Richard L. Bowen, M.D.
Founder & Medical Director
Dr. Bowen completed a bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of South Carolina in 1980. Five years later, in 1985, he graduated from medical school at the Medical University of South Carolina. In 1988 he completed Family Medicine residency training at Spartanburg Regional Medical Center. He then spent time as an emergency physician before moving into private practice in hospital-based family medicine.
Treating patients is what first drew him into research. He has since written more than 25 papers that appeared in peer-reviewed journals. The Food and Drug Administration pointed to his work as the primary basis for its 1997 decision to pull fen-phen, a popular diet drug, off the market. Later, one patient’s case led him to study Alzheimer’s disease, where he put forward a new explanation for its cause and a possible way to treat it. Together with his research partner, Craig Atwood, PhD, he went on to propose a new theory of aging, which the journal Gerontology published in 2004.
Dr. Bowen then served as lead investigator for a Phase II clinical trial that tested a treatment for Alzheimer’s built on this theory. The results were very encouraging. He shared them at the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology (ASCP) 2014 annual meeting, themed “New Approaches to Mental Illness in the Era of the National Brain Initiative,” and again a few months later at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD) meeting held in Philadelphia that same year. The complete findings appeared in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease in January 2015. A second trial that builds on the original study, with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is now underway, and its results should be available in late 2026.
That ASCP meeting is where Dr. Bowen first heard how powerfully ketamine could help people with treatment-resistant depression. Moved by the research and by what it meant for patients, he placed ketamine therapy at the center of his work. Since 2014 he has performed more than 30,000 ketamine infusions, and he speaks up often for its place in mental health treatment. In his own words, “Providing ketamine treatment for depression is by far the most rewarding thing I have done during my thirty-year career.”
Many consider Dr. Bowen a pioneer in ketamine care in South Carolina. He has personally trained two other ketamine centers in the state, part of his ongoing effort to help more people reach this treatment.
Away from the clinic, Dr. Bowen is a proud dad to five adult children: three daughters and two sons.
