Dr. Bowen received his undergraduate degree in Biology from the University of South Carolina in 1980 and earned his medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston in 1985. He completed his residency in Family Medicine at Spartanburg Regional Medical Center in 1988. Following his residency, Dr. Bowen worked in Emergency Medicine before transitioning into private, hospital-based Family Medicine.
His experiences caring for patients sparked a passion for medical research. Over the years, he has authored more than 25 papers in peer-reviewed journals. Notably, the Food and Drug Administration cited Dr. Bowen’s research as the primary basis for the 1997 removal of the diet drug fen-phen from the market. Based on a single patient encounter, he later turned his focus to Alzheimer’s disease, proposing a new cause and possible treatment of the disease. This led him and his collaborator, Craig Atwood PhD, to develop a new theory of aging published in Gerontology in 2004.
Based on this theory, Dr. Bowen subsequently led a Phase II clinical trial for this novel Alzheimer’s treatment. The very positive findings of the trial were presented at the “New Approaches to Mental Illness in the Era of the National Brain Initiative” 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology (ASCP) and later that year at the 2014 Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD) conference in Philadelphia. The full results were then published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (January 2015). A follow-up clinical trial, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), based on the initial study, is ongoing. The results are expected to be released in late 2026.
It was at the ASCP conference that he first learned about the transformative effects of ketamine therapy in treating treatment-resistant depression. Inspired by the results and patient outcomes, Dr. Bowen made ketamine therapy a core part of his practice. Over the past seven years, he has personally administered over 30,000 ketamine infusions and has become a leading advocate for its use in mental health care. He emphatically states, “Providing ketamine treatment for depression is by far the most rewarding thing I have done during my thirty-year career.”
Dr. Bowen is recognized as a pioneer in the field and the leader in advancing ketamine care throughout South Carolina. Two other ketamine centers in the state have been trained by Dr. Bowen, further demonstrating his commitment to expanding access to this life-changing treatment.
Outside of medicine, Dr. Bowen is the proud father of five grown children—two sons and three daughters.
