I used cannabis or marijuana when I was young and I got paranoid. I don’t want to use it again. That’s the question I hear oftentimes in our older patients who had a bad experience with cannabis way back when.
Hi. I’m Dr. Dan Stein, board-certified neurologist and medical cannabis expert. I see many patients who are interested in cannabis therapy but who had a bad experience at one point usually associated with anxiety, perhaps paranoia and they’re reluctant to try cannabis again.
What I tell them is that nowadays, we have specific ways to measure and identify cannabis products that are likely to cause energy and perhaps anxiety versus relaxation and a bit of sedation.
The traditional terms for these are the strains indica and sativa, sativa being the one that causes an uplifting experience and the indica a more – a sedative or relaxing experience. Those terms are actually even outdated now.
We measured the chemical varieties of cannabis and we calculate how many cannabinoids and terpenes are in the cannabis plant and likely to cause an uplifting or sedative experience. We refer to them as chemovars or chemical varieties and it’s much more complicated than simply indica or sativa.
The point is that if someone is prone to anxiety and they need something to relax, we can recommend a cannabis variety that will cause relaxation and not make anxiety worse.
Similarly, some patients would like to use cannabis during the day to have an uplifting effect. Young people with attention deficit or other similar disorders of distractibility find that using a sativa type of cannabis will often help them focus their attention.
So these different chemical varieties of cannabis are useful for different conditions in different people, no matter what their experience was perhaps many years ago.
So if you are a seasonal resident or a permanent Florida resident, please feel free to come to the clinic or call with your special question or concern. We can be reached here at 941-400-1211 or by email, info@neurologyofcannabis.com. I would love to hear from you. I’m Dr. Dan Stein and that’s our video for today.