Doctors are advising patients with chronic pain, anxiety and insomnia to use cannabis with both THC and CBD, with specific doses that don’t get you high.
Now that it is legal here in Canada, this should free our health professionals to research the best practices for each patient’s condition.
We can assume that many Canadians don’t feel the need to get advice on Cannabis because they are satisfied with the way they have been using it.
Others are satisfied with their current course of medications and may be cautious about adding cannabis into the mix.
Myself, I am encouraged by the new interest in the science based research of cannabis going on around the world.
Excerpts from an article called: How to Get the Health Benefits of Cannabis Without Getting High
Dr. Dustin Sulak, a Maine-based osteopathic physician who has treated thousands of patients with medical cannabis, is a strong advocate of microdosing and believes it is especially helpful for older adults.
“Microdosing involves using cannabis at a dose below that which would cause impairment, either to relieve symptoms or simply as a tonic, to promote health and prevent disease,” Sulak says. “Basically, my entire practice involves treating patients through microdosing. They are looking for relief, not to get high.”
Dr. Jordan Tishler, a cannabis physician and instructor of medicine at Harvard with a practice in Boston, also treats his patients for pain and other chronic conditions using very low doses of THC. For Tishler, the preferred mode of delivery for fast treatment of acute conditions, such as migraine headaches, is inhalation of very small quantities of vaporized flower — a part of the cannabis plant. Vaporization is achieved using a technologically sophisticated portable convection device, better known as a vaping device.
Tishler says it’s the THC in cannabis that works on pain. And he contends that the psychoactive side effects from THC are not something to be feared. “There are plenty of medications, including opioids and even antibiotics, which affect our mental state. Those are just side effects that have to be managed,” he says
