Ketamine for prehospital trauma analgesia in a low-resource rural trauma system: a retrospective comparative study of ketamine and opioid analgesia in a ten-year cohort in Iraq.

Background: Opioid analgesics are used in most trauma systems, and only a few studies report on the use of ketamine for prehospital analgesia. In a low-cost rural trauma system in Iraq paramedics have been using prehospital ketamine analgesia for ten years. This study aims to evaluate the effects of prehospital analgesia on physiologic trauma severity indicators and compare the effect of ketamine and pentazocine on those indicators.