Ketamine Helps Paramedica Presented with Difficulties of...

Trauma patients often present paramedics with difficult situations to handle. These patients most likely have multiple injuries that the paramedic must treat including internal and external injuries. The main concern in treating trauma patients is controlling the pain that the patient may be experiencing while not compromising the patients hemodynamic and respiratory state. The most common drugs used in pain management in the pre-hospital setting often cause undesirable side effects, such as respiratory depression, hypotension, apnea, and bradycardia. All of these side effects combined with a trauma patient who is already compromised can lead to a much bigger issue. What if there was a drug that could treat the pain, calm the patient, and not cause the nasty side effects of traditional pain management? Ketamine provides us the answer to this question. Ketamine was developed in the 1960’s as a dissociative anesthetic. In 1970 the federal government for human use approved it.5 It became very popular as a battlefield anesthetic because of its quick onset and ability not to knock out a patient’s respiratory drive. The first evidence of illicit drug abuse of ketamine was in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s on the west cost of the US.2 It can be know on the street as â€Å"Special K, Vitamin K, Jet, and Super Acid.†8 In its illegal form it is often used as a date rape drug.2 Ketamine is a NMDA receptor antagonist, it works to antagonize or inhibit the action of