Your doctor is not the police. Neither is your doctor there to police your behavior. So, you should be honest with your doctor about smoking weed.<\/p>\n
Why?\u00a0As Kaiser Health News reported last week<\/a>, it could save your life \u2014 or at least make surgery and post-surgery recovery much smoother.<\/p>\n When it comes to cannabis, medical professionals\u2019 ignorance of cannabis generally and of its medical benefits is\u00a0a well-documented problem<\/a>. (For this, you can in large part blame\u00a0medical schools<\/a>.) Yet the risk of being honest with your doctor is low. There is a good chance your physician will hear the words \u201cI smoke weed\u201d and, at worse, shrug and move onto the next question. (This happened to me, last week, when I underwent a physical at a major university\u2019s health center, in a state where adult-use cannabis is not legal.)<\/p>\n However, the reward for honesty is immense, unless you like waking up in the middle of surgery.<\/p>\n As KHN reported<\/a>, surgery theaters in Colorado \u2014 where adults report using cannabis at almost double the national rate, 17% to 9% \u2014 are discovering that cannabis users need \u201cmore than triple the amount\u201d of common sedation drug propofol in order to \u201cgo under\u201d during a procedure. Giving a patient a double or triple dose of\u00a0the stuff that helped kill Michael Jackson<\/a>\u00a0is not necessarily a winning solution. More of that stuff can lower blood pressure or lessen heart function.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s another potentially mortal risk for weed smokers in a medical setting. <\/p>\n Cannabis users are also in a peculiar position to be over-prescribed opioids.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Since most hospitals don\u2019t tolerate cannabis use of any kind \u2014\u00a0the mind-blowing incident in which a Missouri hospital called the police on a Stage IV cancer patient whom they thought had marijuana<\/a>, but didn\u2019t, is an extreme scenario that nonetheless represents the typical \u201cno weed\u201d mindset \u2014 the standard protocol for cannabis users is to not use weed when in post-op recovery. This means they will feel more pain and they will be prescribed more opioids, pain specialists told KHN, a finding backed up by a recent study.<\/p>\n \u201cThe hypothesis is that chronic marijuana users develop a tolerance to pain medications, and since they do not receive marijuana while in the hospital, they require a higher replacement dose of opioids,\u201d Dr. David Bar-Or, the director of trauma research at Swedish Medical Center in Englewood, Colorado, told KHN.<\/p>\n Bar-Or is examining whether dronabinol, the synthetic THC substitute that not many cannabis patients seem to like, might be an effective substitute while in a clinical setting.<\/p>\n Everyone appears to be studying or at least unsure about the safe intersection of cannabis use and mainstream medical attention. Mark Steven Wallace, a physician and department chair of pain medicine at the University of California-San Diego is currently working on a study examining whether cannabis might be of use as a replacement for opioids in patients suffering from pain. One thing\u2019s for sure \u2014 if the doctors don\u2019t know because you don\u2019t tell them, they won\u2019t have enough data to tell you what\u2019s safe and proper at any time, now or in the future.<\/p>\n \u201cWe really don\u2019t want patients to feel like there\u2019s stigma,\u201d said Linda Stone, a North Carolina-based nurse anesthetist, in the KHN report. \u201cThey really do need to divulge that information. We are just trying to make sure that we provide the safest care.\u201d<\/p>\n Think about it one last way: as positive behavior modeling. If even recalcitrant doctors see a parade of healthy and functional cannabis users in their offices \u2014 users who are upfront and casual about their reasonable and responsible habits \u2014 it could change their minds and remove whatever stigma is left.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, are you honest with your doctor about smoking weed?<\/p>\n The post Why You Should Tell Your Doctor If You Smoke Cannabis<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Your doctor is not the police. Neither is your doctor there to police your behavior. So, you should be honest with your doctor about smoking weed. Why?\u00a0As Kaiser Health News reported last week, it could save your life \u2014 or at least make surgery and post-surgery recovery much smoother. WhenContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,21,11734,53,415,738,3860],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37503"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37503"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37504,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37503\/revisions\/37504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: Why You Should Tell Your Doctor If You Smoke Cannabis<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"