Interesting article about someone who took part in a Ketamine trial. She reports that her tinnitus has been temporarily reduced by this drug.
Could Ketamine Cure Tinnitus? (Deborah Copaken, 2023)
I entered a clinical trial to see if ketamine would stop the constant ringing in my left ear. The catch? I'd have to spend 90 minutes, while tripping, completely immobile in an MRI.
The call to clinical trial, after two years of a high-pitched ringing in my left ear, came via an Instagram ad. Would I be willing to be a data point in a study at Columbia University by lying still in an MRI for ninety minutes, on two separate occasions, if it meant the possibility of quieting my tinnitus? Oh, and during one of those sessions, would I be willing to have ketamine, the dissociative anesthesia with hallucinogenic properties—also known by club kids as special K, super K, and vitamin K—injected into my veins?
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How did I get this tinnitus-causing damage to the cochlear cells of my ear? Who the hell knows, but I have several worthy candidates. There was the toddler who screamed in my left ear in that enclosed car at the Wellfleet drive-in in the mid-70s, bursting my eardrum; a particularly loud David Bowie concert back in the mid-80s; the bomb that went off in my face in Afghanistan back in 1989, causing temporary hearing loss; my nearly complete loss of hearing to Covid; and the Covid vaccine, which has been linked to the sudden onset of tinnitus.
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Anyway, whatever the cause of my tinnitus or anyone's, I just wanted the ringing in my ear to stop. And Dr. Martinez, an addiction studies specialist who once suffered from tinnitus herself after a long plane ride during which her eardrum burst, believes that the ways in which ketamine stimulates GABA and glutamate in the brain—the brain's brakes and accelerator, respectively—might be the key. Why? In a word, plasticity. Ketamine interacts with the NMDA receptor (N-methyl-D-aspartate), our brain's primary excitatory neurotransmitter. This neurotransmitter plays an integral role in synaptic plasticity, which is the mechanism believed to be at the basis of memory formation. Dr. Martinez explains all of this much better and more simply than I ever could in our interview below.
Martinez's study, as she also explains above, has been funded—both surprisingly and not—by the U.S. Department of Defense. Why the DoD? Because generations of soldiers exposed to loud explosions and noises currently suffer from tinnitus, which up until now has had no cure, only cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness training to (sorta kinda) learn to ignore it. But trust me: I'm as mindful as they come, and it is impossible to ignore tinnitus. So impossible that it has been correlated, especially in women, with a much higher rate of suicide.
So on a frigid January morning, at a loss for any better options, I showed up at the New York State Psychiatric Institute for my first consultation with Dr. Martinez and her lab. I filled out paperwork. I answered questions. I was told I'd be paid actual money to participate. Not a ton, but enough for two nice dinners out. Then I scheduled my dual sessions in the MRI, one during which I'd receive a placebo, the other during which I'd receive the ketamine. And no, I wouldn't be told which one I'd be receiving.
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Lying completely still in an MRI for ninety minutes definitely does a number on the brain no matter whether any drugs are involved or not, plus you're forced to watch nature videos of Iceland. Lots of pretty fjords and swans. Inescapable, unless you close your eyes and sleep, as I was able to do, if beautiful. After my first infusion I felt woozy but intact enough to instruct the Uber driver to take me to the tennis bubble, where I promptly—if incorrectly—told my love that I was sure I'd received the ketamine. I even bragged about being able to hit the ball within the lines from time to time, all things and hallucinogens ingested considered.
But did my tinnitus go away? No. It did not. Though I dutifully answered all of the clinical questions in the daily online survey sent to me by Grassetti over the next ten mornings after my infusion, I was so frustrated by the still-loud volume of ringing in my ear, I nearly didn't go for my second infusion—the placebo, I was sure—because what was the point?
I'm so glad I did not bail. Because within ten minutes of the second infusion, I realized what a doofus I'd been. This time I was tripping. Hard. Not as hard as with LSD or mushrooms, and in a completely different, more mellow way, but my brain was opening up in that familiar hallucinogenic manner, and I could definitely feel it. All those pretty images of Iceland and swans? My eyes were too sensitive to light to watch them. Instead, I shut them and allowed my brain to make both its own beautiful images plus whatever random connections it wanted to make.
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Then, it happened. Three days after my infusion of ketamine, the loud buzzing in my left ear went silent. Not completely silent, but silent enough, after two years of constant ringing, that I immediately sent the researchers an email: "Radical change in tinnitus today. It's still there, for sure, but it's much quieter." That quiet lasted two weeks, which thankfully coincided with my vacation, during which I was not awoken even once by any loud ringing in my ear. Then, recently, the tinnitus starting gradually growing louder again.
Both elated by this overnight transformation and distraught by its apparent end, I asked Dr. Martinez what I could do to help push forward her study as well as how I might continue getting ketamine infusions to keep the silence going. Regarding the former, she told me she's been stymied by a lack of participation in her study from females, particularly middle-aged women like me. In fact, most of her subjects have been youngish male musicians whose ears have been damaged by performing loud gigs and whose familiarity with the chemical properties of ketamine had, in many cases, already been—shall we say—well-established.
Regarding the latter—where might I get more ketamine, cheaply, legally, and fast—that's a different story. While ketamine clinics have been popping up all over the U.S., the cost is still prohibitive (between $400 and $2000 per infusion, depending on the dosage and time) and not covered (surprise surprise!) by insurance. And while ketamine was approved in 1970 as an anesthetic, using it for any other purpose is still considered off-label. Meaning, doctors can legally prescribe it for depression, PTSD, eating disorders, OCD, postpartum depression, bipolar disorder, and now tinnitus, but its use is not officially approved by the Food and Drug Administration for these conditions, despite ample and long-standing evidence of its efficacy for the relief of many of them.
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To that end, this is my shouting into the void. If you are a woman in the New York City metropolitan area reading this, and you have tinnitus, and you are interested in being part of Dr. Martinez's study, please contact her team at (646) 774-7654 or email
Alex.Grassetti@nyspi.columbia.edu. She—and I, and everyone else suffering from tinnitus—would greatly appreciate it.
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