We’re incredibly thrilled to be helping Green Goods customers get access to the relief medical cannabis offers for a long list of chronic symptoms and medical conditions. We’re driven by a strong belief that cannabis is good and that it can provide safe, effective, and lasting help for those of us who seek relief, whether it be from pain and discomfort or the dangerous side-effects and high costs of pharmaceuticals.
But while cannabis is powerful medicine, there are steps you can take to get even more out of the experience. While you’ll need a health care provider’s recommendation to get qualified for a medical cannabis card, some aspects of your care will remain in your own hands. How do you make the most of it?
One of the best and most rewarding is also one of the simplest: Keeping a medical cannabis journal. Let’s go through the (very few) necessary steps and learn why a cannabis journal will help you get the most value and impact from your treatment.
Keeping A Cannabis Journal: The Reasons Why
There’s nothing fancy or intimidating about keeping a cannabis journal. At its heart, it’s merely a notebook (or a digital note-taking app) that allows you to track your cannabis usage and its effects. Though you can certainly make it as fancy as you want.
Why should you keep one? The short answer is that because cannabis isn’t a single medicine—there are a seemingly infinite number of strains, formulations, and administration methods—and you shouldn’t expect every type of cannabis to have the same effect on you. Learning which types and which forms of cannabis work best with your body and, just as importantly, when and how long they take to work with your body will give you invaluable information to help guide your future use, purchases, and planning.
How and When
While you can use a smartphone-based app such as Simplenote or Notes to keep your cannabis journal, many of us find that having your cannabis journal in physical form actually makes it easier to remember and return to later.
Whichever format you use, the procedure is the same. Every time you use cannabis, jot down the pertinent details:
- Date and time of day
- Whether you were experiencing symptoms before consuming cannabis
- Consumption method (vape, capsules, oil, etc.)
- Brand and cannabinoid ratio (how much THC and CBD it had)
- How much you took
- How long it took to take effect
- How it made you feel
You can go into much greater detail, of course. Some intrepid journalists, for instance, like to record the effects of the cannabis right after they take it and then at hour-long intervals throughout the day. Basically, you want to write down the info you need to replicate the same effect (go and buy the same item and take the same amount again) or to determine whether something didn’t work.
Want to make it easy? Strainprint and Tetragram are great apps to test out.
The more specific you can get about what’s working and what’s not, the better chance you’ll have to guide your care moving forward. And as always: Please don’t be afraid to ask for help or advice. After all, that’s the whole reason we’re here!
