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Are you new to medicating with medical cannabis? Whether you’re just getting started or you’ve been growing your own cannabis for years, keeping a journal could greatly help enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of your cannabis treatment plan. This journal should be personal and may change over time as you become more accustomed to medicating with cannabis. One of the best things a journal can do is help you accurately recall how much medication you took at a given time. A journal can also be an aide to help you differentiate between strains, types of edibles, and brands. Journaling can even be used to help you budget and plan the best time to refill your medicine cabinet. This will help reduce the stress of wondering when, what type, and how much medication you should get next time.
Concentrates made from cannabis have been around for a long time; yet lately, the term has become a bit enigmatic. Perhaps you have heard of wax or are familiar with hash. These are two forms of cannabis concentrate that have been extracted through different methods. While there are many aspects of cannabis that can be extracted, the most common elements are cannabinoids like THC and CBD. Concentrates are aptly named as they are more potent than smoking cannabis flower, making it ideal for those who need a fast acting, high dose treatment to alleviate their pain. To understand the nature of concentrates, we need a better understanding of how cannabis produces the medicines known as cannabinoids.
Medical marijuana treatments can be used to alleviate many ailments; however, too much medication can result in some unpleasant side effects. Often referred to as a “marijuana overdose”, patients may experience nausea, vertigo, paranoia, and panic attacks from a large dose of cannabis. These negative effects can last up to four hours and leave a patient feeling exhausted for even longer; on the other hand, cannabis will not shut off a person’s autonomous functions like lungs breathing or a heart beating. This is why many find cannabis to be a far less dangerous pain remedy than opioids. For further reading on cannabis and opioids, please, check out our blog post on the difference between cannabis and opioids.
With proper dosing, patients might never experience the negative side effects of cannabis. It may be difficult to predict this dose because everybody’s endocannabinoid system is different. On top of that, cannabis comes in many forms that each affect the body uniquely. For example, smoking a joint or eating a brownie will give a patient very different experiences even if both treatments offer an equivalent amount of THC. This is largely due to the way our livers process THC. For inexperienced patients, we recommend starting with a very low dose, one toke or 5mg of eaten THC, and slowly increasing your dose over time to meet your needs.
One of the most well known ailments to be treated with cannabis is glaucoma; even Bill Maher jokes that he smokes cannabis to treat his glaucoma. Despite the popularity of the cultural allusions, glaucoma is a serious medical condition that often results in irreversible blindness. Cannabis has been shown to help alleviate pain symptoms, and patients suffering from glaucoma have praised the holistic properties of cannabis, both smoked and eaten. Most of this praise focuses on the benefits of cannabis with high THC contents, but other cannabinoids may also help, potentially even more than THC.
Opium is a plant containing opioids which reduce pain by binding to opioid receptors. Cannabis is a plant containing cannabinoids which produces a diverse range of effects by acting on cannabinoid receptors. The Drug Enforcement Agency lists several opioids including heroin as schedule I drugs. They also list all cannabis, hemp, and cannabinoids as schedule I drugs. This means the DEA sees cannabis and heroin as comparable threats to society that offer no medical benefit. So, what is the difference between opioids and cannabis, and why would someone choose to treat their pain with one over the other?
