Canadi EM - By Casey Petrie - December 5, 2019
"Research Question:
For emergency department trauma patients, is ketamine a safe and effective option for analgesia when compared to current standard practice?...
Key Points:
- When combined with opioids, sub-dissociative dose ketamine has been shown to be more effective at providing analgesia for trauma patients than opioids alone.
- The hemodynamic properties of sub-dissociative dose ketamine make it a relatively safe choice for analgesia in trauma patients
- Ketamine is being used effectively as first-line analgesia for trauma patients by multiple military organizations.
- The current literature is limited in terms of methodological quality, small sample sizes, and concern for bias (particularly selection and misclassification bias) making it difficult to recommend its’ use on a wide scale.
- A large randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of ketamine compared with opioids on pain scores and hemodynamic outcomes is needed."