Cannabis and Seniors

As more and more research comes out regarding the medical benefits of cannabis, it’s important to keep up with new research as it becomes available.  Here at Arfinn Med, we constantly review new studies and look at our own deidentified efficacy data to try to find any additional insights we can relay to our registered users. With that in mind, we took a closer look at research coming out of the University of Illinois and the University of Iowa regarding the medicinal benefit of cannabis on Seniors.

The research found “strong positive association” between the frequency of cannabis use by Seniors and self-reported improvements in pain, health-care utilization, and overall health-related quality of life. The researchers revealed they had “identified a strong positive association between higher frequency of cannabis use and improvement to HRQL and HCU [health-care utilization] scores.”

With many clinics seeing an increase in the amount of Seniors turning to medical cannabis, we wanted to identify some additional trends through querying our database of deidentified data for patient demographics 60 and above.

Similar to what this report indicated, we found that Seniors self-reported an average 3.7 resolution of symptoms which translates on our scale to just below a ‘significant resolution’ of symptoms. In addition to the overall efficacy, we found that chronic pain was the most frequently sited qualifying condition with both THC dominant and balanced ratios of THC and CBD being the most frequently used cannabis profiles.  Lastly, in terms of mode of consumption, tinctures were the preferred route.

If you are interested in learning more about the efficacy of medical cannabis and would like to add our electronic medical record (EMR), practice management, and telehealth platform to your practice, please schedule a quick demo by contacting info@arfinnmed.com or by clicking here!