Your Florida Medical Marijuana Doctor cannot diagnose your condition, but only evaluate it to determine whether Medical Marijuana is right for you. Once you see the doctor, our cannabis professionals will notarize your paperwork and will have your documentation ready to mail off to the state. Your marijuana license may take a while to be approved by the state. In the meantime, we can recommend dispensaries and caregivers that can take care of all of your Medical Marijuana needs. We only recommend state approved dispensaries that are discreet and professional. Dispensaries and medical professionals all over Florida recommend us as your one stop Medical Marijuana Doctor and Registration Company because of our unparalleled service and care for our patients. Our doctors look forward to helping you achieve the highest grade of health through cannabis therapy. We look forward to you becoming a part of the All Natural MD community! Let us help you take the steps to living a healthy life through the use of Medical Marijuana.
Is Alcohol or Marijuana Worse For Your Health You Ask?
Which is worse for you: cannabis or alcohol?
It’s a tough call, but based on the science, there appears to be a clear answer. Keep in mind that there are dozens of factors to account for, including how the substances affect your heart, brain, and behavior, and how likely you are to get hooked. Time is important, while some effects are noticeable immediately, others only begin to crop up after months or years of use. The comparison is slightly unfair for another reason is while scientists have been researching the effects of alcohol for decades, the science of cannabis is a lot murkier because of its mostly illegal status.
In 2014, a ton of people died from alcohol-induced causes in the United States and that does not count drinking-related accidents or homicides. If those deaths were included, the number would be closer to 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, no deaths from marijuana overdoses have been reported, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. A new study of more than 70,000 Americans, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found that healthy marijuana users were not more likely to die earlier than healthy people who did not use cannabis.
Unlike alcohol, which slows your heart rate, marijuana speeds it up, which could negatively affect the heart in the short term. Still, the largest-ever report on cannabis from the National Academies of Sciences, released in January and read by most marijuana doctors in Florida and other states, found insufficient evidence to support or refute the idea that cannabis may increase the overall risk of a heart attack. On the other hand, low to moderate drinking about one drink a day has been linked with a lower risk of heart attack and stroke compared with non use. A director at Alcohol Research UK, told The Guardian that those findings should be taken with a grain of salt since any protective effects tend to be canceled out by even occasional bouts of heavier drinking.
In November, a group of the nation’s top cancer doctors issued a statement asking people to drink less. They cited strong evidence that drinking alcohol as little as a glass of wine or beer a day increases the risk of developing both pre and postmenopausal breast cancer. The US Department of Health lists alcohol as a known human carcinogen. Research highlighted by the National Cancer Institute suggests that the more alcohol you drink — particularly the more you drink regularly — the higher your risk of developing cancer. For Florida medical marijuana, some research initially suggested a link between smoking and lung cancer, but that has been debunked. The January report found that cannabis was not connected to any increased risk of the lung cancers or head and neck cancers tied to smoking cigarettes.
A research note published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that, when adjusting for other factors, having a detectable amount of THC (the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis) in your blood did not increase the risk of being involved in a car crash. Having a blood-alcohol level of at least .05, on the other hand, increased that risk. Still, combining the two appears to have the worst results. The risk from driving under the influence of both alcohol and cannabis is greater than the risk of driving under the influence of either alone,” the authors of a review written in the American Journal of Addiction.
It’s impossible to say whether drinking alcohol or using marijuana causes violence, but several studies suggest a link between alcohol and violent behavior.
According to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, alcohol is a factor of all violent crimes, and a study of college students found that the rates of mental and physical abuse were higher on days when couples drank. On the other hand, no such relationship appears to exist for cannabis. A recent study looking at cannabis use and intimate partner violence in the first decade of marriage found that marijuana users were significantly less likely to commit violence against a partner than those who did not use the drug.
Both marijuana and alcohol temporarily impair your memory, and alcohol can cause blackouts by rendering the brain incapable of forming memories. The most severe long-term effects are seen in heavy, chronic, or binge users who begin using in their teens. Studies have found that these effects can persist for several weeks after stopping use so Florida medical marijuana doctors say, as well as many other physicians nationwide. There may also be a link between daily weed use and poorer verbal memory in adults who start smoking at a young age. Chronic drinkers display reductions in memory, attention, and planning, as well as impaired emotional processes and social cognition and these can persist even after years of abstinence say a writer for All Natural Medical Solutions.
A new study suggests that anyone who smokes marijuana faces a threefold risk of dying from high blood pressure than people who have never used the drug. Those findings sound alarming, but it’s important to keep in mind that, like any study, this one has limitations, including that it defines marijuana “users” as anyone who’s ever tried the drug and that it doesn’t differentiate among strains of a highly unregulated product. However, the study highlights some key areas for future study including how using cannabis might affect the heart. Here’s what you need to know. “We found that marijuana users had a greater than three-fold risk of death from hypertension and the risk increased with each additional year of use,” The lead author of the study and a doctoral student of epidemiology and biostatistics at GUS, said in a statement. For her paper, published Wednesday in the where they looked at more than 1,800 people age 21 or older who had been recruited previously as part of a large and ongoing national health survey. In 2008, researchers asked them whether they had ever used marijuana or hashish. People who answered “yes” were classified as marijuana users; those who answered “no” were classified as nonusers. The researchers then merged that data with statistics on death from all causes, pulled from the US National Center for Health Statistics, and adjusted it to rule out any factors that could muddle the results, like gender, race, and a history of smoking tobacco. Overall, those classified as florida medical marijuana users were found to be more times as likely to die from hypertension, or high blood pressure, than those who said they had never used. That risk also appeared to rise with what the researchers labeled “each year of use.” Here’s the problem: The study’s authors defined anyone who said they had ever tried marijuana as a “regular user.” Other research suggests this is a poor assumption. According to a recent survey, about 58% of Americans have tried cannabis at some point, yet only 19% said they used the drug “regularly,” defined as “at least once a month.” Also, the study was observational, meaning it followed a group of people over time and reported what happened to them, so the researchers cannot conclude a cause and effect they can’t say that legalize smoking marijuana causes high blood pressure, only that the two things appear to be linked. The authors wrote, “From our results, marijuana use may increase the risk for hypertension mortality.” Another issue is the unregulated nature of the existing, and largely illegal, cannabis market. People are using a wide variety of strains whose concentrations of compounds — there are up to 400 in marijuana, including THC and CBD — can differ drastically. While the study is far from conclusive, it sheds light on an important potential health risk linked with marijuana use. Scientists know that cannabis affects the heart, but because of the limited research available on the drug, it has been hard to suss out how it affects things like high blood pressure. For example, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, ingesting marijuana increases heart rate by between 20 and 50 beats a minute for anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours. But a large, recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found “insufficient evidence” to support or refute the idea that medical marijuana doctors in florida cannabis might increase the overall risk of a heart attack, though it also found some limited evidence that using the drug could be a trigger for the phenomenon. When it comes to cannabis’ effect on blood pressure, the results are also inconclusive. One very small study, for example, found a sharp increase in blood pressure immediately after regular pot users stopped using the drug. “Abrupt cessation of heavy cannabis use may cause clinically significant increases in blood pressure in a subset of users,” that study’s researchers wrote. And according to the Mayo Clinic, using cannabis could result in decreased, not increased blood pressure.