Interview with Dr. Jordan Tishler
On February 21st, Dr. Jordan Tishler, will speak at Kahner Global's Cannabis Private Investment Summit in Fort Lauderdale, FL. This event gathers industry leaders and investors for a day of collaboration and networking
Dr. Tishler is a Cannabis Specialist. Through his training in Internal Medicine and years of practice as an Emergency Physician, Dr. Tishler brings his knowledge, reason, and caring to patients here at inhaleMD, and through his advocacy work at the local and national levels.Dr. Tishler graduated from both Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, trained at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and has spent many years working with the underserved, particularly our Veterans. Having treated countless patients harmed by alcohol and drugs, his observation that he had never seen a cannabis overdose lead Dr. Tishler to delve deeply into the science of cannabis safety and treatment.Dr. Tishler is also a parallel entrepreneur working for patients’ wellbeing in the corporate space, helping to elevate dosing and safety profiles of medication, and helping to establish best practice for bringing new Cannabis products to market.Dr. Tishler is a frequent speaker and author on a variety of topics related to the medical applications of cannabis. He is the President of the Association of Cannabis Specialists, and the Treasurer and a Board of Directors member of Doctors for Cannabis Regulation (DFCR).
Please tell us about your medical background?
My medical background is quite traditional. I went to Harvard College and then to Harvard Medical School. I trained in Internal Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. I worked in emergency care for most of my career, the last 15 years at the VA.
Why did you decide to start a practice in the cannabis industry?
I got into cannabis medicine through my experience as an emergency doctor at the VA. So many of my patients where there for drug and alcohol problems, or even if they were there for other reasons, were complicated by alcohol and drug problems. I really became a de facto expert on care of these problems. When Massachesetts started considering cannabis as a potential medication, I recognized that I’d never seen anyone sick from cannabis! So I started to delve into the science.
It’s fashionable presently to say there isn’t enough research on cannabis. On the one hand, this is inarguable: we could always do with more research. However, this is true in all fields of medicine, including for example, cardiology. This does not mean that there isn’t good data now upon which we can make good decisions, and refine those decisions as we learn more. Research on cannabis has been ongoing since the early 1960s and has produced a whopping 26,000 plus studies. It is the most widely researched substance. Compare this to 5500 studies on alcohol.
After my rather skeptical deep dive into the science, I emerged quite convinced that under the right circumstances, cannabis is great medicine. As with all medicines, whether is works, is good or harmful, or creates intolerable side effects, it’s all in how you use it.
Ultimately, I recognized that very few of my colleagues knew much about cannabis. Further, they were supportive and curious about the benefits, but haven’t the bandwidth to get into the details, much less take care of patients using cannabis. This lead to the referral model of a Cannabis Specialist, which is the way I see things working well today. Co-management of patients is wildly successful.
To further the field and to raise the bar for patient care, I started the Association of Cannabis Specialists cannabis-specialist.org which I encourage people to learn more about.
What are some health reasons for why patients come to you? What are the most typical treatment you offer?
One of the unique aspects of cannabis as medicine is that it works on our Endocannabinoid System (ECS), a system only recently discovered. The ECS is really a meta-system affecting the action of many other systems throughout the brain and body. This makes cannabis good at treating many seemingly unrelated illnesses.
For examples, cannabi