A different Ketamine of Fish?
Sorry for the awful pun…couldn’t resist it though. I promise nothing so bad appears in either of my books (the novel is coming out tomorrow!)
This is really a footnote to the post I did on psychedelics and is the result of a conversation I had with an ER doctor. He is part of a group of intellectuals I recently started meeting with who discuss some of the deeper issues of life…much of it way too deep for me in fact, especially when it comes to theoretical physics etc. However, we got to discussing NDEs and OBEs and he told me that just a week before he had a phone call from a surgeon who had been performing an operation on his mother (the ER consultant’s mother). The mother had listed in her notes that she has a reaction to Ketamine, and yet the team had still used Ketamine as an anesthetic. Her reaction is that she experiences a full blown OBE. Having received the Ketamine, and had this reaction and still conscious, the surgeon had phoned this woman’s son to calm her down as she was freaking out. He was literally talking to her while she was on the operating table experiencing an OBE. Was it verified? No. Was it a true OBE, or some form of illusory autoscopy in which the brain tricks the person into believing they are seeing themselves? Impossible to know without doing an experiment designed to test this. I will mention it to the doctor next time I see him, but it is highly unlikely his elderly mother would willingly undergo the experience again as it terrified her.
So I did a bit of looking into this, and OBEs with Ketamine are a relatively common phenomenon. The mode of action of Ketamine is quite different from psychedelics and causes dissociative experiences. This paper written by a group from Ryerson in Canada describe the incidence of OBEs.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21324714/
I contacted the author of the paper to ask if any further work had been done to try prove OBEs, and he said that there hadn’t been and that the phenomenen was almost certainly neurologically induced.
For me the key is complete lack of veridical OBEs for Ketamine induced OBE-like experiences. Given its widespread use in medicine, if the OBEs were true OBEs, then you would have hundreds if not thousands of veridical OBEs – as we do with NDEs.
In conclusion, I do not believe that Ketamine causes genuine OBEs.
AwareofAware 