Combining Ketamine Therapy with Other Modalities with Genesee Herzberg, PsyD

In this episode, Dr. Genesee Herzberg joins to discuss the ways ketamine therapy can be combined with other healing modalities. Dr. Herzberg is a clinical psychologist and co-founder and director of Sage Integrative Health, an integrative psychedelic therapy clinic and training center in the SF Bay Area. She worked as a therapist on the MDMA for PTSD clinical trials and co-edited the book Integral Psychedelic Therapy.

In this conversation, Dr. Herzberg explains how somatic therapy, touch therapy, bodywork, and movement support trauma processing. She also highlights the benefits of combining ketamine with acupuncture, craniosacral therapy, and functional medicine—including nutritional and hormonal assessments—to address physiological contributors to mental health. In closing, Dr. Herzberg emphasizes trauma-informed, team-based, and individualized approach to psychedelic healing, where ketamine acts as a bridge between psychological, somatic, and biomedical treatments.

In this episode, you'll hear:

• How somatic therapy is used within ketamine therapy sessions
• How ketamine helps quiet the default mode network to support therapeutic processing
• Ensuring safety during physical and movement-based therapies 
• The importance of establishing boundaries and explicit consent for therapeutic work that involves touch
• Dr. Herzberg's first hand experience of the reciprocal benefits of combining acupuncture and ketamine therapy
• Using functional medicine and nutrition therapy to support the therapeutic process with ketamine

Quotes:

"I see ketamine, especially at lower psychoanalytic doses… as a support in turning down the volume on emotional and physical pain, which can then help us to better experience them. So I think of it as a sort of 're-associative'." [4:08]

"Another aspect of the healing potential of therapy in general has to do with a therapeutic relationship: developing this sense that there's someone who cares about you, who's there to support you, who's going to be right there with you as you're dropping into your scariest and darkest places. And touch is one of the best ways to communicate that."  [13:53]

"Acupuncture can help the nervous system to relax and help the system to open to the ketamine such that we are able to more fully receive the benefits of the medicine and feel the effects of it." [25:07]

Links:

Sage Integrative Health website 

Dr. Herzberg on LinkedIn 

Sage Integrative Health on LinkedIn 

Sage Integrative Health on Instagram

Sage Integrative Health on Facebook  

Integral Psychedelic Therapy: The Non-Ordinary Art of Psychospiritual Healing edited by Jason A. Butler, Genesee Herzberg, and Richard Louis Miller

Previous episode: Psychedelic Adjunct Series: Somatic Therapy with Jenna Valentine, DACM, LAc

Psychedelic Medicine Association

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