Hi Mary, Tina and all. We met with Dr. Feldman a week ago Monday. He is indeed
a very kind and very knowledgeable man. He had just returned from Chicago where
he met with 4 other CVS specialists. He mentioned that he also recently spoke
to a group of 145 gastro doctors and only a couple of them had even heard of
cvs. Sad, isn't it?

The long and short of our meeting - our son definitely has cvs, which was no
surprise to us. But it did give us a sense of relief to have him tell us that
so much of what he experiences is part of cvs. Dr. Feldman considers stress is a
major contributor to it. With our son having Tourettes syndrome, stress is part
of his make-up.

One issue Dr. Feldman brought up early on was pot use. When my son said he did
smoke at least once a day on a regular basis for anxiety as well as nausea, Dr.
Feldman suggested that the effects of pot could begin to cause the very symptoms
it's being taken to avoid. He asked my son if he would be willing to stop using
pot for 6 weeks to rule it out as a cause of his (at least) weekly abdominal
migraine episodes and prescribed klonopin wafers to use while he's weaning
himself off pot. My son agreed to abstain until he sees Dr. Feldman again in 6
weeks. He smoked the last of his pot last Tuesday and while he has had to take
zofran for nausea almost daily during the past week, he has not had any
abdominal pain or vomiting. I would say that's pretty remarkable for him. I
don't know if the nausea and anxiety lessen somewhat as time goes by with
continued abstinence. Hailey or Mary do either of you know?

Another thing that came up at the meeting was the use of suboxone as a pain
management medication. My son has been using it for a number of years now since
getting rebound from Stadol NS. Dr. Feldman was interested in how well it
worked. It works pretty well a lot of the time. And even when pain breaks
through, it prevents visits to the ER.

Did anyone watch Anderson Cooper 360 last night? He's had a series all week
about legalizing pot but last night's program had 2 brief interviews. One with
Melissa Etherege who used pot during her chemo treatment 5 years ago and still
uses it. She said it was wonderful for her cancer needs. The other was an
unknown Bipolar woman who used an unlimited amount of medical pot for anxiety.
She said that while the pot made her feel better for the first few years, by the
3rd year of unlimited use, the pot made her anxiety and depression worse and she
became hooked on it. Something then was said rather quickly - that pot worked
well for physical ailments with symptoms like nausea and pain but cauld cause
extended neurobiological problems for people with mental disorders. I was
waiting for something to be mentioned about cannabis toxicity but it never came
up.

So there you go. My son really misses it but is staying off the pot, at least
for now. Thank you, Tina, for recommending Dr. Feldman. We had never heard of
him before and had no idea he shared the office at Cedars with Dr. Fleisher at
one time.

I'll give updates as times goes on.

Linda

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