Originally developed as an anesthetic in the 1960s, ketamine has reemerged as one of modern psychiatry’s most promising tools for treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Its superpower lies in working with your brain's glutamate receptors to create antidepressant effects. What does the future of psychedelic-assisted mental health care hold? Could this once-stigmatized molecule represent the future of mental health care and healing the mind from within?

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Mai Shimada, M.D., MBA, FAAEM. Dr. Shimada is a board-certified emergency medicine physician with over a decade of experience and is the founder and CEO of Isha Health, an online at-home ketamine clinic dedicated to providing safe and effective treatments for depression and anxiety.

Dr. Shimada received her MD from the University of Tokyo, Emergency Medicine residency in the United States, and later on, completed the Psychedelic Facilitation Certification Program at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics in two areas and the Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy Training Program at Polaris Insight Center. Currently, alongside Isha Health, Dr. Shimada is a study physician for psychedelic medicine clinical trials at Open Mind Collective, a Fellow of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (FAAEM), a member of The American Board of Preventive Medicine (ABPM), and a visiting professor of Medicine at Tohoku University in Japan. Dr. Shimada has been featured on Forbes Japan.

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