#24 PRIME TIME: Educating Today’s Cannabis Clinicians
When a medication that has been prohibited for 82 years, is suddenly made available to large numbers of patients, it takes a bit of effort to train the clinicians who are already in the field much less get a curriculum organized for today’s healthcare students. For the doctors and nurses already in practice, the growing number who get questioned about medical cannabis nearly every day, it has been a challenge to “get up to speed.” Even harder, the speed is accelerating all the time. Cannabis research around the globe is giving us new discoveries that practitioners need to incorporate and pass on to patients. It is a serious problem.
Some cannabis clinicians, like Eloise Theisen of Radicle Health, have put a new twist on an old saying. They are “Thinking globally and streaming locally.” Eloise is an advanced registered nurse practitioner from Northern California who has seen more than 5,000 patients in her practice. (See #23 PRIME TIME: Case Study for an example of Eloise’s caseload.)
To assist other nurses, Eloise and Radicle Health have prepared different modules for healthcare practitioners which include onsite training at Radicle Health; an online, self-paced course entitled “Cannabis Therapeutics for Nursing”; and live course work given in the form of webinars.
And this healthcare education is not restricted to medical clinicians. If you own a dispensary or production company, you owe it to your customers to stay up-to-date with the maturing medical cannabis market.
I took the pictures below last September when I visited Radicle Health. That day Eloise was conducting a class for about ten nurses via an online meeting platform. The discussion centered around geriatric patients and the dangers of poly-pharmacy. Watching Eloise teach her class I was struck, once again, with one of my favorite twists on another old saying: Just Say Know, folks. ❖
