11
votes
Emergency medical personnel in Minnesota regularly dose restrained patients with Ketamine
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- Title
- At urging of Minneapolis police, Hennepin EMS workers subdued dozens with a powerful sedative
- Authors
- Andy Mannix
- Word count
- 1443 words
As a former EMT, no. There is no legitimate medical purpose for them in an ambulance. In a surgical room, maybe, and there's some limited use among mental health professionals. Otherwise it's used almost exclusively on animals.
There are so many great big WTF's in the article it's hard to choose just one.
There's a lot of people out there that need to be fired and criminally prosecuted.
Ketamine is sometimes used on children as a surgical anesthesia, but I've not heard of it being used in an emergency get-to-hospital kind of way.
when my daughter broke her arm they gave her ketamine, once her arm was set and she was getting the plaster on that was the most hilarious shit I've ever seen and I wish to this day my phone didn't die.
I had never heard of Ketamine being used as a "date-rape" drug as referenced in the title of this article. Is this a commonly known thing elsewhere in the world? Or newspaper clickbait?
The wikipedia article on it has a few references to date-rape, notably in India, an article on CAMH which unhelpfully says the "media" refers to it this way:
and a UCSMD article that references a relatively old (2000) work from Jansen which references frickin' Cosmopolitan of all things (Cosmopolitan. 1997. Sedate rape. Cosmopolitan 25th Anniversary Issue. March: 109, if anyone can find the article)
That to me sounds like some old "wisdom" from the 90's rearing it's anti-drug head.
That said:
Forcefully injecting people with a drug, and then doing it so poorly that they need resuscitation is horrendously wrong.
I really did not want to throw out a clickbait article. The first one I saw on this topic was more than a little hyberbolic, so I intentionally looked to the local newspaper for a more in depth story. To me, it's wildly medically unethical. Emergency personnel are taking medical orders from cops with no medical certification or training and against the wishes of patients. Beyond that, this is a medical institution that's paid out of state funds. It absolutely screams medical malpractice.
Gotcha - the article itself is fairly well written (local reporting is a plus), I was just a bit confused by the subtitle - which doesn't appear on mobile - labeling ketamine the 'date rape drug'. That point is fairly tangential to the article itself---it appears briefly in the fifth paragraph:"Minneapolis police previously had no policy addressing the drug, and the department manual classifies it as a “date rape drug”---and had no real point being there, other than biasing readers against Ketamine from the get-go (or grabbing extra clicks). I'm willing to chalk that up to editors and SEO though :p
Whether or not Ketamine is a date rape drug is irrelevant to the other content of the article. Even if Ketamine were widely known to be such, I can't see any reason for mentioning it other than to add a bit of sensationalism. Nowhere does the article claim that the police are date raping these victims. It's a shame, this is a serious and important subject matter. They did a decent job of reporting it, but had to undermine themselves by slipping in that little sensationalistic taste. This type of reporting makes more room for the counter-arguments that always come from the police-affiliated folks in discussions about abuse by the police. When they start up the refrain of "you aren't there, you don't have all the information..." well, that argument works a bit better when you threw in non-sequiturs about horrible things like date rape. You're reporting on real abuse but mixing it in with an unfair smear.
Particularly when Ketamine has been the topic of quite a bit of research for dealing with treatment-resistant depression (TRD):
Ketamine is often used during dental surgery. My spouse received it during wisdom tooth removal.