Why Your Progress Should Be Measured During Ketamine Treatments
One of the things that's important to do while getting your ketamine treatments is to measure how you are feeling. This allows us to identify how responsive you are to the treatments and if any adjustments to the dosage should be made. Measuring how you are feeling can be done in a variety of ways. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how we measure.
Through asking our patients to fill out a survey prior to each infusion, we are able to identify how responsive they are to our treatments.
Measurement-Based Care
How we measure how our patients are feeling is done through a survey. The survey is based on their condition such as for depression, PTSD, anxiety or OCD. And sometimes patients will have multiple issues going on so they'll fill out multiple surveys.
What's great about this is we like to do something called "Measurement-Based Care.” If you are filling out this survey prior to each infusion, we will be able to tell if you're not getting better after several treatments. This is how we can identify patients who are non-responders to ketamine.
On the other hand, if we notice that you are getting better and your scores on the various mood disorder sheets are improving, then we know you are on the right path. We may also want to change the dose or increase the dose depending on how you are doing and feeling.
Measurement-based care doesn’t just happen during the sessions. Post-treatment, the patient is still asked to answer a survey to see how they’re doing.
Post-Treatment Surveys
After you complete the initial six series of treatments, we will then follow up with you typically once a month to see how you are doing. We can also email you those same forms that you would answer at the clinic before. What’s great is that you can now fill out those forms online instead of in person. If these scores hit certain thresholds, then it might be a good time to come back to the clinic for the booster.
Measurement-based care via surveys is indeed important, but knowing how a patient is feeling themselves is even more crucial.
What’s More Important Than Surveys?
Being able to have an objective measure of how you are feeling through your answers in the form is a really big help. What's most important however is how the patient is feeling themselves and we can then supplement it with these numerical values.
And that is the concept of measurement-based care during your IV ketamine treatments. Let me know what you think in the comments below!
Everyone responds to ketamine treatments differently. That is why it is important to measure how responsive they are to the treatment. In this blog post, we explore how we treat our patients through measurement-based care.