Of course this trial is worse than useless if the other reported benefits of ketamine come from the experience had while under the effects, but these authors seem not to have thought of that.
And in fact, the study strengthens the idea that if ketamine works against depression, the conscious experience matters, because if you remove the experience using anesthesia, then it doesn't work.
Also, they didn't use any anaesthetic known to have antidepressant properties:
"Anesthesiologists were asked to minimize use of nitrous oxide (N2O), which has reported antidepressant effects22. Agents used for anesthetic maintenance included intravenous propofol and inhaled sevoflurane or isoflurane"
there are plenty of studies in which ketamine has been given without masking, so we have a lot of evidence it does help. You’re tacitly assuming that it does, which in the absence of blinding the patients to the use of ketamine there is no evidence for.
Smells like someone virtue signalling to a group I know nothing about, but not in a way that I find equitable. Smacks of someone trying to transplant their own form of racial(?) superiority to the US. But what do I know?
The second you "think" a piece of software/a feature works, you should be verifying that this is the case automatically. It's often just as easy to write an automated test as test manually, just do it and that test will be there forever saving you from your own idiocy. You don't need to write the tests before you know how the feature is going to shake down to its implementation, but you'd sure do better to test before pushing to prod. You save yourself so much hassle in the long run with automated CI.
