Dr. Ben Yudkoff, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer at Lumin Health, hosted a Reddit AMA on the Spravato community on November 21, 2025. The below blog post is a recap of one of the questions presented on that AMA, syndicated to the Lumin Health blog in the event that it answers any questions about ketamine therapy, Spravato treatment, or general concerns you may have about treatment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Spravato/comments/1p2ar6v/ama_im_dr_ben_yudkoff_psychiatrist_cofounder/
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you’re interested in learning more about ketamine for depression at Lumin Health. Thank you once again to the moderators and community members for facilitating such an engaging discussion.
Violainejane asks:
Hello Dr Ben! I started Spravato in July and I believe it is helping. The day after my first treatment felt like I had a “break in the clouds.” Sadly, that feeling lasted only an afternoon but additional regular treatments help prolong that feeling and provides more benefits.
I’ve had to travel for work a few times in the past few months and I’ve ended up missing 1 to 2 treatments. When I return to treatments, I feel like I’m starting over again. First,I get a little break in the clouds but then it takes a while to build up back to where I was before I missed the treatments.
Do you have any suggestions when traveling? Or even how to spread the benefits over several days?
Answer:
Violaine, is that a Cocteau Twins reference? If it is, that's some deep end of the pool stuff.
What you're describing is not all the unusual: while there are some people who can go for days/weeks without treatment and still maintain benefit, there is also a large group of people who find that absent a regular, weekly treatment, depressive symptoms come back - symptoms that can take minute to climb out of it. This is tricky and there are potential options with one big caveat: these options should be discussed with your providers and should not be considered recommendations. This caveat attends to the fact that every person's situation is slightly different, and so these ideas should be discussed with a provider who should ultimately give the recommendation. Here we go:
- Take-home doses of ketamine via an online platform, and take them while traveling.
- A person might seek to schedule two treatments per week in the week prior to traveling and schedule two treatments on the week returning.
Outside of attending to the medication, itself, there are also other things that people can do that can help make up for having to take a quick paise in treatments. Vigorous physical exercise! Vigorous physical exercise (so long as a person is healthy enough to engage in it) causes the release of brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which helps to regrow synapses - this just so happens to be one of the principal mechanisms of action of ketamine and Spravato. In addition, physical exercise engages endorphin system - endorphins are the chemicals in the brain that are responsible for a runner's high and can help a person experience a better mood, improved focus, and a sense of calm. Spravato likely interacts with this system, as well.
To plan it out: first priority idea is more frequent Spravato visits before vacation and after vacation for the week before and the week. The second idea is thinking about incorporating strong physical exercise as a 20 minutes per day of any trip you take. The third idea which carries the most amount of risk is having some "take-homes" of ketamine available to you via online platforms to help you bridge until the next Spravato appointment.
