Marijuana use and epilepsy
Prevalence in patients of a tertiary care epilepsy center
D. W. Gross, MD, J. Hamm, BA, N. L. Ashworth, MD MSc and D. Quigley, BSN
From the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Donald W. Gross, Division of Neurology, Department of Medicine, 2E3.19 Walter C. Mackenzie Health Sciences Centre, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2B7, Canada; e-mail: donald.gross@ualberta.ca

The authors sought to determine the prevalence of marijuana use in patients with epilepsy by performing a telephone survey in a tertiary care epilepsy center. Twenty-one percent of subjects had used marijuana in the past year with the majority of active users reporting beneficial effects on seizures. Twenty-four percent of all subjects believed marijuana was an effective therapy for epilepsy. Despite limited evidence of efficacy, many patients with epilepsy believe marijuana is an effective therapy for epilepsy and are actively using it.

Got this off neroulogy.com for your reading pleasure

Go to google plenty of reading medical marijuana, epilepsy marijuana,
I don't have time to wait for studies I have to live my life please support medical marijuana

On/Off Topic Elbert, this is kind of on and off the topic. It regards attitudes. I have a severely bad back condition - severe degenerative disc disease in all of my discs and until last spring when they surgically fractured them, I had two auto fusions in my lumbar spine that didn't fuse right - all to say - I had chronic and severe back pain. Throw a lot of drops in there and well....I'm sure you get the picture. Doctors do not like to prescribe pain pill, thank you DEA rules and regs. I'm a self professed expert on this. However I have gone to two pain clinics, received modalities as well as pain pills but can those suckers be expensive. The first clinic, long ago before OxyContin got a bad name, I was prescribed OxyContin, which was terrif. Worked. I regained my life. I got rebound headaches from it but not disabling, nagging though. The pinch was the price. For a month it was about $150/month. We moved and got ins. with Kaiser Permanente who had their own pharmacy which equates to you are going to be prescribed the cheapest drug possible for whatever you need it for and in the pain clinic class that was morphine. As an ex-hospise nurse I knew morphine's tolerance grows like a weed in humid hot weather, should never be used on a continuous basis as an outpatient. The addiction is tremendous and immediate. I protested loudly I was not going to take morphine daily and the answer was - it's morphine or nothing. So I got the morphine and used it as little as possible, which was really very little. I didn't know, until I found out the hard way, that the withdrawal ain't no picnic either but that was all that was available through Kaiser. Anyway at the first clinic where I was being robbed blind without ins. on OxyContin? I did some research and found out that Methadone is dirt cheap. Methadone is habituating but with the amount of pain I had i.e. no life, there has to be some trade offs. Methadone if you remember was originally synthisized for people getting off of heroin. The deal with Methadone is it doesn't give you a high like heroin. In fact you feel nothing at all as you would a normal narcotic. People who can't handle the withdrawal of heroin, which can be deadly, can be on Methadone for life. BUT heroin users didn't like it. No high, no fun. As it came to pass the use for Methadone was for pain relief. In fact a study showed that 90% of Methadone users were chronic pain patients. One 5 mg tablet, which is a small dose, is 5 cents. A lot cheaper than OxyContin. I asked my doctor if I could switch. He said sure but he wasn't familiar with it so he'd slowly take me up on Methadone and slowly take me down on OxyContin (which was giving me headaches and making me poor). The rub is when I took that Methadone script to the pharmacy? They laid an egg. Treated me like I was a heroine user, refused to fill it until they called my doctor who of course took all day to call back. Once they finally filled it they treated me like a criminal. Now that is a useful, effective drug, used mostly for chronic pain. NO pharmacist should pass their moral judgment on anyone. Okay - got that out of my system. The ending of this story is I moved before I got built up enough on it to see if it worked BTW. I'm just sick of people judging with such little information. I researched Methadone extensively before suggesting it to my doctor. We were using it in the hospital with end stage cancer patients - so why not as an outpatient? It is also a safer drug than OxyContin BTW. This judgmental thing. If we're going to judge? What about phenobarbitol? That's a barbiturate. The hardest pharmaceutical, except maybe Xanax, to withdraw from. So there. Gretchen

I know of people who have found help with MJ...I think the problem is that since it's also a popular recreational drug it's very difficult to strike a balance and only use it when it's medically justified. having said that, I'm in no position to pass judgement on anyone who is suffering from illness - if you find it helpful then that's that. I was reading an article from a drug treatment center and they said it's getting more and more common that people check in for marijuana addiction