Cannabis in the Treatment of Pediatric Epilepsy

Bonni Goldstein, MD, sees patients in an office in Lawndale (Los Angeles County) and is the director of the Canna-Centers chain of clinics, with five offices in California. She graduated from the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey and did her internship, residency and Chief Residency at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. She worked in Critical Care Transport and Pediatric Emergency Medicine for 12 years before becoming a medical cannabis specialist. I have been a medical cannabis physician seeing adult patients in California for the past six years. Occasionally I would be approached by parents who knew of my background and asked me to monitor their children’s use of cannabis. (As a doctor who trained in pediatrics and practiced pediatrics and emergency medicine for 12 years, I have considerable experience taking care of children.) In the summer of 2013 I evaluated a few adolescents for use of cannabis: a teenage boy with cancer; a teenage girl who went through a horrific trauma and was suffering with PTSD, anxiety and depression and had failed all conventional treatment; a teenage boy with Tourette Syndrome; another teenager with epilepsy. The nature of my practice changed dramatically after Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s documentary aired on CNN in August 2013. Parents of children with intractable epilepsy wanted to know about CBD and cannabis as a possible treatment. They learned about my background on the Internet and asked if I’d be willing to treat their children. Many of the parents are connected on a pediatric epilepsy Facebook page, through which most of my current patients found my practice. Epilepsy is not a rare disorder. In the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control, some 2.3 million adults and 468,000 children (under 17) have epilepsy. Epilepsy in children is often a genetic or congenital condition. Epilepsy can result at any time in life from head trauma, infections, or tumors.