Elaine Levy has revealed she had to sell her house so she could afford a personal prescription for medical cannabis to treat her adult daughter’s epilepsy.
Saturday 08 April 2023 09:13, United Kingdom
Families of people suffering from chronic diseases are asking the government to fund medical cannabis research.
End Our Pain, which advocates for the benefits of medical cannabis, will write to Health Secretary Steve Berkley on Monday urging him to set aside £1.4m for research into the drug.
medicine cannabisActivists believe it can treat conditions such as neurological disorders, chronic pain, and epilepsy, and it was legalized in the UK in 2018.
However, less than five people have so far NHS The rest are forced to go private for prescriptions and even buy drugs on the black market.
Elaine Levy had to sell her four-bedroom house and move into an apartment to pay £2,200 a month for medical cannabis to treat her adult daughter’s epilepsy.
“In the end, I couldn’t keep making my mortgage payments. It was like paying more than a mortgage, so in the end I actually sold the house.”
“I’ve sacrificed a lot for this, but when I have kids, seeing them change from being drug-doped to being a girl who wakes up and doesn’t need a wheelchair is always an ambulance.” I don’t have to call you. Can I go to the back?”
The reluctance of NHS doctors to prescribe cannabis-based products is due to the lack of quality, safety, clinical and cost-effectiveness evidence.
Dr Simon Elridge, Head of Research and Access, Sapphire Medical Clinic, London, said: The appropriate type of research that could convince NHS regulators and clinicians to prescribe on a population basis to all people with these conditions.
Medical Cannabis Use Increases
“These trials, which we call randomized controlled trials, take either a dummy sugar pill or the gold standard treatment and compare it to medical cannabis.”
For Elaine, that lack of research is very frustrating.
She said that when he was health secretary, Matt Hancock promised that funds would be made available, but has since been repeatedly ignored by the government.
“We were promised observational and randomized controlled trials so we could actually help children who were already using medical cannabis, and also get data for children who weren’t. was completed.
“We haven’t seen the money. We haven’t had a single meeting since we met with the government. They basically ignored us.”
Elaine lost her home to get drugs personally, but some went further by buying drugs on the black market.
When Hayley Lanciano’s husband Neil was left with an incurable brain tumor for several weeks, she tried to treat his pain by illegally sourcing medical cannabis.
“When he was having trouble walking, he was having trouble getting out of the house. So they told us he only had six to eight weeks to live, so we He was clutching at a straw desperately wanting to do more.He has some quality of life.”
She added:
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In a statement, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services told Sky News: .
“Licensed cannabis-based medicines are funded by the NHS with clear evidence of quality, safety and efficacy.
“We are taking an evidence-based approach to unlicensed cannabis-based therapies before we can consider broader deployment in the NHS.”
