Anxiety

What is anxiety?

While everyone experiences stress and anxious feelings from time to time, anxiety disorders involve excessive fear and stress about typically benign situations. In its simplest form, anxiety is an extreme and irrational fear of a future event that causes symptoms like tension and avoidance behaviors.

There are several classifications of anxiety disorders. The most common is generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). If you have GAD, you live with persistent worries and fears that disrupt your regular daily activities, along with symptoms that include:

• Muscle tension
• Feeling on edge
• Poor concentration
• Fatigue
• Insomnia

Other common forms of anxiety include panic disorder, social anxiety, and specific phobias.

How is anxiety treated?

Our Anesthesiologist/Anesthetist team uses ketamine IV infusion therapy to treat anxiety. Your experiences with anxiety may be very different from others, and it’s sometimes challenging to find the right treatment to relieve your symptoms. Many of the medications used to treat anxiety are slow-acting and have to build up in your body to adjust any chemical imbalances contributing to your condition.  

Ketamine IV infusion therapy works differently than traditional anti-anxiety medications. While most antidepressants help your brain slowly produce more serotonin, one of the “feel good” chemicals in your brain, ketamine stimulates your brain’s overall functional capacity.

What should I expect during ketamine IV therapy for anxiety?

An Anesthesiologist/Anesthetist conducts an extensive consultation to determine if ketamine IV infusion therapy is right for you. In most cases, you’ll begin with a series of six infusion sessions at around 0.5mg/kg/hr. Once or twice a week, you’ll undergo hourlong, low-dose IV infusions. You’ll spend 40 minutes relaxing while the IV is administered and 20 minutes recovering. You may experience a relaxed or floating sensation or mild hallucinations that subside quickly when your session is over.

Our Anesthesiologist/Anesthetist may suggest additional maintenance ketamine IV sessions depending on how you respond to treatment and the severity of your symptoms. Maintenance ketamine IV therapy sessions take place every 3-5 weeks to provide long-lasting relief of your symptoms. Eventually, you work with our Anesthesiologist/Anesthetist to increase the time between your treatments.

They carefully monitor you during your IV infusion sessions to ensure all protocols and best practice standards keep you safe.

The ketamine IV infusions should help resolve your symptoms and create mental clarity so you can focus your energy on additional therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy, where you learn to recognize your thoughts and control your behavioral responses.

If you want to learn more about ketamine IV infusion therapy and how it can help control your anxiety, call or make an appointment online today.

At Lone Star Infusion we provide ketamine treatments for depression and other symptoms in Houston, Texas.