We’ll avoid the obvious bad joke here, as choosing the best palliative care is critical in end of life care to make the experience as positive as possible for the dying, i.e., ideally not to be in intolerable pain nor so sedated or suffering from other side effects so that they can’t interact with others, and to lessen the trauma for their loved ones, and yes, on their staff caretakers too – as suffering is hard on all concerned.
However, the problem is like all of the cannabis proposals in recent years, the bills are another stall tactic, and this year the submitted bills are designed to convince Utahns that this “careful approach” is all we need, so let’s “ake-tay ings-thay ow-ly-slay” on “e-they allot-bay eal-day.”
We hope citizens see through this charade, but while this is playing out on Capitol Hill, here’s a new LARGE scale study (from Israel, where else?) showing – along with evidence already gathered – that we really don’t need to hold up the whole state for a tiny pilot study, because we already know medicinal cannabis is safe and effective for the very ill elderly:
Excerpts….
“Researchers from Hebrew University and the Ben Gurion University of Negrev distributed questionnaires to 2736 patients aged 65 or older who were receiving medical cannabis treatments in a clinic in Israel. Six months later, the patients received a second questionnaire asking them to self-report changes in their pain intensity and quality of life after receiving the cannabis-based treatment.
” ‘After six months of treatment, 93.7 percent of the respondents reported improvement in their condition, and the reported pain level was reduced from a median of 8 on a scale of 0-10 to a median of 4,’ the researchers wrote, according to a preview of the upcoming report that will be published in the European Journal of Internal Medicine. Most of the respondents also reported an improvement in their overall quality of life. The majority of these patients were using cannabis to treat chronic pain or cancer, and after six months of medical cannabis use, around 18% of these patients were able to reduce their dosage of opioid medications or even stop using them entirely.
‘Our study finds that the therapeutic use of cannabis is safe and efficacious in the elderly population’.”
The authors want to go further, but Utah legislators, by contrast, want to go backward and start re-inventing the wheel.
Or maybe they, you know, just plain want to continue to delay medical cannabis for more years using whatever cockamamie proposals they can come up with….
If you have an opinion on HB’s 195 and 197, you can find and contact your legislators: http://ift.tt/2mbMCJm
#MMJ #HB195 #HB197 #Elderly #Research #Israel #TRUCE
See full article – New Study Reports that Medical Cannabis Is Effective and Safe for Elderly Patients – Health | MERRY JANE
