Medical Cannabis Oil Finally Available for Sick 12-Year-Old from Nova Scotia
12-year-old Morgan Oulton from Nova Scotia has finally found some relief in her medical struggle and legal battle to get medical cannabis for her treatment. Young Morgan was born with multiple brain abnormalities and suffers from various forms of epilepsy, and she also has autism.
Her parents have been fighting to find proper care and treatments for their daughter for years.
Morgan lives in a group care facility, and the facility didn’t want to administer or prescribe Morgan medical cannabis. The Oultons had to go to battle with the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services for their daughter to be allowed to take the medication while in the facility.
Two weeks ago, the department finally gave a technical “OK” to the family to administer medical cannabis oil. “They’re not really consenting to it, but they’re not standing in our way,” mother Chantelle Oulton said.
“We’d exhausted all other pharmaceutical treatments, and she wasn’t a candidate for surgery,” Chantelle Oulton said. “We had basically run out of options.”
Chantelle told CBC News that Morgan’s first dose was very small, and that they will increase the dosage over the following six weeks. But, even after just the first doses of the medical cannabis oil, Chantelle says that Morgan’s appetite has greatly improved, her cognitive abilities have started to return, and her seizures have reduced. In Nova Scotia, medical cannabis treatment is experimental and considered as a last resort for doctors, and is usually limited to dried flowers, not oil.
Chantelle says that she thinks the way Nova Scotia deals with medical cannabis will change in the upcoming years, and she hopes cases like Morgan’s will aid in that journey to acceptance and use. “Trials such as Morgan’s [are] how we are going to get the data to get this more mainstream medicine,” she said.
