Dr. Ben Yudkoff, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer at Lumin Health, hosted a Reddit AMA on r/TherapeuticKetamine community on March 6th, 2026\. 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/TherapeuticKetamine/comments/1rj2blv/ama\_im\_dr\_ben\_yudkoff\_psychiatrist\_cofounder/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TherapeuticKetamine/comments/1rj2blv/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.
Fun_Bench3712 asks:
Speaker 1:
Do you see more patients finding relief with esketamine or ketamine itself? If you can answer honestly and not what we know makes the most money.
Answer from Dr. Ben Yudkoff, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Lumin Health:
Absolutely.
The research speaks for itself, FB! The research brought to the FDA, which is essentially verified in clinical practice, is that esketamine (delivered in FDA-approved doses) provides relief to around 60% of people. In contrast, ketamine, which, importantly, can be delivered at higher doses, shows response rates of around 80%.
That 20% delta in expected relief is significant and may be attributable simply to the difference in dosing options - we use a much wider range of doses of ketamine than esketamine. Certain people just respond better to higher doses and ketamine offers that flexibility. In contrast, Spravato dosing is relatively fixed. It is dosed at an average dose of 0.3 milligram per kilogram ketamine equivalent (slightly lower than the 0.5 mg/kg we see in most ketamine studies).
Ketamine is considered a more predictably effective medication by the medical community and I believe that the principal difference may simply be in the total milligrams provided. That being said, we still see very material improvements in patients who undergo Spravato treatment at Lumin Health which remains 4-5 times as effective as standard antidepressant medications in treating treatment refractory depression that has failed to respond to the 4-5 (on average) antidepressant medications that many of our clients have tried.
