Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Friday, December 8, 2017

Epilepsy Patients Failing Regular Meds Improved with Medical Cannabis

You might very well need this. So demand your doctor give you a prescription. By the time I have another stroke I will just have to drive 100 miles to Canada and have to smuggle it though customs since our fuckingly stupid federal legislators won't have legalized it yet.
Poststroke epilepsy: update and future directions

Epilepsy Patients Failing Regular Meds Improved with Medical Cannabis



  • by Contributing Writer, MedPage Today

WASHINGTON -- Medically refractory epilepsy (MRE) patients in New York state who regularly used medical cannabis reported improvements in their health, according to a pilot survey presented here this week at the American Epilepsy Society annual meeting.
Researchers with Northeast Regional Epilepsy Group identified 33 patients in their "large, multi-site, regional epilepsy program" who had signed up for New York's medical cannabis program. Among the 17 who then completed a questionnaire about health differences and had consumed cannabis for at least a month, a majority reported improvements in the following measures:
  • Overall quality of life (76% of respondents, average score 4.24 out of 5)
  • Epilepsy (70%, 4.12)
  • Mood (70%, 4.06)
  • Quality of sleep (70%, 4.00)
  • Appetite (70%, 3.94)

"The results of this study suggest that [medical cannabis] may be a promising candidate for the treatment of MRE and its associated comorbidities when used in conjunction with [anti-epileptic drugs]," the authors wrote on a poster prepared for the meeting. Less than half of patients reported improvements in:
  • Stress (47%, 3.71)
  • Anxiety (23%, 3.35)
  • Sedation (47%, 3.65)
  • Aggression (11%, 3.12)
Cannabis use was not without its problems. It was difficult to obtain, many patients reported, citing high costs and inconvenient access. Four patients dropped out of the study because they could no longer afford to purchase the cannabis, which is not covered by insurance in New York. Fifteen of the 17 patients said cannabis was more expensive than anti-epileptic drugs they had previously used, while 10 said it was less convenient to obtain. "The high out-of-pocket costs and lack of insurance coverage of [cannabis] treatment has been a major concern and deterring factor in this study," the authors wrote.
Patients took medical cannabis with a 20:1 ratio of cannabidiol to tetrahydrocannabinol.

They had tried an average of 5.43 anti-epileptic medications on average before turning to cannabis. "The patients come to us because other medications fail," said co-author Juliann Paolicchi, MD, the group's co-director of pediatric epilepsy research, who spoke to MedPage Today at the meeting.
Epileptic patients will continue to try medical cannabis, Paolicchi said, encouraging researchers to thus study the plant's impact on them -- despite major research barriers. "We have to be open to gathering information as best we can. We can't do all these randomized control trials" she said, citing prohibitive laws. "That shouldn't preclude us from getting valuable information in a clinical setting" via other methodologies. Patients in this study expressed their desire to continue using medical cannabis, said Paolicchi, also a professor of pediatrics and neurology at Rutgers and Seton Hall universities, and the results suggest they benefit from it. "That's what's really exciting about this," she added. Paolicchi's team is now working on a larger follow-up study examining how cannabis affects medically refractory epilepsy, quality of life and epilepsy comorbidities. Of the 27 patients who enrolled in the study, 19 were male. Ages ranged from 3 to 48 years old.

They were asked to rate health changes on a 1-5 scale, with 5 representing a "significant positive impact," 1 a "significant negative impact" and 3 "no impact."
The study lacked controls and relied on patients' self-reports, the authors noted.









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