Replies

If my child were having seizures, I would prefer to not give him an untested chemical mixture with known adverse effects. There are 57 anti-seizure drugs listed over at www.epilepsy.com, which I would rather try. It is very likely that one or a combination of them would control the disorder, and I know that they have a tested safety profile. There are also various medical treatments for some kinds of epilepsy--perhaps my child could benefit from one of them.

I did a search for cannabidiol over at www.pubmed.org. There wasn't much. The first entry was this Cochrane review: Cannabinoids for epilepsy. Basically, it tells me that the studies to date are safety studies, which are not designed to test efficacy. Although some safety studies can give limited data on efficacy, none of the studies reviewed did that. These studies only showed that in the 48 patients studied, cannabidiol did not have short-term safety issues. That means that long-term safety has not been established. The usefulness of cannabidiol as an epilepsy treatment is still a matter of hear-say.