If only you could see what I see…
As I walk into the exam room to see my patient who has literally had to drag herself into my office for years due to chronic pain, I can see a gleam of light in her eyes and a smile on her face like I’ve never seen before. She practically leaps up from her chair and steps towards me and can’t stop saying Thank you…
After answering what might seem to some like never ending questions, she reports “Now I can walk again. I can exercise again.’ She is now taking a fraction of the amount of narcotic pain medicine that she had been taking for years and she’s more functional and exercising every day. This is the type of response that we see in patients who have the opportunity to use medical cannabis as an alternative to other tried and failed conventional medicines. Time and time again I talk to patients who are at their wits end, and like this patient who is almost 70 and has never touched an illegal drug in her life, in their desperation to find pain relief and avoid surgeries with sub par success rates, they find pain relief and a palpable improvement in their quality of life like they have not experienced in years.
This makes me proud to be one of the few physicians willing to break down barriers and go against the norms of medicine to help patients and it brings joy to my heart when I see patients who have suffered for so many years, living life again.
Medical cannabis is not a magic answer to all that ails you but the fact that it is so difficult to access for so many is simply a shame. I sometimes wish that the naysayers and skeptics could be a fly on my clinic wall and see the lives that are being changed. And trust me, if you’re a skeptic now, I say to folks, all it takes is to have someone you love experience suffering and be without hope with the use of conventional medicines and then you might pause, evaluate the plethora of information that exists supporting the benefits of medical cannabis and maybe, just maybe, you might become a believer.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again, while medical cannabis may not be the first treatment we should reach for, it certainly should not be the last…
Helping my patients live their healthiest and most fulfilling lives yet in mind, body and spirit is the greatest gift I can receive from living in my purpose.
No more heartfelt words have ever been spoken as we came to the end of our visit and she said to me…”I don’t cry every day in pain anymore…Thank you so much…”
If only you could see what I see…
