This past Tuesday, I got into the local hospital's multi-disciplinary pain programme, which takes a whole bunch of different departments, spearheaded by their interventional pain department, and gets them to work together to aid persistent pain patients with lowering their pain levels - which basically involves radical life changes. It's based off of what they do in Australia and New Zealand (they actually played this amazing animated PSA from AUS for it).
One of the introductory segments talks about medications, and since Pennsylvania just recently began working on introducing their medicinal marijuana programme, we discussed that. Sadly, they only had European and US studies - none of the Turkish or other Middle Eastern studies - but what they had primarily was promoting CBD oil over flat out medicinal marijuana for nerve related issues.
The process to get on the medicinal marijuana programme is actually designed to be detrimental to the person trying to get onto it here, mostly because they're using a lot of exceptions to even make it work. I had already started attempting to get into it, with the first digital step done...but the waiting lists to see the very limited amount of doctors in the area that are "approved" to work in the system is huge.
However, CBD is approved by the FDA, even if the DEA doesn't like that fact. So it's available as a vape oil right in town. Tuesday I went and priced it, and the staff was super knowledgeable and super straightforward; they don't carry the purest brand around, but what they carry is a good purity in a good quantity for a good price. They can get the crazy super pure brand that is crazy expensive for a smaller bottle - they just don't carry it normally because this area does not have that kind of money going around. What they carry is overall the better deal for the people in this area. If this CBD oil does have some effect, but I want to try the purer version, I can get that later.
Like anything, it takes several weeks for CBD to fully take affect. The bottle I have is about a one month supply, so I figure one or two bottles will give me an idea on whether or not this stuff is going to work. Frankly, any pain relief that's not a god damn pharmaceutical pill or shot would be nice - I'm up to 27 medications currently, and I'm kind of sick of being on that many. The idea behind going onto medicinal marijuana was that I could eliminate up to 14 of those; while the lack of THC in this form of cannabis means that it won't eliminate that many, it still eliminates some.
Ideally, something with a higher CBD content but with some THC content would likely work out the best, but I don't think that'll end up happening while I'm on this state. So we'll try this.
I'm really sick of having weeks to months of having to stay in bed, like the past several weeks.
