I just posted this in Kate's thread, but for the sake of symmetry, I wanted to put it up here as well.

For the last three months, I've been pushing with the assistance of my pain doc at a local medical school to get into a round of RUL ECT treatments using ketamine as the general anesthetic, where brain PET scans show almost identicle changes in regional cerebral blood flow - specificailly to areas of the brain that control "sympathetic tone" in blood vessels - so that the ketamine could be expected to have a catalytic affect on the ECT process. To my real frustration, I found out on Friday morning that that university hospital where it was going to be done regards the proceedure as sufficiently "non-standard" that it will have to be submitted to it's "Institutional Review Board" (IRB), something that I understand can take over a year. No fun.

Mike