Imagine a medical cannabis patient living with chronic pain. The medicine she chooses to use provides plenty of short-term relief. But long-term relief, especially during the overnight hours, is fleeting. Can she do anything other than taking more? Yes. She can try layering different medical cannabis products.
Layering can work very well for some people. However, it takes time and practice to master. Layering is also not an exact science. A person who masters layering may find adequate relief but only for a limited amount of time. He may have to go back to the drawing board and start over if his current layering regimen stops working.
What Layering Actually Is
Layering medical cannabis is the practice of using a variety of products simultaneously to realize maximum relief from the symptoms a person is facing. It should be noted that layering is not unique to medical cannabis. In fact, it did not start with medical cannabis.
Getting back to the fictional patient mentioned at the beginning of this post, an effective layering strategy for her might involve using an edible product that offers hours of relief overnight. It allows her to fall asleep and stay asleep. During the daylight hours though, she might combine low-dose edibles for sustained effect with vapes to boost pain relief as needed.
An edible delivers a stable and consistent stream of THC for a longer period of time. Meanwhile, vapes deliver a higher level of THC in shorter bursts. By combining both edibles and vapes, our fictional patient maximizes the pain-relieving benefits she derives from medical cannabis.
Experimentation Is the Key
Rare is the medical cannabis patient who figures out the most effective layering strategy right off the bat. According to the operators of the Beehive Farmacy medical cannabis pharmacy in Brigham City, Utah, experimentation is the key to getting it right. They say that the most successful patients work with their pharmacists to come up with a layering strategy over time.
The pharmacist may recommend something similar to the previous example: a combination of edibles and vapes. If the combination does not work as well as expected, the next suggestion could be to decrease the edibles and use more vapes during the daylight hours. The pharmacist could even go off schedule to recommend layering tinctures, edibles, and a topical.
While trying different combinations might seem chaotic, it is the way things are done in medical cannabis. Here’s why:
- THC doses differ from one product to the next.
- Delivery method impacts THC bioavailability.
- Delivery impacts how quickly a medication works.
- Bioavailability impacts how long a medicine’s effects last for.
- A patient’s weight impacts a medicine’s effectiveness.
All of this is further impacted by the fact that people react differently. Let us go back to our fictional pain patient. How she reacts to a particular medical cannabis product it is going to differ from how someone else reacts to it. Not only that, but her pain perception is uniquely her own.
A Lot of Variables in Play
The need to experiment really boils down to the reality that there are a lot of variables in play. And that’s true of everything medical cannabis related. There are very few black-and-white standards compared to more traditional prescription medications. When it comes to layering, a patient just needs to keep working at it until she finds the right combination. Layering medical cannabis can work. However, rare is the patient who figures it out on the first try. Patients tend to work with their pharmacists for quite a while to come up with the best layering regimen.
