Dr. Vikas Patel MD is a board certified Emergency Medicine physician and also a Veteran of the US Navy. He served as a Flight Surgeon for the majority of his military career and has seen first hand the devastation that depression, PTSD, and chronic pain can bring to the lives of military service members. After leaving active duty, he completed his emergency medicine residency at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, IL where he took care of some of America’s highest acuity patients on the trauma and mental illness fronts. Since completing residency, he has remained in Chicagoland and has been a practicing emergency medicine physician as well as Director of Emergency Medicine at area hospitals. Through his clinical and administrative roles, he has witnessed first hand the hurdles that hospitals and patients must overcome to obtain care and treatments such as Ketamine. As Ketamine treatments are off label for this purpose, there are many legal obstacles, necessitating the existence of stand alone clinics.