A mental health nurse found an "amazing" treatment for migraines after he woke up projectile vomiting.
Since he was a teen, Peter Phillips, 32, has suffered from migraines that leave him lying in dark rooms with curtains drawn and screens off. Usually, he'd drink lots of water and sleep them off, but two years ago, the migraines became more frequent and severe, causing Peter to feel nauseous, miss work and start seeing "flashing lights". The man from Warrington said: "It was very scary. Because I'm a mental health nurse, I thought I was hallucinating, I thought it was a bit of psychosis, but my GP said it's part of the migraines."
His doctor prescribed medication for the headaches, which reduced them enough for him to function. But the migraines got worse every time they came back until he woke up projectile vomiting after going home from work in "overwhelming" pain. Peter said: "It was like something from The Exorcist, the level of vomiting and how I had no control over it."
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An ambulance took him to hospital where he was treated for suspected meningitis, but tests revealed it was just a migraine worse than anything Peter previously experienced. Doctors suggested beta blockers that reduced his blood pressure and left him feeling faint, and also lithium, which would require tests to monitor the levels in his blood.
Peter said: "It was quite daunting because at that moment, you're weighing up the pros and cons of how much your migraines impact your daily functioning and how much that needs to be treated, compared to how much impact these medications are going to have. Once you start on these medications, that is it, that is what you're taking every day forever."
Unhappy with these treatment options, Peter looked for alternatives he could take as and when he needs them. His research led him to medicinal cannabis and Sapphire Medical Clinics, an award-winning medicinal cannabis clinic, and the first one registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which rates is as 'good'. Thinking it was too good to be true, Peter said: "At first I thought, 'Is this all a big ruse? Is there actually any medical benefit to it? Is this just people saying it works because they want to get stoned?'"
What he found last October was a clinic running online appointments where he discussed his medical history with a doctor who talked through non-cannabis treatment options before prescribing cannabis flower and later oil. It took some tweaking to find the right type and dose - too much makes Peter sleepy - but he felt the effects almost immediately.
Peter's light sensitivity, nausea and pain disappeared within 15 minutes of consuming the medicinal cannabis through a vaporiser. Using just 500 milligrams in 12-hour periods has allowed him to miss one day of work since he started, compared with two months in the previous year. He said: "I was very amazed, and I am really amazed at how little I need to use, because you're not doing it to get stoned, you're not doing it to be intoxicated."
Dr Simon Erridge, Sapphire's head of research and access, joined the clinic when it started in 2019. A law change the previous year allowed specialist doctors to legally prescribe cannabis-based medicines to patients for whom first-line treatments haven't worked. Medicinal cannabis contains the same CBD and THC compounds found in recreational cannabis, but producers must ensure the levels are consistent across batches and that batches are not contaminated.
More than 6,000 people have been treated by Sapphire Medical Clinics since it opened, with many of them never trying cannabis before. Coming in the form of either a flower plant or oil, the medicinal cannabis works by interacting with receptors in the body's endocannabinoid system. Some receptors in the brain are involved in emotional processing, while others are affect how pain is experienced, meaning the products can be used to treat a wide range of conditions from anxiety to epilepsy to chronic pain. It's also been found to benefit the concentration of some people with ADHD and reduce the pain of people with endometriosis, but more research into cannabis as treatment for such conditions is needed.
Dr Erridge said: "It's definitely not a silver bullet and it's not something that works for everyone. What I can't think of is another parallel in modern medicine where you would see a medication being prescribed for so many different conditions. With the conditions that we see, particularly chronic pain, there are relatively few treatment options available to them with high-quality evidence and acceptable side effects."
Side effects of medicinal cannabis include dry mouth, concentration impairment and fatigue, but Peter said it doesn't affect his work and he feels less sleepy than he did on GP-prescribed drugs. Dr Erridge said they've found lower levels of psychosis among medicinal cannabis patients than they'd expect in populations with high levels of mental health problems.
Peter said: "If you're finding nothing's working for you and you've got all these medications that have these significant side effects, and you can't find anything else to work, I think it's worth exploring if you can afford it. It's quite expensive, and some people can't afford that, particularly if they've got to the stage where they're so debilitated by a health condition they can't work."
