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Doctors lack critical knowledge of marijuana |
Physicians who prescribe government-authorized medical marijuana have an incomplete knowledge of the drug’s clinical uses and are relying heavily on the anecdotal evidence of their patients in determining a course of treatment, Sun Media reported.
| “This model obscures the boundary between physician and patient and contravenes conventional medical practice which relies almost exclusively on scientific evidence-based information,” a study for Health Canada by the Montreal-based Les Études de Marché Créatec concluded, according to Sun Media.
|  | | “Many physicians expressed concern about this blurring of boundary.” |
Despite admitting they need to know much more about marijuana, it appears these same physicians endorse prescribing it to their seriously ill patients as a way to relieve severe pain, nausea and muscle spasms.
They also seem to believe that marijuana is not a “high risk” drug and that its positive medicinal effects outweigh its negative effects.
Meanwhile, the Regina Leader-Post reported on the weekend that people registered with Health Canada to receive marijuana treatment now have more freedom to choose who supplies them with the drug.
Federal Court Judge Barry Strayer ruled that a government regulation imposing limits on growers of medical marijuana was unconstitutional. He also allowed growers to supply marijuana to more than one patient at a time.
“In my view,” wrote Strayer, “it is not tenable for the government, consistently with the right established in other courts for qualified medical users to have reasonable access to marijuana, to force them either to buy from the government contractor, grow their own or be limited to the unnecessarily restrictive system of designated producers.”
HIV-AIDS sufferer and registered medical marijuana user Tom Shapiro of Regina hailed the ruling as “a step in the right direction.”
“This is definitely good for the designated grower,” Shapiro told the Leader-Post. “We can now have people get together and grow medical marijuana like gardeners in a community garden.”
Shapiro expects the government will appeal the decision.
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