PRIME TIME: HOMING IN ON WHAT WORKS FOR WOMEN

Sarah M. Cohen reports on sessions from CannMed 2018:

Stephanie Karasick, the co-founder and chief creative officer at Strainprint discussed the impetus for her company’s new app and shared some initial data with the CannMed audience. Born of her own need to understand which cultivars and dosages worked best, Strainprint is a smart phone app that allows cannabis patients to record their experiences in real time. Basically, it is a digital cannabis journal with an easy-to-use graphic user interface. Stephanie and most Strainprint users are lucky to live in Canada –where all cannabis medicine is “lab verified” and almost one third of cannabis medicines are labeled with their entire cannabinoid and terpene breakdowns! You can see where this is going….that, over time, this information will enable a data-driven approach to selecting cannabinoids and terpenes for particular symptoms and conditions. In the absence of top-down recommendations (disseminated from laboratories to patients) Strainprint and similar apps are enabling bottom-up crowdsourcing to provide guidance for clinicians and patients. Medical cannabis users are stepping up to do what their governments won’t and what their countries’ researchers can’t!

Some things that Ms. Karasick shared…. Strainprint users are evenly divided with respect to gender, although women (ages 30-39) are the most frequent trackers…To date, among female users, 332 reported pelvic pain symptoms and 572 reported PMS symptoms, including cramps, pain and anxiety…Vaporizing is the most common form of medicine delivery – although Ms. Karasick believes this is a function of access and will change as new routes of administration become available in Canada…. 45% of female users are tracking for anxiety…the terpenes that appear to work best for Strainprint users are: alpha-Pinene, beta-Caryophyllene, limonene and myrcene.❖