Eleanor Bramwell and Lauren Going chose Baltimore City for a reason when they opened their psychedelic-assisted therapy and wellness center: they saw an unfulfilled need.
The two therapists wanted to offer support to people around psychedelics with education, assisted therapy, coaching, and safe experiences that are healing rather than harmful, and no such practice existed in or around Baltimore.
Bramwell and Going founded Inner Path Wellness, which offers Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and microdose coaching with their team of medical professionals and therapists.
Ketamine-assisted therapy involves a client coming to their physical space, and the medical staff (a doctor or nurse practitioner) prescribing ketamine. The ketamine is given during the therapeutic session, which all happens during a two-hour window at the wellness center. Ketamine is the only substance with psychedelic properties in clinical use for assisted therapy. It can be administered intravenously, via nasal spray, or in lozenge form. Inner Path uses lozenges with their clients.
Going describes Ketamine use as an adjunct to any therapeutic process that allows it to unfold beyond the obstacles and with faster speed than traditional therapy. In addition to helping patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), she describes research showing Ketamine as a powerful therapy for treatment-resistant depression, suicidal ideation, and addictive behaviors like obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Microdosing coaching is a different process, whereby the client would ingest tiny doses of substances like Psilocybin mushrooms (street name: magic mushrooms or shrooms). The wellness center does not provide this, as it’s not available yet for clinical use in Maryland. They don’t sell psilocybin or serve it. They do, however, educate people and teach them about how to regulate their own nervous systems, identify life changes they seek with the assistance of psilocybin, and support them with therapeutic sessions to get the most out of their work with that substance.
Bramwell describes therapeutic microdosing as taking advantage of the brain’s neuroplasticity.
“Because the brain is so neuroplastic when you’re microdosing, it’s a really sacred window to go in and create thought changes, behavior changes, lifestyle changes,” Bramwell said. She described grooves in the brain that act as pathways. “But when you’re microdosing the brain is so moldable you can create much deeper grooves, much deeper pathways, much deeper new potentials. So microdosing is really good when people are stuck.”
She used the example of a path on a dirt field that a truck has driven over many times, and the path has become very deep — so deep that the truck is stuck in that deep groove. A microdose of Psilocybin is like a rainstorm that washes away that path, turning the dirt field into mud into which a person can create a new pathway.
“Then after the microdosing protocol, that new possibility is really available to you forever, you … can get to live into change,” Bramwell said.
Psilocybin is not legal to grow in Maryland now, but other states like Colorado, California, and Oregon are legally growing it, as is the District of Columbia. There are over 300 strains that have different impacts on one’s body. Bramwell describes the dose as sub-perceptible, so that one can take it and still drive a car or go to work or parent.
For a person to get the proper strain, Bramwell and Going consider it critical from an ethical and harm reduction perspective to purchase psilocybin from people growing it with integrity and legality.
“They have different actions on the body. They work with you differently. And so for someone to be able to call a company, have a consult, and share their medical history and get matched with a blend that actually helps their constitution is critical,” Bramwell said.
Going is a therapist for an MDMA expanded access program in Rockville and will be able to offer MDMA assisted therapy at Inner Path once it is in clinical use (meaning it has FDA approval). Since it is not yet, though, Going says it’s not a substance to microdose, nor is it a substance Inner Path is working with yet.
Inner Path generally works with adults 18 years and older, though they would consider working with someone slightly younger on a case-by-case basis. “Because the effects on depression, especially treatment resistant depression are so phenomenal. Compared to SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and the current treatments that we have, there’s so much promise that we would definitely consider and that’s really based on the judgment of our medical doctors,” Going said.
The diversity of the team adds to the uniqueness of their practice, adds Going. “All of our therapists are trained in ketamine assisted therapy, plus other modalities that they bring to the work. So we’re really unique in Baltimore in that way,” Going said. “We have such a variety of practitioners that can really be matched to the client’s needs.” The other modalities the practitioners use include Internal Family Systems (IFS), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EDMR), and Somatic therapies.
Psychedelic integration involves helping clients prepare for their psychedelic experience and integrate it into their lives in a way that offers the most healing.
“What we really look to do is meet with people and help educate them around safety,” Going said. “Help them prepare for the journey with an intention and really create a certain setting that will be the most therapeutic for them.”
They don’t support the client during the actual use of the substance for legal reasons. “We’ll meet with them for integration afterwards, which is really looking to draw from the experience, what are the insights, what are the new perceptions and then how to put them into life and into practice,” Going explained.
Statistically, Bramwell says Ketamine has decades of research dating all the way back to the first half of the 20th century around the medicine’s efficacy, yet research was shut down mid-century until the year 2000.
“We have a lot of data. A lot of data. Not a little bit, a lot of data. It’s good. This is peer reviewed. And Hopkins really pioneered this reopening,” Bramwell said. “This is peer reviewed, evidence based, and now this research is happening at esteemed universities across the entire world.”
Going describes support for Ketamine and other psychedelic therapies as moving west to east, with the East Coast being slower to pick them up compared to California and Colorado where these treatments are more commonplace. She did describe a momentum, but said it requires a lot of education to overcome the stigma for drugs like MDMA or psilocybin being in the same class of drug as heroin or crack. (Ketamine has always been a Class III drug, designated for therapeutic use.)
“It really is taking that kind of education for us to help people understand that there is therapeutic value, and these medicines can be very safe when used in an intentional way, where safety is paramount,” Going said.
Going and Bramwell hope to be a hub in Baltimore for that education, helping professionals and the public learn about how these medicines can help them in a safe, productive, long-lasting way.
Editor’s note: In a previous version of this article, an explanation of microdosing included a reference to MDMA (which has since been removed). MDMA is not recommended for microdosing due to potential dangers.
