The single largest avoidable pitfall I see among new patients is having fallen prey to the hype. Whether it’s buying vast numbers of different products, to believing that you can’t overdose on cannabis, or having followed the advice of others leading to excessive use, the advice of friends and of the industry can really lead you astray. We’d like to avoid that!
Where You Get Your Guidance Matters!
There is a common, self-serving refrain in the cannabis world that doctors don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to cannabis. I’d say you’d better think about who is saying this and what they stand to gain from it.
Let’s remember that doctors go to college, 4 years of medical school, and do at least 3 more years of practical training called Residency. This is a long, grueling process that transforms normal young people into something else, called a physician. Nobody is stupid enough to go through all of this if it weren’t necessary to be properly educated to take care of people.
Medical training not only takes years and long hours of dedication, but it covers vast information about how your body actually works and what can go wrong when diseased. While it is truly frustrating when medical science doesn’t have the answers you want, and it is well known that the American medical payment system is broken, but don’t let those aspects convince you that most doctors aren’t smart, caring, and knowledgeable.
It’s also true that many doctors are not very well acquainted with cannabis as medicine. Yet, even in that situation I would argue that doctors know more about your illness than anyone else, and knowing cannabis is less important. The best physicians have learned about cannabinoid medicine albeit more recently.
Furthermore, we don’t usually have anything to sell you. We don’t make medicines, we don’t sell them, and contrary to popular conspiracy theories, we don’t make money from the pharmaceuticals that we prescribe. We only earn when we see you and take care of you.
Why does this matter?
It matters because everyone else does have something to sell you. It’s obvious what the cannabis industry has to sell you, and yet it’s amazing that otherwise rational patients will believe the 20 year old at the dispensary or the sales-pitch on the package of gummies they buy. Sadly, there are no requirements in this industry that prevent utter nonsense being doled out to unsuspecting folk.
Friends and acquaintances you’d think would only have your best interests at heart, right? They have their own experiences and learning from them would seem reasonable. Surely you can get advice from them. However, this poses at least two problems.
First, people who have had a good experience so far are very enthusiastic about the medication. This is understandable, but not very scientific. Their experience is, well, their experience and not necessarily relevant to you or your situation. They probably don’t even know or understand your situation, and because they’re not doctors, that’s normal.
Second, where did your buddy get her information? It’s likely that she got it from the same flawed process as you are. That is to say, she got it from her buddy, who got it from their buddy and so on. It’s like that game of “telephone” where everything gets distorted as it’s passed along.
Studies of military veterans with PTSD who turn to cannabis as medicine show that they typically get their advice from a buddy who is already using too much cannabis. They then follow the example and end up using too much themselves. And contrary to the self-serving message from the cannabis world, there is such thing as using too much and negative consequences to that (even if they correctly say that it won’t kill you).
So What Are You Supposed to Do?
It seems that there are two good sources of guidance. First, you could start reading the scientific literature on cannabis medicine. Not Google, not websites, but the actual scientific studies. Also contrary to popular belief, there are many such studies, in fact, over 35,000 such studies at last count. That’s a lot to take in. It also presumes that you’d be able to make heads or tails of all the technical stuff. If you haven’t spent your life being trained to read and digest this stuff, how likely is it that you’ll really understand it?
The second option is to ask a knowledgeable and caring doctor who specializes in this kind of medicine. This would be someone, like myself, who has dedicated their life to science and the practice of Medicine, and who has taken the years to read and digest all this science. This extensive background enables them to have the framework of understanding of human biology as well as cannabinoid treatments. I would argue that this is the person who has the most knowledge on these topics, and again, the least incentive to guide you in any direction other than for your health.