Almost daily do have to educate my patients on the health hazards of the drinks they routinely use throughout the course of the day.   Today I sat down with a 51 year old man who came in with a Rockstar Energy drink.   He was using it “to get a jumpstart in the morning.” [...]

As medical director for Medical Cannabis of Southern California I often evaluate patients who suffer from neuropathic pain as a result of diabetes. Neuropathic pain means pain that is associated with direct pathology to the nerves themselves. This is in contrast to pain in a muscle whose signal is transported to the brain via the healthy nerves. In diabetes the elevated levels of sugar in the blood actually cause damage to the nerves leading to chronic pain. Cannabis has been shown in several studies to reduce the pain associated with various causes of neuropathic pain including HIV neuropathy.

Today in my Irvine clinic I evaluated a 44 year old man who suffered from chronic pancreatitis. He had recently discovered that cannabis helps relieve his abdominal pain, increase his appetite and reduce any associated nausea.

Just yesterday I had a 39 year old male with diabetes come into my office for a cannabis evaluation with the complaint of gastroparesis as a result of his diabetes. Gastroparesis is also called delayed gastric emptying and is a disorder in which the stomach takes too long to empty its contents into the small intestine.