them. So when I often sit with the patient, the first thing I do is I validate them, and I say, I know you're in pain. I know you didn't just get up this morning, put your clothes on, get your hair together, get on the metro, come to the office, wait, do all the paperwork, and then come in here because of nothing. I know something is going on. I'm going to be your partner in trying to figure out what is going on, and I can answer any questions that you have. A frequent question or concerned that I get is that a lot of Black people they don't want to be experimented on, which is very understandable given our history, like with the experiments that went on in Alabama with the Tuskegee Airman and just throughout our history in the United States. So I explained to them that this is the evidence that I have. No medication is perfect. No medication works for everyone one hundred percent, but there are things I can do to safeguard your care and monitor your care. And some patients may have a preference for more natural substances, and that's fine. You know, for a long time, I was one of the only providers in DC who would prescribe medical cannabis for paying patients, especially for patients with DC Medicaid or medical assistance. That company a lot of African American patients, and I think explaining kind of like I did before, that it's synthesized in the lab, and this is how it's made and this is how it gets to you. I think that can help a lot too, And just explaining it like I would explain it to any patient, and kind of taking the time to answer concerns.
So why did you feel the need to work as a co founder in starting Culture Therapeutics, Like was there a concern that maybe black and brown communities were not getting this kind of care in other places?
I think we are always at a disadvantage historically when it comes to access to medical care, especially to treatment resistant care, and so we face this double barrier where we have issues getting the additional therapies, and then if we may find that those don't work, then we have issues accessing alternative therapies. And we created Culture Therapeutics to kind of answer that question, to bring that safety and that expertise, and to demystify some of these medicines and to let people know that this is a part of our history kind of using medicines like this, This is not necessarily a white thing or an indigenous thing or anything like that. This is also an African thing. This is an African American thing, and we formed our practice as a love letter to our community because we want to make sure that we have a stake in these sort of therapies going forward.
You know, I often hear this kind of stereotype that a lot of physicians, it seems, and other medical professionals have when they have black patients right about being medicine seeking, right, or even having higher thresholds of pain. Can you speak to that and maybe any of the work that you have to do around spelling some of those myths.
So definitely, it's definitely a misconception that black patients are drug seeking. And I teach medical students and residents. I dissuade them from describing patients that way or writing that in a medical note, and to say, if they suspect someone has a substance use disorder, to ask them and discuss it with them in a frank nature. I educate everyone that people of color, black people do not have higher pain thresholds. We do not make up pain, and we do not have higher rates of addiction or substance use disorder. Actually, there's some studies that say our rates might be slightly lower than other groups, especially in North America, but it's definitely something that patients encounter when they are in the hospital setting many times unfortunately.
M So, it does feel like there is like a renewed interest. It feels like maybe people were kind of using kenemine maybe years ago, I think specifically in more mental health kinds of spaces, and it feels like there's now a renewed interest, but also some pushback. Can you talk to me a little bit about what's going on generally in the field and like what is the field's reception to using ketamine for both mental health concerns and pain.
So, I think right now it's kind of like a renaissance period for ketymine and for psychedelic care in the United States. A lot of these substances have been around for a very long time. Over the last five to ten years, you've seen more commercialization of ketymine use. You've seen more venture capitalists and larger corporations forming ketamine care companies and mailing ketymine out to patients for home use. And with the COVID era, there was actually the suspension of something called the Ryan Height Act, and the Ryan Height Act was something that was put forth about twenty years ago to decrease substance misuse from controlled substances, and so they put the DEA put certain rules in place, like you need to see the patient in person, you need to make sure that the patient has a condition that qualifies. And some of those rules were suspended briefly during the COVID period because you know, people couldn't get out of their homes. But now the emergency COVID period is being legally ended by the government. So a lot of those companies now are some of them are shutting down, some of them are having to completely change the way that they practice, and a lot of the companies that weren't growing organically have shut down.
Got it more from our conversation after the break So, I know I mentioned earlier that it feels like there's often a lot of misinformation related to kenemine and psychedelics. What are some of the most common myths that you hear about ketamine and psychedelics and can you put those to rest for us?
Sure? So common misconceptions that we've seen at Culture Therapeutics. One is that ketamine will cause people to lose their sanity, or that ketamine is gonna cause some sort of psychotic break in patients, and that people who commonly use it are going to have that as a very common side effect. And traditionally with what we've seen patients who get ketamine sometimes there can be some short lasting, you know, agitation or anxiety depending on who takes it. But in general that's a misconception and that's why we also carefully screen to see if someone has psychosis or schizophrenia prior to trying a trial of ketamine. I think another myth is that it increases the risk for addiction and that people will develop an addiction to ketamine immediately. And that's where close medical care comes into play. So if someone is receiving ketamine, they should be screened like anyone receiving any controlled substance, they should be ACTSD. You know, do you have a strong family or personal history of substance use disorder. Do you have a strong history of adverse childhood events or or a history of abuse, do you have a history of alcohol use disorder? And you should kind of come up with a risk factor or a risk score for a patient and let them know that in general you may have a higher or lower risk of substance use disorder based on your history. It might just be a genetic factor, an environmental factor. With that in mind, these are the steps we can take to safeguard you from that. But by and large, patients who use ketamine and a therapeutic setting under physician guidance very rarely develop a ketemine use disorder.
Got it, Got it, so, doctor Doyle. And this may be my ignorance because I feel like I hear people talk about mushrooms, but I'm not quite sure like how that fits into all of this. I feel like maybe people are using mushrooms as like a clearly not physician assisted psychedelic kind of treatment. Where do mushrooms fit as a part of this conversation.
So, mushrooms are psilocybin, that's the botaqu as psychedelic plants. It's a mushroom and it works in the brain on the serotonin pathways, and so it can cause patients to sometimes hallucinate, dissociate a little bit. It can cause increase sociability, and patients can have kind of existential experiences. Some people will have ancestral experiences, some people will have profound experiences where they gain insight about how they want to live their lives. And it's interesting because a lot of those medicines do work on the serotonin pathway. A lot of antidepressants, a lot of pain medicines work on the serotonin pathway in the body, and so does psilocybin, and so do chemicals like LSD. So now we're trying to untangle why a lot of these things work for mental health and why they work for chronic pain. So there are a lot of states now like Oregon, that are legalizing psilocybin for public use, so patients are able to grow this or on their own. And I think that is a new area that is going to have a lot of growth, just like the cannabis industry and cannabis care industry had a lot of growth. I think this is a new area for growth. And I just say, you know, have healthy skepticism and have safety protocols in place with substances, and be careful about what you put in your body because again, you may not know dose, you may not know potency of what you're taking. And always be mindful of what the laws are where you live. There's still certain places where you can't consume cannabis and in the US now, the majority of places there may be some legal repercussions for psilocybin use, but hopefully some of those laws we think going through Congress right now, there are a lot of acts that are passing to provide more access to that.
So what are some safety measures that patients who are interested in perhaps having kadamine sessions? What kinds of things should they be looking for in safety midas to put in police to make sure they're getting good, adequate care.
So you want to go to a provider that has a lot of experience with ketamine care. So at Culture Therapeutics, myself and my co founder, we have over two decades of experience with ketamine care for pediatrics, adolescents, and adults. We've taken care of a lot of patients who have medical conditions and ketamine. You want to make sure that you know your full health history, allergy history, and once you found an expert provider, you want to make sure that you have the time and the space to try the therapy, so that you have time set aside for an infusion and you have time afterwards to do the afterwork after the infusion.
And I would imagine that it sounds like especially you know the way that you practice. It's a very team oriented thing, and so you're also maybe talking with their primary care doctor or other physicians or other medical professionals they've worked with. Can you talk a little bit about that approach.
Absolutely, the patient has certain medical conditions, like if they have bladder issues or a liver disease history, kidney disease history, heart disease history, I would definitely want to see their medical records or talking with their primary care provider. If they have a psychologist or a psychiatrist that has reservations about them using ketamine therapy, I would want to know what those reservations might be. If they have prior history of treatments that they've tried, I would want to know, Okay, what exactly did you try, what worked, and why didn't it work? And it really is a multidisciplinary group approach. So within psychedelic care and within ketamine care, there are people who can serve as guides that can sit with the patient during the therapies and do follow up work with them on the intentions that they've set. They're psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists who are also very interested in the area. They're antithesiologists who have experience providing high doses of very potent medications and how to provide that to a patient in a way that makes sure they're vital signs and their overall safety needs are met. So I think it's an exciting time and I think it's creating this really wonderful mosaic of care for patients that it's going to provide a really beneficial therapeutic response.
So, doctor, do I want to go back to something that you mentioned earlier because it just occurred to me. So you said that you are sometimes seeing good results for mood improvement for clients who struggle with anxiety and depression. And is it that the ketamine works on different receptors because typically when we hear about medication for anxiety and medication they tend to be like SSRIs or some other And so are you seeing that it's effective because it's working on this did you say B and DF Is that the mechanism for why they are effective.
There are a few reasons we think it might be effective. It works on a receptor called the NMDA receptor, there's a receptor called the AMPA receptor, and all of those things are causing neural plas plasticity, so they're causing a malleability almost like if you had clay or plato. So we're kind of reforming some of those connections in the brain that have gone a little haywire when you have chronic pain or depression, and so it's really able to reset things. And ketymine is interesting because it works for both pain and depression, but it's not that unique because a lot of medicines work for pain and depression that we currently use, like tricyclic antidepressants, medicines like deloxetine, which is symbalta, those use the serotonin pathway and they're very commonly used to treat nerve pain.
Got it, Okay? And I'm also curious, So I know a lot of times when psychiatrists and other medical professionals are prescribing things for anxiety and depression, they will ask about a family history of like other medications that have worked. Right, So would it be the case like if I had a mom who has had depression in ketamine was found to be the most effective thing, would that then make me a better candidate? Like if I were strungruggling with depression to also maybe start at ketemine because my mom has had good experiences with it or not.
I think it's a really good question. I don't know that we've studied it exactly to say that, yes, that would happen. But I believe a good family history and a good personal history is always really important. So if a patient came to me and shared that with me, I would certainly think they had every other reason to have ketamine. I would say, well, this is a good prognostic indicators. That makes me think you might respond because perhaps we have similar genetic pathways causing the depression. So I think it would be something that would increase your risk of getting a good response.
Got it. So you mentioned that there are currently legislation looking at, you know, expanding some of the laws. Can you talk about like some of the roadblocks that people like you and other black people in this space are facing in terms of getting legislation passed through.
I think a lot of times with people of color, black people who are getting into the industry, a lot of times we get there a little a little bit later, or we don't have as many resources. I think there are a lot of parallels with the cannabis industry where in a lot of areas, a lot of the companies or wide owned companies or venture capitalists owned companies or companies that have received outside grants resources, the majority of those funds tend not to flow within our community, so that can definitely be a barrier. However, I think with ketymine care and psychedelic care, I'm actually been surprised by how accepting a lot of legislators have been. So a lot of people who work in legislation or work in DC have been pretty accepting of this, and I don't know if that's because they've had the benefit of ketymine care. When I worked in DC and worked at a really large hospital and we took care of a lot of people who had very high powerful positions in governments and a very robust ketymine care program, and it was people like doctor Karen William, doctor Paul Dangerfield. They were really pioneers and getting patients ketamine care for the last twenty to thirty years, and also doctors like may Chin and so I think over time, as they themselves have had access to the most cutting edge therapies, that has likely trickled down to their feelings about some of the legislation, because everybody is affected by this. It doesn't matter how powerful you are, if you're in the White House, if you in Congress. Everybody is affected by pain, everybody is affected by mental health issues. You're equally susceptible to those things. The difference usually is what access to care that you have.
Anything we didn't get to, doctor Doyle, that you feel like you want to make sure people know, so I just.
Want them to note it's okay to advocate for yourself in terms of pain management. There are a lot of disparities in pain management and mental health care, and I want people to feel comfortable embracing some of the alternative therapies that are available. I don't want people to lose hope. So if you've tried everything and there's still things that you haven't tried, just know that there's an opportunity there and if we can get you to the right provider in the right space, you can have a really good result.
Well, this has all been so incredible, doctor Doyle, I really appreciate you sharing this information with us. Tell us where people can stay connected with you. What is your website as well as any social media handles you'd like to share.
Sure, so again, thank you, doctor Joy. I'm doctor Doyle and you can find me at www dot Culturtheapeutics dot com and as Culture Therapeutics on Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook and Instagram.
Perfect, well, we should include that in the show notes. Thank you so much for spending some time with us.
Absolutely, thank you for all your great questions.
I'm so glad doctor Doyle was able to share her expertise with us today. So learn more about her and her work. Visit the show notes at Therapy from Blackgirls dot com slash Session three twenty and don't forget to text two of your girls right now and tell them to check out the episode. If you're looking for a therapist in your area, visit our therapist directory at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com slash directory. And if you want to continue digging into this topic or just be in community with other sisters, come on over and join us in the Sister Circle. It's our cozy corner of the Internet designed just for black women. You can join us at community dot Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. This episode was produced by Frieda. Lucas, Elise Ellis, and Zarius Taylor. Editing was done by Dinnison Bradford. Thank y'all so much for joining me again this week. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all real soon. Take good care. Which friend are you and your sister circle? Are you the wallflower, the peacemaker, the firecracker or the leader? Take the quiz at Sisterhoodheels dot com slash quiz to find out, and then make sure to grab your copy Sister Hood Heels to find out more about how you can be a better friend and how your circle can do a better job of supporting you. Order yours today at sisterhood Heels dot com.