Ketamine GP can return to practice after two-year ban
Dr Leimin Chen will be reregistered after a tribunal found he now recognised it was wrong to prescribe ketamine for severe depression
A former GP registrar banned after prescribing ketamine for severe treatment-resistant depression has been given the green light to reapply for GP training, after his registration was reinstated.
Dr Leimin Chen was a registrar in Alice Springs when he was deregistered in 2018 for offering ketamine injections off-label to patients four years earlier.
At the time, he had been employed by the Aura Medical Corporation to prescribe the $3000 experimental treatment, which has never been approved by the TGA (see box below).
In most cases, the patients’ regular GPs were not informed about the treatment.
