Ask my friend about his medical cannabis recommendation.

[tongodeon]

An friend recently sent a small group of us this story about his experience obtaining medical marijuana, partly in response to my own experience. Looks like not a lot has changed in the last two years. I post this here with his permission:

The past week or so i've had constant pain in my side from what I thought was a gastrointestinal issue (

Comments

[chemicalpilate]

I think you over-estimate how much most people analyze the "regular" pharmaceuticals they're given. Doctor says take this, they take it, but they don't understand half-lives, dosing, etc.

[tongodeon]

...nor do they have to, which is perhaps the greater point.

The fact that the regular doctor/pharmacist works as well and as simply as it does ("take two of these and call me in the morning") is that the system encapsulates (pun intended) the principles I've described. It's understood what "these" are and what "two of them" contain. Without quantities and standardization to provide a foundation for basic directions everyone's just shooting in the dark.

Patients don't need to understand half-lives any more than car owners need to be familiar with metric conversions or understand oil viscosity, but if those standards and figures aren't part of the process somewhere the whole practice of modern auto mechanics pretty much breaks down.

[chemicalpilate]

See, that's where you're wrong. How often do people go on an SSRI only to have to change it a few times (compound, dose, etc) before they find something that works?

My business idea, if it weren't so legally risky in San Diego, would be to start an actual marijuana pharmacy: standardize doses based on measurement of THC content.

[tongodeon]

How often do people go on an SSRI only to have to change it a few times (compound, dose, etc) before they find something that works?

Obviously it's better when patients understand half-lives and dosing. My point is that nobody - not the doctor, not the pharmacist, not the patient - can get to that point ("changing compounds and doses") without these medications being standardized to contain known compounds or metered to known dosages.

My business idea, if it weren't so legally risky in San Diego, would be to start an actual marijuana pharmacy: standardize doses based on measurement of THC content.If anyone were to do this it would completely demolish my argument against the current MCD system, and I would welcome this. My objection is not with medical cannabis generally, but the way it's being handled in California specifically

[chemicalpilate]

If anyone were to do this it would completely demolish my argument against the current MCD system, and I would welcome this. My objection is not with medical cannabis generally, but the way it's being handled in California specifically.

OK, so, according to a friend of mine who has a recommendation, the club he goes to uses GCMS to quantitate. So, I guess I'm not surprised: it's cheaper than an HPLC and it's quantitative with specificity in multiple dimensions. I wasn't sure if GC would work for that kind of compound (I'm not a chemist anymore, sigh). Just saying. San Diego plays ball!

[matrygg]

The problem with SSRI's, in my understanding (this is based on why it was explained to me that I had to change them back when I was fucked up in the head) is that we only sort of understand the how and why of them and so we can't predict their effect on a specific individual.

[chemicalpilate]

We only "sort of" understand all drugs. Most psychotropic medications (specifically things like gabapentin) we have only the vaguest understanding of "how" they work. A lot of it is empirical.

[tongodeon]

We only "sort of" understand everything. All knowledge is tentative, probabilistic, and abstract to a degree. This doesn't necessarily mean that everything that we know might be crap, but it does mean that we don't know everything.

[chemicalpilate]

Right. The problem is that the human body is a system with a high degree of complexity. Reductionist models of drugs action can guide a process, but ultimately the only measure of improvement is in the social judgement of pre- and post-treatment conditions. So the problem with pharmacology is that you have one complex system (the body) interacting directly with another complex system (society) mediated through science (reductionist indexes like Ka, IC50, EC50, etc). Data is lost by necessity and this ambiguity is why it's not always "obvious to everyone" why things should be one way or another.

[flwyd]

We sort of know a lot less about the mind and brain than we sort of do about the musculoskeletal system.

[mutantgarage]

Ehhh,.. gabapentin.
Dr. prescribe that to me for neuralgia, lived in a haze for a month until I could wind down from it. That stuff would literally make my mind go blank, no thoughts, nothing for several seconds. Decided a little numbness and muscle twitches were not so bad compared with the effects that stuff.

[chemicalpilate]

I can't say I know anything about it personally, but I did know someone who took it as an anti-epileptic for which it worked quite well.

[xiphias]

A further problem is that we only sort of understand depression. My claim is that "depression" is actually a category of diseases, like "cancer", which all have similarities in presentation, but may well have different pathologies, causes, and therefore different effective treatments. That a drug that may work PERFECTLY on ONE form a depression may have no effect on another -- because it's quite possible that they are two completely different diseases, and we just don't know that.