by Connor Hansen
If you're thinking about getting a medical marijuana license, you
might be able to get a doctor's recommendation without leaving your
home.
With advances in telemedicine, people are turning to their computers more and more for basic prescriptions.
Now
that medical marijuana is legal, there are no rules that say you can't
use telemedicine for a medical marijuana recommendation.
"There's
nothing in the OMMA rules that would prohibit a doctor from signing that
recommendation form by telemedicine," said Melissa Miller from the
Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority.
"They still have to meet all the
requirements as any other physicians, they have to be licensed and in
good standing with the State of Oklahoma. They have to be an MD or DO
and they have to be board certified."
Patients can't use any app like FaceTime or Skype.
For health privacy reasons, it has to be over an approved telemedicine platform.
"Most
folks that we're seeing are primarily anxiety, depression related,
chronic pain," said Dr. Justin Dockendorf, an emergency physician in
Edmond.
Dockendorf has had hundreds of patients come to his practice who want to switch to medical marijuana.
While he has used telemedicine, mostly for emergency situations, he has not used it for marijuana yet.
"This
is a real medication that we're recommending and I think it should be
treated as such, in the sense that there should be a formal patent
physician encounter," Dockendorf said.
There aren't many
guidelines for what types of patients doctors can give recommendations
to, but for some of them, telemedicine could be useful.
"Some of
the folks that are coming to see us, they're travelling 100, 150 miles
to come and see us," Dockendorf. "Mostly from the far-reaching areas of
the state."
After a doctor recommends a patient for medical marijuana, the patient doesn't have to check in for two years.
The OMMA says it's still getting more than 5,000 applications every week.
So far, about 76,000 patients have applied.
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