Available but inaccessible: patient experiences during the first 2 years of a primary care-based medical cannabis program at an academic medical center.

Background: Medical cannabis use and public acceptance in the United States have increased over the past 25 years. However, access to medical cannabis remains limited, particularly for underserved populations. To understand how patients experience medical cannabis accessibility, we measured medical cannabis use and barriers to use after medical cannabis certification in an urban safety-net academic medical center.

Dispensary Staff Perceptions About the Benefits, Risks, and Safety of Cannabis for Medical Purposes.

Background: Therapeutic use of cannabis is common in the United States (up to 18.7% of Americans aged ≥12), and dispensaries in the US are proliferating rapidly. However, the efficacy profile of medical cannabis is unclear, and customers often rely on dispensary staff for purchasing decisions.

Cannabis dispensary staff approaches to counseling on potential contraindications to cannabis use: insights from a national self-report survey.

Background: Legal cannabis is available in more than half of the United States. Health care professionals (HCPs) rarely give recommendations on dosing or safety of cannabis due to limits imposed by policy and lack of knowledge. Customer-facing cannabis dispensary staff, including clinicians (pharmacists, nurses, physician's assistants), communicate these recommendations in the absence of HCP recommendations.

"It doesn't make any sense to even try": the disruptive impact of COVID-19's first wave on people with chronic pain using medical cannabis in New York.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted health care but it is unknown how it impacted the lives of people using medical cannabis for chronic pain.

Objective: To understand the experiences of individuals from the Bronx, NY, who had chronic pain and were certified to use medical cannabis during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: We conducted 1:1 semi-structured qualitative telephone interviews from March through May 2020 with a convenience sample of 14 individuals enrolled in a longitudinal cohort study.

Factors Associated with Medical Cannabis Use After Certification: A Three-Month Longitudinal Study.

Over the past decade, there has been increased utilization of medical cannabis (MC) in the United States. Few studies have described sociodemographic and clinical factors associated with MC use after certification and more specifically, factors associated with use of MC products with different cannabinoid profiles. We conducted a longitudinal cohort study of adults (=225) with chronic or severe pain on opioids who were newly certified for MC in New York State and enrolled in the study between November 2018 and January 2022.

Pain catastrophizing and mental health phenotypes in adults with refractory chronic pain: A latent class analysis.

Chronic pain, pain catastrophizing, and mental health disorders such as anxiety or depression frequently occur together and are challenging to treat. To help understand the relationship between these conditions, we sought to identify distinct phenotypes associated with worse pain and function. In a cohort of people with chronic pain on opioids seeking medical cannabis in New York, we conducted latent class analysis to identify clusters of participants based on pain catastrophizing and mental health symptoms of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Clinical Approaches to Cannabis: A Narrative Review.

Cannabis use in the United States is growing at an unprecedented pace. Most states in the United States have legalized medical cannabis use, and many have legalized nonmedical cannabis use. In this setting, health care professionals will increasingly see more patients who have questions about cannabis use, its utility for medical conditions, and the risks of its use.

First-Year Trajectories of Medical Cannabis Use Among Adults Taking Opioids for Chronic Pain: An Observational Cohort Study.

Objective: To describe first-year trajectories of medical cannabis use and identify characteristics associated with patterns of use in a cohort of adults using opioids for chronic pain.

Design: Latent class trajectory analysis of a prospective cohort study using data on the 14-day frequency of medical cannabis use.

Setting: A large academic medical center and four medical cannabis dispensaries in the New York City metropolitan area.

People living with HIV and the emerging field of chronic pain-what is known about epidemiology, etiology, and management.

Purpose Of Review: Chronic pain is common in people living with HIV (PLWH). It causes significant disability and poor HIV outcomes. Despite this, little is understood about its etiology and management.

Medical Marijuana and Opioids (MEMO) Study: protocol of a longitudinal cohort study to examine if medical cannabis reduces opioid use among adults with chronic pain.

Introduction: In the USA, opioid analgesic use and overdoses have increased dramatically. One rapidly expanding strategy to manage chronic pain in the context of this epidemic is medical cannabis. Cannabis has analgesic effects, but it also has potential adverse effects.

Daily and near-daily cannabis use is associated with HIV viral load suppression in people living with HIV who use cocaine.

Disparities remain in HIV viral load (VL) suppression between people living with HIV (PLWH) who use cocaine and those who do not. It is not known how cannabis use affects VL suppression in PLWH who use cocaine. We evaluated the relationship between cannabis use and VL suppression among PLWH who use cocaine.

COVID-19: The Worst Days of Our Careers.

Adapting to this new paradigm during this pandemic has been ever-changing and extraordinarily challenging, both personally and professionally.

A ratiometric lectin microarray approach to analysis of the dynamic mammalian glycome.

Glycosylation creates an intricate and complex code for biological information that plays a role in cell-cell communication, infection, and immunity among many biological events. Dynamic changes in the glycosylation status of cells have been observed in tumor cell metastasis and cell differentiation but have been difficult to analyze because of a lack of high-throughput and facile technologies. Here, we present a method for the rapid evaluation of differences in the glycosylation of heterogeneous mammalian samples using a ratiometric two-color lectin microarray approach.