Peter Attia· MD
do you have a scent you ever seen people with these sort of ketamine eyes like these sort of sunken distant like this person has taken too much ketamine in their life and their brain doesn't work as well anymore and i think you can have that with i'm sure there are lots of different drugs that can produce that phenotype i'm sure somebody that's taken far too much cocaine can experience something but but but it i i think it has it's something that you see more commonly i would assume with ketamine than you would with lsd or psilocybin because as you said the frequency of use is much harder with those other drugs like no one is going to i mean i shouldn't say no one i'm someone can do anything but it's far less likely that a person is going to take heroic doses of lsd or psilocybin over and over and over again whereas you could get down that path with ketamine and again it's just anecdotal but you know you see some of these people where you you get the concern it's not just the bladder i mean the cystitis is a very obvious and and tangible objective side effect that can be devastating this is much more subtle it's just something's changed in that person's brain and it's not for the better so am i just sort of making this up and it's possible i am and that i'm just over extrapolating from something else but have you you've been around this more than almost anyone do you have a concern around that yeah no we've done a lot of studies on that as well and i guess maybe i don't know we haven't studied sunken eyes but we have like yeah and it's not it's i mean it sounds silly to say it it's not physically sunken right like like you would with hypothyroidism it's just it's a vacancy is more what i'm describing a kind of dullness yeah and i mean i guess like any addiction one thing i noticed and again anecdotally was just like a lack of you know when people lose their sense of humor and that seems to be like a thing an addiction it's like the the spark has gone out of life which is odd right because what we're giving ketamine for this guy's quite a paradoxical drug in depression is to like put the spark back but then it makes sense you do it too much and maybe that's is gone and we found that you know cognitively we found cognitive impairments and with planning and we found actually um reductions in you know your hippocampus which is involved in processing novelty um and encoding memories and that's the function of that is reduced in some of our brain imaging studies with people who these are people who take daily heavy doses of catamaran so i'm not saying even your non-medical recreational user would show this kind of symptoms so people who take it occasionally but yeah really really really heavy doses i think that's possible