This podcast is sponsored by Kalypso Wellness Centers.
If you or someone you know has depression, PTSD, fibromyalgia, or chronic pain this episode is a must listen.
If other treatments don’t seem to be helping, this episode may have options that many, even in the medical community, are not be familiar with.
With a success rate above 70%, Kalypso Wellness Centers is having great success treating those conditions with Ketamine.
Listen in as I chat with Dr. Cannon Clifton about how Kalypso got started, how they’re helping patients and finding amazing success with their treatments. Depression does not have to be destiny.
SHOW NOTES:
[00:55] Starting Kalypso Wellness Centers – Two Brothers in Medical School
[04:55] Ketamine background, side effects, and mitigating side effects
[07:37] Discussing the safety, connotations, and truth about Ketamine
[09:26] The science behind Ketamine (in lay terms)
[12:17] Treatment timelines, frequency, and how long treatments last
[16:29] The success rate at Kalypso Wellness Centers
[19:24] How to connect someone you know that needs help with Kalypso Wellness Centers
[23:17] Getting Treatment In Frisco
[27:15] Beyond Depression, other conditions that benefit from Ketamine treatment [31:00] How to connect with Kalypso Wellness Centers
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Transcript
Scott Ellis:
Scott Ellis: Welcome to the Frisco podcast. I’m your host, Scott Ellis. And today we are here with Dr. Cannon Clifton from Kalypso wellness centers. Dr Clifton, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me out, Scott. Good to have you on board. So we’re here to talk about a subject that is near and dear to my heart. So one thing a lot of people don’t know about me is I have a degree in psychology and I worked in a clinical setting for a little while, eventually got out of that. But um, it’s still something that, that I think that experience gave me a different perspective on the topic we’re going to talk about today and that is depression and the treatment of depression. And so you have co founded something called the Kalypso wellness centers and you guys have a, I guess a unique approach to how you’re treating depression and some of the success that you’re having with that. So let’s start there. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into Kalypso and treating depression.
Dr. Cannon Clifton: Definitely. Well, uh, I started off, uh, initially as a chemical engineer and actually worked for five years up at an oil refinery up in Minneapolis. Uh, it got to the point where somebody was gonna have to start making the gasoline, but it just wasn’t going to be me anymore. And at the time, my brother was in medical school and I started talking to him and, uh, I realized that why I really wanted to figure out how to get into medical school so I can still do science related stuff but maybe help more people. Uh, fast forward a bunch of years and went to medical school and ended up doing residency and got my, uh, a certification in anesthesiology and was practicing as a anesthesiologist in San Antonio for about eight or nine years. And about that time, my brother who also decided to specialize in anesthesia, he had moved to San Antonio as well.
And we were in the same group. And we started looking to say, okay, what can we do? We keep getting the subset of patients that, that need more help, uh, whether it be chronic pain or depression or anxiety. In San Antonio where we practice, there’s a lot of veterans that have PTSD. And we started coming across as research of patients that would get low dose ketamine infusions that was having pretty remarkable results. And so then we started talking to some other pain physicians that are now our partners. And they said, yeah, we’ve heard about that, but we just don’t have time to kind of explore it more. And so my brother and I said, well, we’ll make time out of our anesthesiology schedule and let’s start seeing some of your patients. And so we saw 10 of their worst pain and depressed patients and remarkably nine out of 10 of those patients got way better.
And we said, man, we might be onto something here to get a new type of treatment for these patients. And so then from there we said, well, let’s, let’s do all the research. Let’s see what’s going on. And one of the things we found was that unfortunately, the medicine itself, ketamine, while it’s highly effective for helping these, it also had a pretty bad side effect profile. Uh, the literature States that 40 to 60% of patients, you know, can’t tolerate getting infusions. And we found that for our first 10 patients, almost exactly half of ’em said, boy, that really helped me, but I don’t know if I want to do that again. Um, and medicine, there’s an old joke that if I come up with a cure for cancer, if it causes Alzheimer’s disease, not a very good cure. Right. Um, so that’s when we said, well, let’s go back to the drawing board.
I mentioned I was a chemical engineer. We started looking at more of the organic chemistry literature. Uh, one of our partners, Dr. Mark Moran, he’s got a master’s in pharmacology. Um, my brother I mentioned, he’s always just been kind of a research nut. And so we started looking at all different types of things that we can say, what can we add in to help put the ketamine to make it either work better? And maybe more importantly have less side effects. And, um, you know, I’m sure we’ll talk about it here in a bit, but that’s kind of how we got going and started Kalypso. Uh, again, it was a purely out of that there’s gotta be something better to help these patients with their depression and anxiety, PTSD, their chronic pain, their migraines, fibromyalgia, and, uh, you know, from there we were kind of off and running and, and that’s, you know, I’m here talking with you now.
SE: Okay. So are you guys, is this your full time focus now? Is the Kalypso Wellness Centers, are you still a practicing anesthesiologist?
Dr. Clifton: I’m still a practicing anesthesiologist as is my brother. Uh, the other two founders are still practicing traditional pain management. Uh, but essentially we were working two full time jobs and, uh, you know, our, our goal would be as a, hopefully one day we could, uh, switch to just doing Kalypso full time. Uh, there’s, you know, way too many patients out there that, that need to hear about it, that need this treatment. Uh, there’s way too many physicians and people in the medical community that don’t even know about this treatment that need to be educated too. So that’s the goal is hopefully we can get to it so that more people can get access to this.
SE: All right. So it’s already opening up a whole bunch of questions for me. The first of which is what were the side effects that was making the ketamine treatment so, so hard on people? What was it, what were they experiencing?
Dr. Clifton: Well, first, just a little quick background on ketamine. It’s actually a very old medication. It was invented in the 60s and uh, we use it as an anesthetic all the time. Uh, in fact, the world health organization listed as one of their core medicines in the world. So it’s a very safe, very, uh, effective anesthesia agents we use it for is that we give these patients infusions of the medicine over an hour and really low doses. So it’s not even enough of the medicine that you could do a procedure on them, like a true anesthetic if you had to get a surgery or some type of procedure. The problem with ketamine is that it has a very just fork, um, out of body type of experience.
Some patients, uh, state that they get some hallucinations and a lot of people don’t like that, that feeling. And in fact when we use it as an anesthetic, we actually give patients a very powerful amnesia medicine as well. So that way they don’t remember having um, that kind of out of body, um, you know, experience where they have these kind of weird hallucinations and doesn’t, don’t like the way they feel even at these low doses. These patients still are getting some of those side effects. And that’s when we said, okay, you know, if they can’t tolerate it then there’s no use and continue with this medication. And now what we did is, again, I mentioned earlier about the different research we did. We found other medicines that we use commonly that we can mix with the ketamine and I can’t stress enough the ketamine is the main medicine that’s doing all of the benefits that’s helping the patients.
But these other medicines greatly reduced the side effect profile that now all of our patients, they still say it’s a weird experience, but nobody says it’s a bad experience anymore.
SE: Not enough to keep them from wanting to continue or to, to have the treatment?
Dr. Clifton: correct. And everybody’s always a little nervous about coming in the first time because usually they do nothing about ketamine or if they have heard of it, they usually have heard of some of the bad connotations with ketamine.
SE: And I was going to ask, I know that for those that have even heard the word ketamine before, they may have an association with it being used illicitly or in some other way that’s recreational but not advisable. So, um, how do we get people more comfortable with the idea that this is a drug that we can treat these problems with and you’re going to be okay.
Dr. Clifton: Yeah. It’s all about education and, and surprisingly not just to the general public, but even to my other healthcare colleagues because unless you’re an anesthesiologist or maybe an emergency physician, most people learned about ketamine for just a couple of days their first year of medical school and then they forgot about it. Um, the problem that most people hear the negative connotations is they say, well, isn’t that a party drug? And isn’t that a horse tranquilizer? And the short answer is yes, but then I always have to explain that any type of substance or medicine can be abused. People abused caffeine, people will lose alcohol. People abused, you know, the opioids that we have prescribed for pain. Um, so it’s two and they’re taking those in much higher doses than what we even give as a, as true anesthetics in the operating room. The other big one, I think that was a worst, um, connotation with it is that when people ask me about it being a horse tranquilizer, and because they throw their horse in front of it, people think, Oh, this must be super powerful.
It can’t be, you know, it must be too strong. And the truth is that’s used ketamine all the time for the simple reason that we can also give it as almost like a flu shot intramuscularly. And that’s important because we use that for children all the time too. Because what kids and animals don’t let us do is start IVs on. They don’t like needles, but when you give it intramuscularly, then the, the child, the adolescents or the animals will start to calm down and then you can do what you have to do to them or you can then start an IV and do the procedure. And the key part of this is that the reason why ketamine is so safe as it’s our only anesthetic that actually increases your heart rate a little bit and increases your drive to breathe a little bit interesting. So that’s why it’s great for the vets because animals as a general rule are harder to maintain their airway, keep them breathing than they are with humans.
And so this actually helps them out so they can do their procedures. So usually anytime that I’m talking with somebody like you Scott or giving a talk or we’re talking to patients to come in for a consult, then they, I explained this to them and they say, Oh, that makes a lot more sense now I understand. You know why people say these things about ketamine and actually it turns out, like I said, it’s a very safe and very effective medication.
SE: Okay, that’s good to know. For those of us that like to kind of nerd out on these things a little bit and we won’t go too far down this rabbit hole, can you describe what is it that ketamine is actively doing that is helping alleviate symptoms of say, PTSD or depression?
Dr. Clifton: Yeah. Well you may take me down the rabbit hole cause I love to nerd out about this stuff.
Um, but in short, the, it’s got four main things that it does. The first thing that ketamine does is the very potent anti inflammatory medicine. In fact, that may be one of the most potent anti inflammatory medicines that we have at our arsenal. And that’s very good for anybody that has any type of chronic pain. There’s usually inflammatory component and just recently they’ve also linked inflammation and depression together and they’re not sure if the depression causes inflammation or if inflammation causes more depression. So it’s certainly gonna help with that aspect as well. And that’s been new to hear just in the last three to five years. They’ve, they’ve pieced that together. Number two, just from the pain side of things, a ketamine targets a specific receptor in your body. And again, here’s the nerdy part of it. It’s called the NMD receptor. And the only reason that’s important is because all of our other pain medicines mostly targets a different receptor that’s associated with morphine type medicines.
And so therefore when patients are exposed Academy and they have chronic pain, usually it’s a novel medicine. Their body’s never seen before, and so they have a profound reaction to it that helps them to start to feel better almost right away. It makes sense. Yep. So that’s great for those patients. Back to the mental health side of things. Depression, anxiety, PTSD. The medicine also targets the receptor in your brain called the glutamate receptor. And that’s really important because glutamine is one of the main excitatory amino acids in your body. That’s great. If you’re taking a test or running from a bear, it’s not great when it’s time to relax and your brain needs to sleep. And, uh, you talk to any patient with depression, with anxiety, PTSD, you know, they feel like that even if they’re going to sleep, their brains are still running a mile a minute.
And so this medicine helps to truly calm their brain down and start to quiet things down. And the last thing that the Ketamine does, and this is what I think is the coolest part about the whole thing, is that the medicine actually helps for new nerves to regrow and synapse. They don’t have the memory or the imprints that I’ve got. Chronic pain, chronic depression, chronic anxiety, fibromyalgia, and you know, we’ve actually got research studies now and, uh, functional MRIs that have shown that the ketamine helps to stimulate these new nerves and start growing faster and connections together while we’re blocking all those receptors I just talked about. Uh, so that way the patients, you know, gets hopefully truly longer term benefits and relief and not just a transit type of medicine. So in a nutshell, hopefully that wasn’t too, too nerded out, but that’s, that’s what it does.
And I love talking about it because, uh, again, it’s just for the patients that get these treatments, uh, it’s been life changing for them.
SE: I think that was, that was a great description, I think, uh, at a high enough level that most of us can still relate to it or understand it anyways. When somebody comes in for treatment, how long does that treatment take and then how long does it last? How frequently do they have to come back? Things like that.
Dr. Clifton: We get asked that all the time. It’s a great question. So two answers to that one. At Kalypso wellness centers or any of our managed partners, uh, facilities. The infusions themselves are exactly one hour. There’s about 15 to 20 minutes beforehand to fill out the some standard vetted out questionnaires that everybody fills out beforehand and then there’s about 15 to 20 minutes afterwards for the immediate effects to kind of wear off and you know, get you so we can get you to go home in a safe manner.
How long did the treatments last is kind of dependent on the severity of the patient’s disease state, how long they’ve had it, what other treatments or medications they might be on. We’ve done so many infusions now though that when patients come in for consults, we have a good idea that we say, Hey look, we know you’re going to need four to six treatments kind of right off the bat and then at three to six months you may need a maintenance or booster infusion and then maybe another one at around a year Mark. And that’s the majority of our patients as a protocol that they fall follow. We certainly have some patients that come in and get one or two treatments and they doing way better and they say, Hey, we’ll come see you again if we need to. Uh, we also have a subset of patients that have either been maxed out on narcotics or they’ve had all the surgeries they could have or from their depression and anxiety.
They’ve tried every antidepressant, they’ve tried electric shock therapy, they’ve seen every type of therapist and psychiatrist and nothing has helped. And this is the only thing that helps them for those patients. They say, Hey, we would rather not get back on more medicines with more side effects and come in and see you guys, you know, once every two or three months for an infusion. Because then it takes away all my anxiety, all my depression, all my, you know, thoughts of suicidality. And so we have a small sets up subset of patients that do that as well. So the key though is, is that every patient’s different. We know that when patients come in for the consultations, we want to talk to any of referring physicians that they may have that sent them over. We want to discuss what medications they’re on currently. We want to discuss what their goals and plans are.
Uh, do I have time to tell a quick story?
SE: Yeah. By all means.
Dr. Clifton: We had a patient that came in and he was a grandfather who was 78 and he had chronic pain, had two failed back surgeries. I’m maxed out on narcotics and he said his grandson was coming into town and he heard about us and nothing else helped him. So he wanted to try it. So he got an infusion with us on Wednesday. His grandson was coming in on Friday and we said, we’re going to call and check on you. And like we do all our patients. And we called them on Monday and we said, how are you doing? And he said, Oh man, I had the grip of best time ever. I took my son to SeaWorld. Uh, we went to go out to go play a, he loved that. We got to go to the park.
And I just had made him do that. And for years we said, that’s great. That means you’re responding well to the medicine. We know you’ve had two failed back surgeries and you’re max out on narcotics, you probably should come back in. And that way we can give you longer term relief. I said, no, I’m good. I’ll just come in next time. My grandson comes in town next year or two. And we kind of chuckled cause you know, that’s all he wanted to do was to uh, you know, come in for, you know, that one short time it was your aunt’s son was in. So my point was, is it different patients have different goals and we want to work with them to achieve what goals they want to have, um, but also give them the maximum benefit. So if somebody is on, I guess what I would consider a normal or typical protocol in the beginning, they’re coming in more regularly for awhile before they go into the maintenance mode.
SE: Is it monthly, weekly, every two weeks? What’s the schedule typically look like for somebody like that?
Dr. Clifton:There’s the medical literature that’s out there and then our empirical data that we found too has been that usually you want to get a block of infusions closer together. At the beginning we found that usually as long as you get an infusion and about seven to 10 days or less, then you get the chance for the most and longest benefits. Okay. So most of our patients, if they need four to six infusions, they usually get one or two infusions a week for two to three weeks. And then after that we say, okay, let’s see how you do for a month or two because that’s when those new nerves are regrowing and recent [inaudible] and you know, see how their benefit is. And then again, we check in again about three to six months and that’s when they may need to come back for another maintenance dose.
But most of the time they usually get the block of infusions within the first two to four weeks of them coming in for their first treatment. Okay. That makes sense. What sort of overall, what sort of success rate do you see with people? I know from experience that different people react differently to different types of treatments and medications. Not everything works for everyone.
SE: How does, how well does this work overall for, for people, especially those that have maybe tried other things to treat their condition and it, they just haven’t had any success so far.
Dr. Clifton: So for us, we’ve done a little over 6,300 infusions now since we started Kalypso and our patients, we have an 85 to 90% patient saying they’re getting the benefit that they wanted. Um, this isn’t us leading them with questions. Uh, we have again, both questionnaires they fill out before their infusions that we track and these are nationally vetted questionnaires that deal with depression, anxiety, pain, um, and we track those numbers.
And then after their infusions, again, we have a survey that we follow up with that it’s just a question, you know, one to 10, do you feel happier, do your meditations working better to getting more sleep? And then they answer those questions and they’re not even any of the physicians that call and ask these questions. So that way we can’t be biased. So 85 to 90%, which is huge in medicine. Um, I’d like to point out too that and most of the medical literature out there for uh, any research during studies or other places that are, uh, giving these ketamine infusions, usually they mentioned around a 60 to 70% benefit rate. Now that being said, we’re certainly proud of the work that we’re doing and that with our formulations, patients seem to be getting more benefit than just getting standard ketamine. But I’d like to also stress it again, there’s lots of patients that could benefit from this and even 60 to 70% benefit is huge in medicine.
SE: Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Clifton: Um, I think the bigger difference with Kalypso, which I think you are going to get to here in a second, is that back to that side effect profile and a 40 to 60% side effect profile where patients can’t tolerate it. That part is terrible in medicine. In fact, most of the time we like anything if there’s going to be some type of side effect or if a patient asks, you know, Hey, what’s my chances of this happening in a surgery? We like one to 2% or less. And so with our formulations now we’ve gotten our percentage of those side effects down to that one and 2%. Um, our biggest side effect now some patients would get a little nauseous and we get patients and let’s say I have an allergy to it, a anti-nausea medicine beforehand and so therefore side effect profiles now is essentially down to zero and that’s just phenomenal and great because again, as we’ve talked about at the beginning, if patients don’t want to come get this infusion or they feel like it makes them feel so bad afterwards that they have these bad side effects, then they’re not going to even give it a chance to get their benefits.
SE: Yeah, no, it’s great that you guys have managed to find ways of mitigating that as much as possible so that people are getting the benefits without that sort of negative side effect that that might prevent them from wanting to continue with their treatment. When I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about all of those people that would potentially benefit from this but maybe don’t know about it. Um, haven’t had access to it yet. Um, if I know someone that has PTSD or depression or anxiety and would like them to consider this, how do I begin to educate that person, help them get connected with you guys one way or another so that you’re having the opportunity to treat as many people as possible?
Dr. Clifton: Yeah, that’s a great question because we’ve got, had lots of friends, family, patients that have said, you know, I’ve got this uncle, I’ve got this cousin, you know, I’ve got a friend of a friend that they could really benefit and I don’t know how to get through to them or what’s the right way to do it. So the internet is a great thing and also can not be the right thing. Right? Indeed. Yeah. Everybody thinks if they’re go to Google, then they’d become an expert. Right. Um, but the good thing is, is that if people truly just Google or put in their, you know, ketamine infusions, low-dose ketamine infusions, tons of stuff is coming up now because it seems like there’s a new article every week that’s coming out and talking about some of the benefits for us specifically at all of our Kalypso managed partner locations.
We give free consultations, uh, on our websites. They can send in either anonymous or their name and say, I want more information. We can get back to them either by phone, emails in the literature. They can certainly stop in to any of our clinics and ask for information. Our biggest thing is that we want to educate the patients. We feel like that an educated patient is somebody that is going to do better. They’re going to feel more empowered about their ability to get their treatment. Uh, we only leave any stone unturned when we’re talking to patients and, you know, go, we’ll go back over and over again. The same things we talked about earlier. You know, about what’s the side effects. You know, I’ve heard bad things about Academy and um, you know, what, why isn’t more people offering this? And so we truly want the patients to be as educated as possible.
So um, go to the internet or have them call us, have them check out our website, go to any of our clinics. And the more conversations we have the better.
SE: Do you guys work with other um, referring like psychiatrists or psychologists or other organizations? Like we have a lot in Frisco. There are a number of organizations here that work with veterans in different capacities. If they are identifying somebody that maybe has PTSD or is at risk in some way, suicidal. Do organizations like that have a path to easily reach out to you guys and try to get you connected with the people that would potentially be a good, a good patient?
Dr. Clifton: Yes and no. We, we’ve tried to reach out to a lot of these organizations and there’s, there’s, I say several, there’s many that are national organizations. There’s some that are just specific to different cities and States.
The, I think the issue is, is that a lot of the patients are, or these groups are a little leery because maybe something we should have talked about in the beginning is that these low dose infusions or we’re using this considered an off label use by the FDA. When we use it as an anesthetic in the operating room, it’s FDA approved. But in this setting it’s considered off label use. So therefore insurance doesn’t readily cover it. Um, other people that might send us patients and send referrals, then our leery because they say, well, if it’s off label FDA use and there must be something wrong with it, which is not true. And medicine, we do lots and lots of things that are considered off label use. And so we’re trying to keep it, uh, again, back to the education piece to explain what it is we’re doing and how we’re doing as much as possible.
But for any of those organizations, we’ve tried many times and will continue to try and that we want to reach out to them, we want them to reach out to us. How can we help? How can we see the people you’re seeing that need this help? Again, especially in San Antonio, it’s a big veteran city that we’ve got lots of, uh, military bases and a VA system. Um, and so any way we can reach out to those people and help them, we’re, we’re happy and want to do to help them out.
SE: Yeah, it makes sense. And I think there are a lot of, um, use cases for medicine. I mean that I, even as a layperson that I know of where a medicine was designed for one thing, but it’s then treated for something else. And I think that’s, that’s fairly common, but people don’t always recognize that.
Dr. Clifton:So I’m glad you made that point.
SE: Okay. So you guys started in San Antonio, correct? Yes, sir. And you’ve expanded out into some other places. Um, I know that there is a Kalypso wellness center in Dallas, but for our folks here in Frisco, that’s our main audience, uh, first go and surrounding cities. Is Dallas their best location or is there another place that they can go to, uh, to get treatment or connect with you guys at least know?
Dr. Clifton: Definitely in Dallas. They’re their best spot and we’re super excited cause we just partnered with a new group of physicians, uh, here in the, in the area and they’re called principle spine and wellness. It’s Dr. Paul Kurian and Dr. Arpon Singh. And again, their background is pain management doctors, but then have also been doing their own research about ketamine, ketamine infusions. Um, it’s interesting, you know, we were talking earlier about the depression side of things.
We see lots of patients that have depression that have no component of pain, but almost every patient that has chronic pain has a component of depression and anxiety because they’re always sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. That is completely understandable. So, uh, Dr. Kurian and, uh, Dr. Singh reached out to us and they said, Hey, you guys have kinda been pioneering this treatments, uh, have these protocols set in place. You know, we’d like to meet up with you and see if we can kind of work together and have this partnership. And so just recently, um, you know, we’ve partnered with them and they’re providing Kalypso wellness centers and fusions at their office. Again, Principle Spine and Wellness. And, uh, yeah, that’s a great resource for all of your listeners to go to. Again, they do free consultations. Uh, they can call and, and reach out to them.
Speaker 3: Hey, we just got the question about this or we want to hear more about, you know, we heard on the podcast that Dr. Clifton mentioned this. Can you explain that some more and they’ll be happy to talk with them. And, and again, I, I can’t stress enough how excited we already have a presence, uh, here in Dallas. Um, do you know, there’s a large veteran population here in Dallas as well. And again, you know, being a super large city in Texas, um, you know, there’s thousands if not millions of patients that could benefit from these, these, uh, these treatments.
SE: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s definitely something that we wanna uh, I’m happy to have you on today because I want to get the word out that there is another path for people that have, uh, that have one of these conditions want to treat it, especially if they haven’t had success trying other things. This is going to be new to a lot of people. So let’s make sure that they’re aware that this is an option for them and it’s something worth investigating. It sounds like you guys are having tremendous success with, with the Ketamine infusions.
Dr. Clifton: We have and it’s great and you just kind of hit the nail on the head that, that almost all of our patients are patients that nothing else has worked for them. Again, they’ve tried every medicine, they’ve tried, every surgery, they’ve tried every treatment. Most of these patients don’t even want to go see a physician anymore because the physicians a sink, they’re quote unquote crazy because nothing works. And it’s interesting, we found that all of these patients, while they’re unicorns and themselves, cause they’re all unique. We found a Kalypso. Now, we almost have, we called a herd of unicorns because they’re all individually unique, but they’re all the same in the sense that nothing’s worked for them.
And so when we talked to these patients, um, you know, again, we, we are always forthright and tell them that, you know, again, if we’re getting 90% success rate, that means that there’s 10% that this may not work for them. Um, but we’re giving them hope again. And, and, and that’s an important thing to these patients. You know, feel like that then nothing’s ever gonna change. And what keeps me going and excited about coming in and talking with you and educating people and, and talking about ketamine infusions is that we have patients all the time that they come back to us and say, you know, you got my wife back, you got my son back, I can go back to work again. I don’t want to kill myself again. I mean, that, that, that stuff is just as super powerful. And I can’t stress that enough as a physician how rewarding that is.
And in fact, this has been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done as a physician.
SE: So I can’t even begin to imagine how much. So that’s gotta be the case. So I want to close off with two things. First, let’s start with directly talking to the people that would benefit from this. So we’ve talked about depression, we’ve talked about PTSD, anxiety, and chronic pain. Is there anybody else, any other conditions, people that we want to say, if you are suffering from this, if you’ve tried other things for X, Y, orZ , give us a call. At least come talk to us.
Dr. Clifton: We would love to try to help. Definitely in, those are the main kind of big umbrella diagnoses. But we’ve actually helped treat 32 different disease States at our, we’ve got our clips or senators and some of the other big ones that patients come to see us for migraines.
I didn’t realize how debilitating it can be. The patients that have migraines that this helps them with that. Patients with fibromyalgia. Again, that’s another one of those kind of weird diseases that the medical community even until recently used to think was kind of a made up deal. And until you meet these patients that have fibromyalgia, you realize that this is a really true, debilitating disease that is ruining their lives and they get no treatment. Um, and we have a kind of a class of what we call the weird diseases. We, I joked about unicorns earlier, but while we’re not gonna cure any of these diseases, lots of these different diseases, these patients have severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, pain, and we help with those symptoms. And those diseases are things like ALS or Lou Gehrig’s syndrome, um, multiple sclerosis, Lymes disease, lupus, uh, again, want to make sure we’re clear.
We’re not going to cure any of these diseases, but we can to help out a ton with the, the symptoms and the severity of their disease States. So if we, the kind of two big umbrellas you can think of as a patients that have some type of pain component, whatever that may be. And in the mental health side of things, which again includes depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder, OCD. So almost everybody knows somebody that has some of these symptoms. And again, most of the time this isn’t considered a first line treatment, but it certainly can be. Um, most of the time our patients are the ones that like we’ve talked about that everything hadn’t worked and then they come to see us.
SE: So I’m going to come on and come at you out of left field with this one, you talked about it helping nerves grow back or nerve connections get made. Is there any benefit to somebody with a neurodegenerative disorder like a [inaudible] or things that are related to like a Parkinson’s or like dementia and Alzheimer’s, things like that. Is there any benefit to those patients even with symptoms with ketamine? Just curious.
Dr. Clifton: So there hasn’t been any studies that have come out yet that have helped anything with Alzheimer’s. There has been a couple studies that have said that it has helped patients with Parkinson’s disease but has been more from the mental health side of things that they feel like they can, okay, I’ve got this terrible illness, I can know how to deal with it a little bit better for neurodegenerative types of issues. What we always tell patients when we talk to them is, is it our medicines are never going to fix a true mechanical injury. Uh, that being said, there’s lots of patients that have partially herniated discs.
They have, uh, issues where nerves are partially impinged upon. And we’ve talked about the antiinflammatory properties. So those patients are great candidates. And what happens is we have lots of patients that they go to see a neurosurgeon per se, and they’re kind of plus minus, and whether they want to do some type of spinal surgery. And so the patients will try our infusions first and a lot of times then they don’t need to go get surgery. We’ve also had patients that they tried it and then it turns out that their mechanical injury was too great. So they get the surgery. But then the cool thing is, is that we’re hearing feedback from the spine surgeon saying that our patients that came and saw us first, the recovering quicker or they’ve requiring less narcotics and their postoperative stay, um, they get out of the hospital quicker.
So in that sense, it’s kind of a win win anyway if they ended up having to have surgery because they’re getting more benefits and having less side effects once they get their surgery. Fantastic.
SE: All right, so let’s make sure we’re going to kind of go out on this one. I want to make sure that people know how to find you guys, how to reach you. So if people want to learn more, if they want to connect with Kalypso wellness centers, tell them where to go here in the Dallas area and we want you to go and call the principles spine and wellness. Our national website is www.kalypsowellness.com you can give us a call at one 800-Reset20 no matter where you’re at in the United States, uh, you can get routed to the closest place, uh, to where you live. And we hope to hear frame it because again, if you just want information, we’d love to educate you. Let, let us see how we can help you out.
SE: And that’s Kalypso with a K and we’ll have all this linked up. All the information will be in the show notes, so if you’re listening to this podcast, definitely hit those show notes and connect with these guys. If you know, if you or somebody you know could, could use their help, we appreciate it. We’d love to talk to anybody. Dr Clifton, thank you so much for joining us today. You guys are doing great work and really appreciate it.
Dr. Clifton: Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Thank you, sir.
SE: You bet. And to all of you who are listening, thank you very much for tuning into the Frisco podcast. As always, please be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes, Google play, Spotify, Stitcher, and anywhere that you guys are out there listening to badass cause we’re all over the place now. Thank you very much for tuning in and we’ll talk to you next time.
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