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Dr. Wants Me To Quit Weed To Assess ADD Meds

You know, you don't think that maybe the doctor is telling him to quit smoking weed because whoever employs the doctor tells her to say that? I'm not from Canada so I can't comment on their healthcare system, but if their doctors offices are anything like the one I go to, the psychologists literally have a book that tells them what medications they're allowed to prescribe because the organization they work for has deals with pharmaceutical companies to get discounts on generic drugs. It would not be in that organizations interest to even imply that cannabis is safe. It's a safe and fairly effective drug that's in direct competition with the drugs the HMO/pharmaceutical company are pushing, so they're going to try and convince you to get off of it every chance they get. Don't forget that a lot of doctors are (in practice) just drug dealers with a degree.
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Generally speaking, in Canada all Doctors are De Jeur private practice. They may have hospital privileges, or rent space at a clinic, but they bill the government health insurance organization directly, under their own name and license number and are not paid by the hospital, clinic or any other private organization. This does not apply to certain cases, namely Cosmetic Surgery, Laser Eye surgery and other uninsured procedures/types of care. But for something like ADHD, it is how it works. Physicians here do get samples of drugs, but generally speaking, they don't sell drugs. You go to a separately owned pharmacy to fill your Rx...even for an injection, you go the pharmacy and return to see the Dr/Nurse to have it administered. O.R. supplies/etc hospital stuff is still filled by a pharmacy that is intermediate to the pharma company.

You're really advocating for the use of amphetamine in this situation? This is the cannabis section of a HARM REDUCTION FORUM. This guy comes here asking if he should quit smoking weed and you're telling him that 1) Weed is addictive, 2) He's not on real medication, and 3) He should take fucking AMPHETAMINE?!

Yeah, lets get off the weed and on some physically addictive, neurotoxic stimulants! That sounds like a GREAT idea!
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Yes, we're telling him, in the interest of harm reduction, that he should follow the advice of his physician, and take a substance she Rx's and which has extremely strong empirical evidence showing it to be highly effective to treat his condition, and to be extremely safe if taken as Rx'd. What's the problem? Amphetamine is not physically addictive by the way. Neurotoxicity is only shown in vivo at FAR higher than medical dosage regimes. Whereas the effectiveness and safety of it is shown in vitro in randomized, double blind controlled studies in humans. Many of them, actually.

Science: Regardless of if you believe it or not.If you like it or not. It still works, bitches.
 
rangrz said:
Neurotoxicity is only shown in vivo at FAR higher than medical dosage regimes. Whereas the effectiveness and safety of it is shown in vitro in randomized, double blind controlled studies in humans. Many of them, actually.
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People have a tendency to abuse the fuck out of amphetamines, whereas I think cannabis is one of the easiest drugs not to overdo. Just my 2 cents.
 
rangrz said:
Yes, we're telling him, in the interest of harm reduction, that he should follow the advice of his physician, and take a substance she Rx's and which has extremely strong empirical evidence showing it to be highly effective to treat his condition, and to be extremely safe if taken as Rx'd. What's the problem? Amphetamine is not physically addictive by the way. Neurotoxicity is only shown in vivo at FAR higher than medical dosage regimes. Whereas the effectiveness and safety of it is shown in vitro in randomized, double blind controlled studies in humans. Many of them, actually.

Science: Regardless of if you believe it or not.If you like it or not. It still works, bitches.
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Personally I strongly disagree with your view that amphetamines are "extremely safe if taken as Rx'd".
 
LuGoJ said:
Can you elaborate as to why you feel they aren't safe if taken as prescribed?
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When taken as prescribed over a long enough time, amphetamines can cause people to become angry and enraged, or psychotic, or both.

Yes, such things can happen at prescribed dosages. Probably not a typical thing for everyone but something to be avoided like the plague nonetheless.

I would rather rely on cannabis and its extracts for ADD/ADHD than to use stimulants.

Finally, an even rarer event is that sometimes people become extremely depressed when discontinuing stimulant prescriptions, and this depression can lead someone to hurt themselves or others.

I'm not trying to deflect personal responsibility when discussing such ideas, I'm just merely bringing up what I have heard of and witnessed with my own two eyes in life. I have seen people go psychotic from amphetamines, I have seen people become aggressive, angry, enraged (think roid rage) from taking prescribed dosages of amphetamines. I have seen people start out on prescribed dosages only to later go on to abuse their medication.

It's not necessarily going to happen to you but if it does, you would likely wish you never started using amphetamines to begin with.
 
Yeah... why do you feel that shikidala. Amphetamine is a pretty safe drug, PERIOD. Particularly if taken as Rx'd.

If you want to start evaluating truly dangerous drugs, you are going to have to look outside the realm of typical recreational drugs. Think Cisplatin, or Arsenic Trioxide (used to treat leukemia) Melarsoprol (another arsenic compound, used for African trypanosomiasis) Mustine (another leukemia drug, it's the same compound as mustard gas used in WWI) radiopharmecuticals (used in nuclear medicine, various ones...including hard gamma emitters) Biologicals like anti-serums, etc. These are the types of drugs which are truly dangerous. As in, even being administered them in a hospital by a sub-specialist physician can have high mortality rates from the drug toxicity alone. Amphetamine, on the other hand, can be wildly abused by people and still doesn't usually kill them
 
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I'm with rangerz on this one.

A break won't kill you, it will be beneficial, and that would be true even if you weren't going to start new medication. Now that your doctor wants to prescribe medication to treat a condition that you have and have consulted about, it seems an even better reason. Say you didn't stop smoking and the meds didn't work, or they did work, and down the road you have to stop smoking for unknown reasons and when you do your medication no longer is effective? There are lots of variables here that you or I won't be able to account for. You are going to the doctor in the first place, and doing so implies that you think you need medical attention. Either that, or you are screwing the system and shopping for meds.

Seriously, I smoke weed every day, but cut out this paranoid fucking "all doctors have ulterior motives and i know better because i talk to drug users on BL and read wikipedia" bullshit and accept the harmless (read: probably beneficial) advise.
 
Do what your doctor tells you to do if you are going to even bother using him. His request makes perfect sense.
 
PowerFarts said:
the weed has no detrimental effects on my cognitive abilities when I am not high, I am actually worse off without it
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source?

rangrz said:
Yes, I'm sure you know more about medicine and pharmacology than your physician does, and than the sources and references she relies upon when treating you.

Sure, just ignore her. That 4 year undergrad, 4 years of med school and 5 years of residency obviously has not taught her anything about medicine. I mean ya, sure, she can probably cut you open, take a piece out and wake you up and have you walk away 2 days later, but trust her enough to refrain from taking a non essential substance for a bit to see how a different one is working? That's just absurd!
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\thread
 
Doctors are not to be trusted. I think the field of medicine is an immensely noble and worthwhile persuit, but in my experience. Most doctors, and the closer you get to GP's/PCP's the more this is the case, don't know anything. Actually it's less that they don't know anything, and more that they pretend they know significantly more than they do.

I wish I could trust doctors, but I have seen them fuck up way too many lives, make far too many errors of just common sense, and act with complete corruption against the interests of the patents to have any faith in them. Unless I have good cause to defer to their judgement, I will defer to my own better judgement and face the consequences, to me doctors are just there to be manipulated into getting what I want.

I know how horrible that sounds, and I hate that that's the way it is, but being honest with doctors has never gotten me anything but talked down too, mistreated, threatened, and not treated in my best interests. I don't trust any of them. There's some better ones once you get into the specialists and surgeons, but the primary care providers, the gp's, the glorified script writers, as far as I'm concerned they see me as a cash cow and I see them as a tool to manipulate to write prescriptions.
 
I had similar shit with my doctor(s).

When I got diagnosed with ADHD (by the clinical psychologist and psychiatrist) I was probably just smoking weed on and off about once or twice a month, so nothing that would impair my cognitive ability. Then when I went back to the GP a few months later I was smoking it a bit more regularly but was told to not do any street drugs (alcohol was fine though ofc) for 3 months before going back to get Ritalin, I asked why alcohol was fine but street drugs weren't and didn't get a straight answer. So I went back 3 months later and at this point I was smoking it almost erryday because I was unemployed and bored, had a different doctor and he said "Well you seem fine now it could have just been the cannabis" he must have expected me to be bouncing off the walls and unable to listen to anything if I have ADHD. Obviously I couldn't have said "I smoke weed way more now than I did when I got diagnosed so you're wrong" because they'd clock I'd been lying. This same doctor also told me that methylphenidate works because one of its side effects is drowsiness and that's used to control symptoms of ADHD which isn't how it works. He wanted me to bring my mother in to decide whether Ritalin would be the right option for me (I've used it before during exam season and I know its effects on me), even though I was 19 at the time. Me and my mum both agreed he's retarded so I saw another doctor.

So in my experience doctors (mostly GPs) do overestimate the cognitive impairment brought on by moderate weed smoking. First time I went to the GP thinking I might have ADHD I was told it was just the weed (which I hadn't smoke for months at that point and never smoked it heavily before that), I had to go again a couple of years later and asked to be referred to someone who's actually qualified to make the diagnosis. I'd say you should lie, get the medication, see if it helps you but then try and take a break from weed at some point you feel comfortable doing it because it will probably be beneficial. Smoking weed everyday can make you a bit foggy but for me that clears up after less than a week of abstinence.
 
What 23 said:
Do what your doctor tells you to do if you are going to even bother using him. His request makes perfect sense.
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I agree. I don't like going toe-to-toe with my doctors, either, but if you're not going to be honest and stop for a while, why even bother going to him?
 
Fuck the doctor! Haven't you heard?! Weed doesn't affect people with ADD and ADHD the same way it does most others! It actually promotes better concentration! Here in Cali, you can get a medical green card for that!
I myself have ADHD and I can tell you from experience the shit works! I always study my physics books while high; I couldn't study them without it!
 
im a bit conflicted here... yea add meds kinda work... because theyre tweak... but long term i think theyre a bad way to go for most people... i tried them and quit weed for years... but in all honesty the weed works best long term for me... its like it chills me out and slows me down long enough to think about things longer and results in me making much more productive decisions vs my standard sober or stimulated poor decisions...
 
sometimes I wonder if keeping weed illegal isn't just a machiavellian scheme to put you in a position where you have to argue for it's positive effects.

We all do better when the crap train stays on time.

You have to deal with the psychological issues by reading books, I don't think of it as a matter of disorders, I think it's pissing off the force when you get high, figure out the world's problems, then don't do anything about it except smoke more weed.
 
Dang 'Ol Stoner said:
! I always study my physics books while high; I couldn't study them without it!
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Awesome! Why don't we have a conversation some time, while you're high, about physics. What do ya want to tackle? Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics? Deep inelastic scattering? Photo pair-production? Electroweak symmetry breaking- the intermediate vector bosons-the Higgs interaction and how they all tie in to each other?

Quantum mechanics not your thing? Ok. Let's go for classical magnetohydrodynamics, not in the plasma physics sense, we'll keep it basic and deal with liquid metals and ferrofluids. Nothing beyond Navier-stokes equation and Maxwell's equations.

Let's do this shit. I'll be sober..actually, I have ADHD, so I'll take my dexedrine. You can get blazed the fuck out. We'll record our conversation. Then we'll check it against reputable sources like textbooks, university websites, we'll check our maths using WolframAlpha's Mathematica software.

Sound good?
 
rangrz said:
Awesome! Why don't we have a conversation some time, while you're high, about physics. What do ya want to tackle? Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics? Deep inelastic scattering? Photo pair-production? Electroweak symmetry breaking- the intermediate vector bosons-the Higgs interaction and how they all tie in to each other?

Quantum mechanics not your thing? Ok. Let's go for classical magnetohydrodynamics, not in the plasma physics sense, we'll keep it basic and deal with liquid metals and ferrofluids. Nothing beyond Navier-stokes equation and Maxwell's equations.

Let's do this shit. I'll be sober..actually, I have ADHD, so I'll take my dexedrine. You can get blazed the fuck out. We'll record our conversation. Then we'll check it against reputable sources like textbooks, university websites, we'll check our maths using WolframAlpha's Mathematica software.

Sound good?
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your avatar should be this:

NSFW:
troll-face_zps5d6363f5.png
 
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