A Promising New Option for Physicians: Texas Medical Cannabis and CBD for Epilepsy Patients

A Promising New Option for Physicians: Texas Medical Cannabis and CBD for Epilepsy Patients
A Promising New Option for Physicians: Texas Medical Cannabis and CBD for Epilepsy Patients
This article was first published in MD News | San Antonio. Texas entered a new era in 2018: Medical cannabis is now legal. In February, the state saw the first sales of medical cannabis, nearly three years after Gov. Greg Abbott signed the state’s medical cannabis law, the Compassionate Use Act. The Compassionate Use Program (CUP) allows qualified physicians to prescribe low-THC medical cannabis to patients diagnosed with intractable epilepsy. Despite increasing numbers of medications and technological advances, prospective studies show that today’s conventional treatments fail to control seizures in roughly 30 percent of people with epilepsy, according to the Epilepsy Foundation. Here are the basics on the newly implemented law: It allows the state’s three licensed medical cannabis dispensaries to cultivate plants and create cannabis oil extracts containing specific amounts of psychoactive tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and the nonintoxicating compound cannabidiol (CBD), which has been shown in clinical trials to help patients with certain types of epilepsy. By law, such products can only come in nonsmokable forms — typically ingestible oils and tinctures — and must contain at least 10 percent CBD and less than 0.5 percent THC. Read more at MD News | San Antonio
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