Episode 66 - Introducing CreakyJoints.org, Good news for people with Arthritis
Seth Ginsberg, co-founder of CreakyJoints.org and the ArthritisPower app on how patients and health care providers can get more info about using medical cannabis for their pains.
Medical cannabis is on the rise. Over 30 states have legal programs and CBD is more popular than God (at least in number of Google searches). But because the Feds classify the plant as a Schedule 1 drug, there are scant robust trials about efficacy. This leaves both patients and health care providers at a loss for verifiable scientific evidence.
Lack of clinical data hasn’t stopped patients from using medical cannabis, especially for pain and arthritis related conditions. According to the online community CreakyJoints.org, over half of arthritis sufferers have tried MMJ or CBD but only 2/3 of them have told their health care providers about it. For those who did talk to medical providers, over half said that they were offered no advice or dosing recommendations. At the same time, over 90 percent of respondents believe that cannabis or CBD improves their symptoms. That’s too high a number to attribute to placebo effect alone.
This week’s interview features Seth Ginsberg, co-founder of CreakyJoints and the Global Healthy Living Foundation. GHLF has also built an app called ArthritisPower that offers peer-to-peer support and patient-centered research on the different types of arthritis. The sites are now getting about 10,000 visitors a day -- not surprising given that over 50M people in the US suffer with pain or arthritis. (Seth is one of them. When he was 13 he was diagnosed with Spondyloarthropathy, a form of arthritis that essentially robbed him of his youth but catapulted him into the advocacy world. He is now in remission.)
Although he’s pro medical cannabis, Seth is not a user. As you’ll hear in this interview, his opinions and mine occasionally bump up against each other in uncomfortable ways. He’s not afraid to disagree, and that’s a good thing: Friendly disagreement is the fertile soil from which delicious things grow.
To learn more, check out:
CreakyJoints.org -- an amazing online community full of valuable information for people with all forms of arthritis and pain.
ArthritisPower -- a free app that allows patients with rheumatoid arthritis to track symptoms and shares that anonymized data with health care providers so that both can make better treatment decisions.