Thinking of giving up pills for plants? Are you a new MMJ patient who doesn’t know much about cannabis other than it gets you high? Or maybe you’re concerned about how medical marijuana will interact with your other meds.
Kelsey Schwander is a Doctor of Pharmacy originally from Denver, Colorado, who has been practicing in St.
BHealth Consulting, she meets one-to-one with patients in a doctor’s office.
It can’t interact with my prescription medication.” I’m like, “No, no it can.” So we have to be careful.
I won’t go over all the medications because there’s a lot on how they work and it depends what other medications you’re on, but I’ll go over generally how these interactions work.
Because a lot of healthcare providers will be like, “Oh, it interacts.
Kelsey Schwander : When you have a prescription medication and cannabis, what happens is when you consume both of them, they have to be metabolized.
Kelsey Schwander : Another example, which as a pharmacist, is scarier for me is when it’s the opposite.
We know that THC can have sedating side effects, but you add alcohol and you add some medications that can increase that, it can be dangerous as well.
And what happens is, if there’s an interaction, so let’s say I take that medication and I take cannabis and there’s an interaction, that drug can’t be converted into its active form and therefore it’s not working.
Not to go too far, into the medications, but the big ones I like to let people know are the blood thinners, you want to be careful, talk to someone about it.
So that’s something that you have to be careful because of the state of effects, but some drug interactions can have good responses.
I always tell patients if you’re on opioids or chronic pain, you always, always, always, no matter what you’re on, you should always tell your healthcare provider that you’re starting to use cannabis because they’re going to have to monitor you.
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