Only a tiny number of children with severe epilepsy have been prescribed medicinal cannabis to help ease their symptoms – and the number could be increased, an outspoken academic says today.
Professor David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, said neurologists in the UK have been slow to offer the medicine because of lack of training, fear of prescribing off licence, and difficulties obtaining supplies from foreign producers. Some are also unable to get NHS reimbursement.
Writing in today’s edition of The BMJ, Professor Nutt says despite the change in the law, which came about after a campaign by Hannah Deacon who highlighted the benefits of the drug on her epileptic son Alfie Dingley, there is still a lack of access to the medicine.
He says the medical sector should use the cancer research model, which sees small expert groups conducting open effectiveness studies to collect outcome and side effect data.
Pointing to penicillin, which, he says, has had no trials to test its effectiveness, he adds: “If today’s medical profession could embrace cannabis in the same way as it did penicillin then the true value of this plant medicine should rapidly be realised.”
Hannah Deacon also writes in The BMJ about her fight to legalise medicinal cannabis, which helped to ease Alfie’s seizures.
“Every child with intractable epilepsy should have the right to try cannabis medicines that could save them from a life of suffering,” she says.
“It is heart-breaking that seemingly no NHS doctor is willing or able to prescribe medicines that could help these children who have been very sick, some for many years, after having tried many other drugs.”
She adds that the costs of long- term care exceed those of a product that could give children and their families a life to live.
Nutt D. Why medical cannabis is still out of patients’ reach. BMJ 2 May 2019.
Leave a Reply