Severe Nerve Pain and Ketamine: What Toronto Star Found

A Toronto Star Report Asks Whether Ketamine Can Ease Severe Nerve Pain

A Toronto Star report published September 14, 2026, describes chronic nerve pain as so severe that some patients say it feels "worse than death," and raises the question of whether ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic increasingly used off-label for pain and certain mental health conditions, can offer relief. Neuropathic pain is pain caused by damaged or malfunctioning nerves themselves, rather than pain from an outside injury like a cut or a broken bone, and it often resists the treatments doctors reach for first. This analysis, from Ketamine Resource, explains what the underlying research shows, where the evidence is thin, and what readers weighing ketamine for nerve pain should ask before pursuing it. Read the original report from the Toronto Star.

Conditions that commonly fall under neuropathic pain include diabetic neuropathy, chemotherapy-induced nerve damage, complex regional pain syndrome, postherpetic neuralgia after shingles, and pain following spinal cord injury. People with these conditions frequently describe burning, shooting, or electric-shock sensations that standard painkillers, including opioids, often fail to control well, which is part of why patients and clinicians keep looking for alternatives.

Why Ketamine Gets Studied for Nerve Pain That Won't Respond to Other Treatments

Ketamine works as an NMDA receptor antagonist, meaning it blocks a specific nerve receptor involved in transmitting and amplifying pain signals in the central nervous system. That mechanism is different from how opioids or common nerve-pain drugs like gabapentin work, which is the main reason researchers have studied ketamine for pain conditions that don't improve with first-line treatments. Health Canada and the U.S. FDA approve ketamine as a general anesthetic, and a related nasal spray formulation, esketamine, is approved specifically for treatment-resistant depression. Neither approval covers chronic pain, so when doctors prescribe ketamine for nerve pain, they are doing so off-label, meaning outside the conditions the drug's official approval lists.

In pain clinics, this typically takes the form of low-dose intravenous ketamine infusions given over several hours, sometimes repeated across a few days, in a monitored medical setting. Some patients report meaningful pain reduction that lasts weeks after a course of infusions; others see little or no benefit, and the duration of relief varies widely across the medical literature. Reviews of this evidence generally describe it as mixed rather than conclusive, and large, standardized randomized trials for neuropathic pain specifically remain far more limited than the trial base built up for ketamine's depression uses. That gap matters for readers: promising individual results and case reports are not the same as an established, reproducible treatment protocol.

What to Ask Before Considering Ketamine for Nerve Pain

IV infusion is the route of administration with the most research behind it for pain, though some clinics also offer intranasal sprays or compounded oral ketamine, formulations with considerably less evidence specific to neuropathic pain. Readers researching this option should ask a prospective provider several concrete questions: What is the exact dosing protocol and how many sessions does it involve? What monitoring happens during and after each infusion? What is the provider's training and experience specifically with pain patients, as opposed to mental health infusions? And how does ketamine fit into the rest of an existing pain management plan, rather than replacing it outright?

Cost is another practical factor. In Canada, ketamine infusions for pain are typically delivered through private clinics and are often not covered by provincial health insurance, which means patients can face significant out-of-pocket costs across a multi-session course, plus the cost of any booster infusions needed to sustain relief. Readers should also set realistic expectations going in: where ketamine helps, relief is often temporary rather than permanent, and maintaining benefit may require repeat treatment over time. It works best, according to how pain clinics generally structure care, as one tool within a broader multidisciplinary plan that may include physical therapy, other medications, and psychological support, rather than a stand-alone fix.

The Toronto Star's framing, that some patients describe their nerve pain as feeling worse than death, underscores how much unmet need drives interest in options like ketamine. What remains unclear is exactly how durable the benefit is across different types of neuropathic pain, which patients are most likely to respond, and whether broader insurance coverage or standardized clinical protocols will follow as more data accumulates. Readers dealing with severe nerve pain should treat ketamine as a conversation to have with a pain specialist, grounded in their specific diagnosis and medical history, rather than a treatment to pursue based on a single report.