Listen to a group of medical cannabis pharmacists talk shop and you are likely to hear the subject of bioavailability come up. Your average consumer probably knows little about bioavailability. But to a pharmacist, it’s especially important. A drug’s bioavailability directly impacts its efficacy.
Bioavailability plays a key role in medical cannabis therapies. Different forms of medical cannabis offer various levels of bioavailability, so it’s important for a patient and their pharmacist to work together on figuring out the best form and delivery method.
Bioavailability: The Basics
In pharmaceutical circles, bioavailability refers to the amount of a drug, or its active ingredients, which is made available to the body for relieving symptoms or healing disease. It is expressed as a percentage from the total.
For example, inhaled THC has a bioavailability of 10-60% depending on the product being used and the method of inhalation. Let’s go with the high end at 60%. That would mean 60% of the THC inhaled by a patient is utilized by the body to relieve pain. The remaining 40% is tied up by the liver.
Bioavailability matters because it determines how much medical cannabis a person must consume in order to achieve desired symptom relief. The patient will always intake more THC than his body actually utilizes, so pharmacists and doctors have to account for that when making their recommendations.
3 Key Considerations
Beehive Farmacy is a Utah company operating medical cannabis pharmacies in Brigham City and Salt Lake City. State law requires them to have a licensed medical cannabis pharmacist on-site whenever their doors are open. Beehive says there is a good reason for that: pharmacists are the most qualified among all medical providers to advise patients on how to use medical cannabis.
Pharmacists give attention to three key considerations:
Efficacy – Higher bioavailability generally means more effective symptom relief. This suggests the cannabis products with a higher bioavailability can be administered in smaller doses without sacrificing efficacy.
Onset and Duration – Onset describes how quickly a patient feels relief while duration describes how long that relief lasts. Higher bioavailability generally means quicker onset and shorter duration. Lower bioavailability means the opposite.
Therapy Personalization – Understanding bioavailability helps pharmacists and their patients come up with personalized therapy plans based on patient condition, symptoms, daily routines, life circumstances, etc.
It would be nearly impossible for a pharmacist to offer sound advice if she didn’t have a handle on bioavailability. It’s such a crucial measurement that the concept is one of the first things future pharmacists learn during their educational careers. Visit Beehive Farmacy for more info.
Recommending Multiple Products
Varying bioavailability among medical cannabis products can work to a patient’s advantage. Typically, inhalation offers the highest bioavailability, while oral ingestion is considerably less. But inhaled and ingested products can work together to give a patient maximum relief.
During normal working hours, a patient may not be able to consume medicines via inhalation. Maybe he can’t take the time away from his desk or it would be unwise to use such a fast-acting product. So he uses an edible instead. An edible provides consistent and longer-lasting pain relief while at work. But at home, it’s better for the patient to inhale. He enjoys more immediate relief but with a shorter duration.
The long and short of it is that bioavailability impacts a medical cannabis product’s efficacy. Pharmacists and their patients need to be aware so that they can come up with a treatment plan that maximizes effectiveness. Without that knowledge, treating with medical cannabis becomes a shot in the dark. That is the last thing a patient needs.