Living with the therapy
After the prescription
The commercial part of this market ends with the prescription — after that there is nothing left to sell. Yet that is exactly where the questions begin on which a therapy fails: how is a dose found? What in the first few weeks is normal? What does not go together with what I am taking anyway? And when is stopping the right decision?
What is deliberately not here. No dosing schedules, no recommendation for any particular preparation, and no statement about whether a therapy will work for you. These pages describe principles and what to discuss with your doctor — the decisions are hers, not a website's.
The eight topic pages behind these links are published in German only — the clinical text is written from the Fachinformationen and stays in the language of its sources. Only the titles and summaries here are translated, so that the structure can be reviewed.
Finding a dose: titration
Why a dose is found rather than prescribed — and why topping up is the commonest mistake.
Recognising side effects and placing them
What is common, what is typical at the start and passes again, and when you should not wait it out.
Interactions with other medicines
Cannabinoids are processed by the liver — which is why interactions reach a great many everyday medicines.
Tolerance, breaks and ending a therapy
Does the dose have to rise over time? What to make of treatment breaks, and how a treatment is ended properly.
When the treatment does not work
That a therapy does not work is expected — more than 30 per cent of treatments end within the first year. What makes sense then.
Storage, handling and passing it on
Storage as the package leaflet states it, keeping it secure — and why passing it to someone else is a criminal offence.
Vaporising instead of smoking
Vaporising rather than smoking: the reasoning, the age limit and an honest reading of the evidence.
The treatment diary
What decides whether treatment continues — and which simple scales are fit for that.
Where these pages come from
From the Fachinformationen of the approved medicines, the DGS-PraxisLeitlinie „Cannabis in der Schmerzmedizin“ of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schmerzmedizin, the final report of the BfArM Begleiterhebung (16,809 treatment cases evaluated) and the statutes themselves. Where a question has no answer in those sources — planned treatment breaks to reset a tolerance, for instance — the page concerned says so, rather than filling the gap with anecdote.