Staff at Canna Remedies in Ewing, New Jersey welcome customers on the dispensary floor.
An estimated one in five older adults say they’ve used cannabis in the past year, a number that has been steadily climbing in recent years as more and more U.S. states legalize the plant’s use.
But after decades of criminalization, many older adults still have questions about cannabis as a medicine, and whether it can fit into their current health regimens.
Dr. Monica Werkheiser, Pharm D, Head of Operations at Canna Remedies, is one of many medical professionals around the country working to tackle these questions head on, both by offering educational programming and by meeting older adults where they’re at, literally and figuratively.
For Dr. Werkheiser and her team, that’s meant hosting information sessions at community centers and assisted living facilities or other convenient locations, and giving attendees a brief breakdown of cannabis medicine in a familiar context, as well as plenty of time for questions.
“At first I used to go in and just do a presentation, and people would listen, but they kind of phase out at a certain point. There’s only so much information you can take in. Then I tried the opposite, just saying, ‘Who has questions? I’m here.’ Two hours later, I was still answering questions, and realized we had to find a marriage of both.”
“What we’ve found most successful is taking maybe about 15 to 20 minutes to just give a basics of cannabis and then help them relate it back to things they’re familiar with: you know your heart medicine, and it works in your cardiovascular system. You know that you have neurological medicines, like gabapentin and Lyrica, and those work in your central nervous system. So, now we have cannabis, which works in the system called endocannabinoid, and when you can start to relate it to things that they’re familiar with, it becomes an easier conversation.”
“I’ve also noticed they’re happy to bring a pharmacist in, because they feel like they can ask the questions that they’d ask their pharmacists anyway.”
Overall, she said, older adults seem eager to learn about cannabis, and aren’t caught up in the stigmas of the past surrounding the plant.
“I remind myself that the generations that are older now were the people who were there in the ‘60s and ‘70s and had seen it around them, and kind of recognize the changes that have come.”
“We’re not in that generation of ‘reefer madness’ anymore.”
Dr. Monica Werkheiser, Pharm D, Head of Operations at Canna Remedies
Still, some seniors remain a bit hesitant to dive into the world of shopping for cannabis on their own, Dr. Werkheiser said.
“I realize you have to meet people where they’re at, and there’s still a fear of walking into the dispensary,” she said. “Maybe they’re willing to try a product, but there’s still a fear of walking in the door, and that’s why we’ve really gone to those places, to the community centers, to the clubhouse at a 55+ community, to a few assisted living facilities. We even offered delivery, just to see what would make them comfortable.”
Meeting older adults on their home turf has generated a big response so far, Dr. Werkheiser said. The ailments asked about vary, she said, and sometimes she’ll get questions about whether or not cannabis could help reduce the often high number of medications that patients are already on, the side effects of which may require treatment of their own.
“I would say probably the biggest questions we get are about sleep and pain. Sleep is the number one, and that’s where most people feel comfortable starting. But a lot of them do have the drug interaction question, and that’s been surprising to me, how many people are cognizant of the issue of medication interactions.”
In Dr. Werkheiser’s experience, cannabis can indeed be a good option to replace certain medications, particularly for sleep, pain, anxiety, and other common ailments or symptoms among older adults. She said she was also surprised to discover that, anecdotally, cannabis has seemed to be an effective replacement for blood pressure medication in some cases.
“That’s one of the things I’ve found most interesting,” she said. “I had known that obviously cannabis has an effect on blood pressure, and most studies out there talk about blood pressure actually increasing, but that’s with excessive use.”
“What I noticed with our senior population is that they actually had the opposite experience. I would get phone calls pretty frequently from cannabis patients saying that they were feeling dizzy, for example, and your first thought is generally that the patient has had too much [cannabis].”
“But I started to ask them to take their blood pressure at that time, and most of them had dropped below normal. And what we realized was that those people who were calling were on about two to three blood pressure medications, and with cannabis use they had to stop or reduce the strength of those medications because it was too much blood pressure lowering. So that became an interesting factor, and a few of the geriatric doctors started to realize that, too.”
“It’s not something that’s been studied,” Dr. Werkheiser said. “It’s just something that we started to notice as a trend.”
In the new year, she said, she’ll be presenting and bringing along brand reps at events in multiple clubhouses in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where Canna Remedies operates, and even hosting an on-premises session in one of their front lobbies for members of a local VFW.
“And if they have guys who want to talk about cannabis use for PTSD, pains, whatever it may be, you know, we’ll be there. I have other pharmacist friends who’d be more than happy to come down and chat if they needed multiple people, and to offer bilingual services, because I think that’s a very underserved population.”
Dr. Werkheiser added, “I always think back to my own grandparents and what a game-changer cannabis could have been for them in their health struggles, if only somebody could have just said that to them.”
“As long as places will have me, I will continue to go out there. We’ve done everything from online classes to in person, worked with different events. Really, anywhere that they’ll have us to talk about it, of course, we’ll be there.”
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