Take your life back from chronic pain
Your pain is real.
And it can be treated.
Chronic pain is one of the most common and most undertreated conditions in medicine. It affects an estimated 50 million Americans, consumes years of their lives, and is frequently managed rather than genuinely addressed. Medications dull the edges but don't resolve the underlying problem, and treatments that work for some patients leave others no better than before. If you have been living with persistent pain that conventional approaches haven't adequately relieved, ketamine-assisted therapy offers a neurologically distinct pathway that many patients have found transformative when nothing else has worked.
What living with chronic pain actually costs
Chronic pain is not just a physical experience. It is the canceled plans, the relationships strained by limitations you didn't choose, the work that suffers, the identity that quietly erodes when you are defined by what you can no longer do. It is the medical appointments that end with another prescription or another referral. The suggestion to try mindfulness. The implication, sometimes spoken and sometimes not, that if you just managed your stress better the pain might improve. If you have felt dismissed, minimized, or exhausted by a system that treats your pain as a management problem rather than a solvable one — that frustration is legitimate, and you deserve better.
Chronic pain, defined as pain persisting for three months or longer, affects roughly one in five American adults and is among the leading causes of disability and reduced quality of life globally. Opioid medications, while effective for acute pain, carry significant risks of dependence and tolerance with long-term use. Non-opioid pharmacological options provide partial relief for many patients and none for others. Interventional procedures help some and aren't appropriate for all. For patients who have navigated this landscape and are still in significant pain, the standard toolkit has run out of answers. Ketamine offers something genuinely different.
Reset the pain signal
Chronic pain is not simply acute pain that has lasted a long time. In many cases it involves a process called central sensitization, a state in which the central nervous system itself has become hypersensitized, amplifying pain signals beyond what the original injury or condition would warrant. The nervous system, in effect, has learned to be in pain. Conventional pain management often addresses the symptom without touching this underlying neurological mechanism.
Ketamine works differently. As an NMDA receptor antagonist, ketamine directly interrupts the glutamate signaling pathways that drive central sensitization. By blocking NMDA receptors (the same receptors that become overactivated in centrally sensitized pain states) ketamine can effectively reset the pain signal, reducing the nervous system's amplified response and providing relief that other medications simply cannot replicate through their mechanisms of action.
This is why ketamine is particularly effective for conditions where central sensitization plays a significant role, including fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, neuropathic pain, and chronic back pain that persists beyond what structural findings alone would explain. It is also why ketamine can provide relief even after opioids and other analgesics have stopped being effective: it reaches the pain through a completely different neurological door.
50M
Americans living with chronic pain, the leading cause of long-term disability
Up to 65%
of patients report meaningful pain relief from ketamine therapy
30 Days
of significantly reduced chronic pain symptoms following ketamine therapy
Chronic pain is highly personal
Ketamine-assisted therapy has demonstrated meaningful results across a range of chronic pain conditions, particularly those with a significant central sensitization component. At Transcend Medicine, we work with patients presenting with fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, neuropathic pain of various origins, chronic back and spine pain, migraine and headache disorders, and pain associated with autoimmune and inflammatory conditions.
We also work with patients whose pain diagnosis is less clear-cut: those who have been told their pain is disproportionate to their imaging findings, or whose condition has resisted categorization despite years of evaluation. Central sensitization frequently underlies these presentations, and it is precisely the mechanism that ketamine addresses most directly.
If you are uncertain whether your specific condition is appropriate for ketamine therapy, the first step is a conversation with our clinical team. We would rather have that conversation and determine together that we are not the right fit than have you continue suffering without knowing whether we could help.
Effective pain relief, without the opioid risks
For patients who have been on long-term opioid therapy and are concerned about dependence, tolerance, or the gradual erosion of opioid effectiveness over time, ketamine offers a meaningful alternative pathway. Ketamine is not an opioid. It does not act on opioid receptors, does not carry the same dependence profile, and does not produce the tolerance escalation that makes long-term opioid therapy increasingly problematic for many patients.
This does not mean ketamine is without risks or appropriate for everyone. A thorough medical evaluation is required before treatment, and our clinical team takes that screening process seriously. But for patients whose pain management has become entangled with opioid dependency concerns, ketamine represents a clinically distinct option that addresses the neurological roots of chronic pain rather than simply modulating the perception of it.
We do not ask patients to discontinue existing pain management without medical oversight. Our approach is collaborative: working with your existing care team where appropriate, and designing a treatment plan that fits your complete clinical picture.
If chronic pain has been limiting your life and conventional treatment hasn't been enough, a different kind of relief is available.
DISCLAIMER: Statistics cited reflect ranges reported across peer-reviewed clinical literature and may vary based on patient population and study design. Individual results vary. Ketamine is administered off-label for psychiatric indications at Transcend Medicine. All treatment is preceded by a thorough medical evaluation by a licensed provider. This page does not constitute medical advice.