Therapy
PT496 – Maintenance Doses and Recurring Revenue: The Ethics of At-Home Ketamine Therapy
March 19, 2024
Featuring: Juan Pablo Cappello
In this episode, Joe interviews Juan Pablo Cappello: co-founder and former CEO of Nue Life Health, whose assets were subsequently acquired by Beckley Waves.
In this episode, Joe interviews Juan Pablo Cappello: co-founder and former CEO of Nue Life Health, whose assets were subsequently acquired by Beckley Waves.
Cappello digs into his recent article which has been making waves across the psychedelic community: “Profit Over Patients? A Critical Look at At-Home Ketamine Therapy.” He created Nue Life with the goal of helping a million people address the root cause of their anxiety, and while the company was successful, he began to see a problematic trend: that using ketamine while providing services of a mental health company is very expensive and resource-consuming, and as companies saw a large percentage of clients requiring maintenance doses, the most profitable business model became essentially slinging ketamine to patients without providing any real integration or aftercare. Are these companies promising healing but really only guaranteeing recurring revenue?
He talks about:
- How this emerging model makes it harder for ethical practitioners to be able to provide their services
- The tools they built at Nue Life for long-term benefit, and why these should be the main focus – not repeated ketamine
- Matthew Perry’s death and how the media was quick to place the blame on ketamine
- The need for companies and communities to come to gather and create ethical industry standards for the at-home ketamine model
- How cannabis was almost decriminalized under the Carter administration
and more!
Notable Quotes
“There’s all sorts of ethical companies and practitioners who are doing the good work every day on the front lines, and we have to recognize that. We also have to be honest that it’s harder and harder for those ethical practitioners to make a living because of what unethical practitioners are doing every day in the trenches, which is slinging ketamine.”
“Do I think that it’s probably a good trade to take ketamine six times a year as opposed to taking an antidepressant every day? Yeah, that’s probably a good trade. But there’s a better trade. which is: Let’s address the root cause of your depression, anxiety, or trauma once and for all. Let’s do the hard work. Let’s use ketamine as a beautiful tool to help you reset and reboot, and let’s get you well. And let’s support you in your wellness journey going forward, rather than putting you on the cycle of feeling better, feeling worse, feeling better, feeling worse.”
“I absolutely believe the pharmaceutical companies are way too close to the regulators, absolutely. But what do we expect when getting a drug approved by the FDA is a billion dollar proposition? I mean, look at what MAPS has gone through. They’re still raising money, notwithstanding the amazing clinical results that they’ve had with MDMA. …[They’re] continuing to raise money for clinical trials of a drug that wasn’t made illegal until 1982. So it’s not as if, in terms of the safety profile of MDMA, we don’t have oodles and oodles of real life data prior to 1982. Nothing’s a better sign of how broken the system is than what MAPS has gone through.”
Links
Profit Over Patients? A Critical Look at At-Home Ketamine Therapy, by Juan Pablo Cappello
PT274 – Juan Pablo Cappello – Nue Life: Using Digital Phenotyping to Personalize Healthcare
Lexology.com: Ketamine Clinics and Malpractice: Recent New York Litigation
