Readiness to Use Medicinal Marijuana in the Practices of Polish Family Physicians – MDPI
#75 Strong Clinical Relevance
High-quality evidence with meaningful patient or clinical significance.
Polish family physicians show limited readiness to recommend medicinal cannabis despite its legal status, which creates a gap between regulatory allowance and clinical practice that may leave patients without evidence-based guidance on this treatment option. Understanding physician attitudes and barriers to cannabis prescribing is essential for developing training and policy that could improve patient access to potentially beneficial treatments while ensuring safe, informed use. This readiness assessment directly informs how clinicians can integrate cannabis into their therapeutic toolkit and what educational interventions might increase appropriate prescribing in countries with similar regulatory frameworks.
# Clinical Summary Despite legalization of medicinal cannabis in Poland in 2017, this study examined the readiness of family physicians to incorporate cannabis into clinical practice and found significant gaps in provider confidence and knowledge. The research identifies barriers to implementation including insufficient training, uncertainty about appropriate indications, concerns regarding efficacy and safety data, and lack of clinical experience among primary care physicians who are often patients’ first point of contact. These findings highlight a critical disconnect between legal availability and clinical adoption, which may result in delayed treatment access or inappropriate self-management by patients seeking alternatives for conditions like chronic pain and neuropathy. The study underscores that regulatory approval alone does not ensure clinical integration without accompanying physician education and evidence-based guidance. For clinicians, this suggests the need for targeted training programs and accessible clinical protocols to bridge knowledge gaps and build confidence in appropriate cannabis prescribing. Patients in jurisdictions with legal cannabis may benefit from seeking care from providers who have pursued specific education in cannabinoid therapeutics, or from physician-led initiatives to systematically educate primary care practitioners about patient selection and dosing.
“What we’re seeing in Poland mirrors what happened here in the States: physicians want to prescribe thoughtfully, but we lack the clinical training and evidence base to do it well, so we default to caution or referral. The solution isn’t more permissiveness or more restriction, it’s building competency through structured education so family doctors can actually assess cannabinoid therapy the way we assess any other medication.”
? While medicinal cannabis legalization in Poland expanded patient access in 2017, this survey reveals significant hesitancy among family physicians to integrate it into clinical practice, reflecting broader uncertainty about efficacy, safety, and appropriate indications that extends beyond Poland. Clinicians’ readiness to recommend cannabis appears influenced by knowledge gaps, regulatory ambiguity, and limited clinical guidelines rather than outright ideological opposition, suggesting that education and evidence synthesis could shift practice patterns. Important confounders include variable training in cannabinoid pharmacology, heterogeneous product formulations available in different jurisdictions, and the challenge of extrapolating evidence from research studies to individual patient contexts with comorbidities and polypharmacy. For family physicians encountering patients interested in medicinal cannabis, acknowledging the current evidence base for specific conditions (such as chemotherapy-induced nausea or certain seizure disorders), maintaining awareness of knowledge limitations in other areas, and engaging in shared
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