Today on Digital Trends Live, Greg Nibler presents an interview with Franco Brockelman, CEO of Releaf, a digital cannabis database, to discuss how the app is personalizing care for medical marijuana patients.
Brockelman built the app to help his mother, who struggled to find relief from her chronic pain even after agreeing to try cannabis. Releaf helps make information about cannabis more widely accessible and create records of people’s hands-on experiences with the substance.
“At first [my mother] said ‘no way, I’m not breaking my streak,'” Brockelman recalls in his interview. “That was what she actually said. It was funny, but it also shows you how unapproachable [cannabis] can be for some people to take that leap to this newly accepted form of medicine.”
Before Releaf, Leafly was the only mainstream cannabis database of its kind, but Brockelman saw gaps in the service, particularly as it related to its medical patients. While certain strains provided his mother with relief, some made her symptoms worse than ever and created unwanted side effects.
Releaf allows users to not only create tangible records of strains they have tried and detail what worked for them or didn’t, it also makes healing and information a priority. Users can enter however much information they wish to the app, including stats related to how it made them feel, production, batch number, and strain profiles of the cannabis they are using.
Besides acting as a journal for medical patients, the company is also determined to improve the cannabis industry and the quality of information related to it. Releaf recently partnered with the University of New Mexico to determine the effectiveness of cannabis against insomnia.
The study analyzed data from 409 patients using Releaf and found that cannabis was indeed effective at treating insomnia. The study also documented what strains and methods provided the most relief.
Releaf is free to download in the App Store and Google Play. For more information about the app, be sure to check out Releaf’s website.
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