![]() ![]() PHOTO BY ZOË MEYERS / INEWSOURCEĪrmy veteran AJ Williams organizes her medication for the week at her home in El Cajon, May 27, 2020. “The thought of taking patients off of a treatment without first consulting with their doctors is simply indefensible,” he said. Stirling is also a reserve judge advocate general officer in the California National Guard and a law professor at the University of Southern California. “It's just unconscionable that the VA would take the action that they have,” said Dwight Stirling, founder and CEO of the Center for Law and Military Policy, a nonprofit think tank in Huntington Beach. Unlike Spravato, IV ketamine is very similar to the intramuscular injections given at Kadima in strength, amount absorbed by the body and psychological effect. The veterans also said the VA hasn’t offered them IV ketamine. They show a VA psychiatrist reassuring one of his patients that the agency had no intention of taking veterans off ketamine - two weeks before the VA began to do just that. Eight months of emails between Kadima and the VA also don’t support the spokesperson’s statement. That is not true, said Williams and eight other veterans, along with Feifel and his staff. Since switching to Spravato she has found herself retreating into more self isolation in her room. PHOTO BY ZOË MEYERS / INEWSOURCEĪrmy veteran AJ Williams watches a movie from her bed in El Cajon, May 27, 2020. I was not given a choice.”Ī San Diego VA spokeswoman told inewsource on May 21 that the agency “has communicated to patients and Kadima leaders” that this is happening because the VA is now offering Spravato and intravenous ketamine at its La Jolla medical center. “I was basically told that it was either their way or the highway,” said AJ Williams, an Army veteran who said she was sexually assaulted during her 14 months in service and developed anxiety and major depression as a result. PHOTO BY ZOË MEYERS / INEWSOURCEĪrmy veteran AJ Williams becomes distressed as she discusses her switch from receiving ketamine treatments at Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute to receiving Spravato treatments at the San Diego VA, May 27, 2020. In some cases, vets were told less than 24 hours before a scheduled appointment that the treatment they’d relied on for years would no longer be an option. Some of the vets had heard about Spravato but were nevertheless stunned when the VA cut off their ketamine at Kadima without giving advance notice to them, their psychiatrists at the VA or Feifel. The San Diego VA has referred at least 32 high-risk veterans to Feifel, a recognized expert in the use of ketamine for mental illness, since he opened Kadima in 2017.īut following President Donald Trump’s hype last year over Spravato, a derivative of ketamine he called “incredible” in combating veteran suicides, the San Diego VA began pulling veterans from Kadima to treat them in-house with the controversial nasal spray. Though ketamine has been used for more than 50 years as an anaesthetic - and recreational drug - it has recently shown promise in derailing suicidal thoughts among patients resistant to other treatments. The VA San Diego Healthcare System was going to stop covering her ketamine treatments. In her farewell email, she cited what had, in part, prompted her decision: ![]() One of his patients, a Navy and Marine Corps veteran who for years had battled PTSD, anxiety and depression at his Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute in La Jolla, had taken her life. ![]() This isn’t real, he thought, then cried out in despair in front of his wife and children. He scrolled through messages he’d missed during the Jewish holiday but stopped on one text, dumbfounded, and read it over and again. David Feifel’s vacation in Israel was wrapping up last October when the psychiatrist turned on his cellphone. Thursday JPHOTO BY ZOË MEYERS / INEWSOURCEĪbove: Navy veteran Larry McMinn relaxes before receiving a ketamine treatment at Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute in La Jolla, May 15, 2020.ĭr.
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