Dr Jen Anderson: “Helping other families access cannabis healed my own trauma”

Dr Jen Anderson, a paediatric prescriber of medical cannabis in Canada, shares how her family’s personal trauma led to her taking a leap of faith in her career.

Dr Jen Anderson, a Canadian doctor renowned for her work helping families access medical cannabis, will arrive in the UK on 4 November, to share her story with patients and prescribers at the UK’s first cannabis patient conference.

Dr Anderson features in a new documentary following her journey from family doctor to paediatric prescriber of cannabis, after it helped her own son Nicholas who was born with cerebral palsy and subsequently intractable epilepsy.

Whilst pregnant with her twins, Nicholas and Zachary, Dr Anderson was diagnosed with twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS), a condition which occurs when one twin prevents blood from getting to the other. 

Both boys survived, but Nicholas was born with brain abnormalities and began experiencing seizures at a young age.

“His seizures started to escalate as he got older, until 2015 when he fell into electrical status epilepsy,” says Dr Anderson.

Despite trying different medications the seizures continued and while Zachary progressed with his milestones, there was  a decline in Nicholas’ development. 

“He started losing his abilities. He was starting to have difficulty walking and eating. Sometimes you could barely tell if he was conscious, he would just be staring at you and shaking,” she continues.

“During the summer of 2016, he was in hospital 90% of the time. It got to the point where the hospital actually asked if we wanted him resuscitated.”

Looking for another option

Dr Anderson was working as a family physician at the time, covering everything from obstetrics to hospital emergency departments and began researching alternative therapies. 

“I have family members that have used cannabis for years for chronic pain and I was familiar with the story of Charlotte Figi,” she says. 

“I went to our neurologist and asked if we could try cannabis, but she said she couldn’t help me.”

Having kept a blog about her experience with the twins, she reached out to her followers to say she was interested in trying it and a friend offered her a bottle of Charlotte’s Web CBD oil. 

“I was at my wits end, Nicholas was seizing all night and I felt like I didn’t have any other option,” she recalls.

“I gave him a drop that night and he slept the whole night. I couldn’t remember the last time he had slept all the way through. We carried on and gradually he was more interactive. My respite worker mentioned that he was walking better and was becoming more alert. It just got better from there.”

Adult-use hadn’t yet been legalised in Canada and patients required authorisation to access medicinal cannabis. Nicholas’ doctors weren’t supportive.

“I was really troubled and angry that they could see that it was working, but wouldn’t help me,” says Dr Anderson.

“I could have lost my medical licence, but I refused to stop giving him it, if we took him off the oil he would start seizing again. It felt like I had to choose between being a mum and being a physician.”

Dr Anderson and Nicholas

Learning about cannabis

Eventually a friend also from the medical profession offered to help. They researched everything they could about medical cannabis, reaching out to experts in the field such as renowned paediatric prescriber, Dr Bonni Goldstein, reading about dosing and different drug interactions and going ‘straight to the source’ to speak to growers in Canada’s ‘grey market’. 

“Nicholas did really, really well for the first six months, his seizure activity reduced and we reduced our hospital visits,” she says.

When in the spring of 2017 he started having seizures again, Dr Anderson made contact with another physician who knew more about the physiology of cannabis. He introduced her to research from Israel and he re-dosed Nicholas’s oil based on his weight.

The seizures stopped again, ‘immediately’.

“We’re four years on now and Nicholas still has seizures, but they’re minimal and they tend to flare up with common triggers, so we adjust his cannabis accordingly,” Dr Anderson continues.

“He has a great quality of life and now he’s doing things nobody ever thought he would do.”

When Dr Anderson was later approached by a clinic, wanting her to help other families looking for treatments for children with epilepsy, she was reluctant at first.

“My initial response was absolutely not, I’m not going to be the doctor who prescribes cannabis for kids, but that didn’t sit well with me, especially after the experience I had with my son,” she says.

She started treating children for whom conventional treatments had been unsuccessful, some with epilepsy, cancer, autism and rare genetic disorders.  

“I saw improvements in almost every child,” she says. 

“Some of these kids had been around the world trying to find treatments. My approach, as I learned later, was the same as that of Dr. Mechoulam [the Israeli scientist who discovered the endocannabinoid system] – to treat them all.”

Advocating for paediatric access to medical cannabis

Dr Anderson is now one of few paediatric prescribers of medical cannabis in Canada, and is working with The Canadian Collaborative for Childhood Cannabinoid Therapeutics (C4T) on building the evidence base around its safety and efficacy. 

Rather than pushing against the system, she believes she has a powerful role to play from within it. 

“I’m not a cannabis doctor on the fringes, I still work at the hospital. These doctors know my son, they know my story, so they’re comfortable with who I am and how I practise,” she says.

“I have a unique role as a parent and a physician. I think that my story helps me to connect with the medical community and say things that other people might not.”

She also credits her experience as a parent as making her a better doctor.

“It was very therapeutic for me to work with these families, we shared a common trauma and I found a lot of healing through that and I think that’s how I got through my own trauma,” she continues.

“It’s not fair to ostracise a parent for going out and trying something on their own. These parents are not trying to hurt their kid by giving them cannabis or any other alternative therapy. They are in a position that most never have to deal with, they are desperate. If we don’t help them and support them then they’re going to do it anyway, but it’s going to be more dangerous.”

She adds: “I never meant to be a doctor giving cannabis to kids. It has turned into something I never imagined but it’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve done with my career.”

Anything Can Happen

The documentary, Anything Can Happen, tells Dr Anderson’s story, as well as those of the other families she has helped.

Its European premiere will take place at the UK’s first medical cannabis patient conference on Friday 4 November, as part of Medical Cannabis Awareness Week.

Dr Anderson will be flying over to share her experience in person, along with her daughter and Nicholas’ sister, Sidney, who will speak about the impact of having a severely ill sibling.

Chase Gouthro, director of Anything Can Happen

Director and producer, Chase Gouthro, of Bare Hand Films, commented: “The film works as a standalone piece, but where it really shines is when you have an opportunity to hear Dr Anderson speak more about her journey, because it’s really a great catalyst for that conversation to be had.

“These stories are borderless in the sense that a family here has much the same values as a family in the UK, or indeed all over the world. A parents’ love for their child is universal. I would like the documentary to be used as a sort of a catalyst to have a bigger conversation about cannabis, its role in medicine and more specifically, its uses in paediatric medicine.”

Anything Can Happen will premiere at the UK Patient Conference on Friday 4 November at ISH Venues, London. In-person tickets have now sold out but can register to watch the event online here 

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