Chronic Pain
The ripple effect: medical cannabis: another tool to support patients and carers
The ripple effect: medical cannabis: another tool to support patients and carers
5 min read
Sam North
Many carers never refer to themselves as such. They are simply a husband or wife, daughter or son, neighbour or friend, doing what needs to be done. The cooking, the appointment booking, the cleaning. All the day-to-day tasks that slowly stack up, often through nights of broken sleep and a level of worry that is tough to switch off.
There are an estimated 5.8 million unpaid carers in the UK (with some sources pushing that figure above 11 million), and the real number almost certainly being higher as so many carers simply don’t count themselves as such. Behind every single carer is a patient in need, someone whose health, wellbeing, and response to treatment shapes how heavy that load feels day to day.
This Carers Week, we wanted to dig into a simple question: Can a patient’s medical cannabis prescription potentially help support their carer? It’s not a question we can easily answer outright, but our 2025 patient survey gives us some strong hints.
Contents
In 2025, we ran the largest survey of active UK medical cannabis patients ever conducted. Although the 1,669 respondents were not directly asked about the impact their Releaf treatment had on their carers' wellbeing, they told us a great deal about their own. What follows is an honest assessment of those answers rather than a direct measurement, but the pattern certainly points to a positive impact that reaches past the patient alone.
Why are we talking about carers this week?
This week, the 8th to the 14th of June 2026, is Carers Week in the UK, with this year's theme being Building Carer Friendly Communities.
The idea is simple: carers will always be able to do a better job when they are supported, when the world around them recognises the role they play and the toll that role can take. At Releaf, we believe this also includes effective patient treatment. When the person a carer looks after has access to a wide range of treatment options, their health outcomes (along with other markers of wellbeing such as quality of life, independence, the ability to work and/or study, and their mood and sleep) often improve. As the patient improves, so does the load placed on the carer. This is the ripple effect, and where our 2025 survey starts to tell a clear story.
What did patients tell us about the impact of their Releaf prescription?
We asked the survey respondents many questions, but some of the most telling answers came when we asked them about the day-to-day impact that their medical cannabis treatment had. These are areas that often reverberate beyond the patient themselves, into the lives of the people who help care for them.
|
What patients told us |
Improved significantly |
Improved slightly |
Total improved |
|
Quality of life |
65.8% |
31.0% |
96.8% |
|
Ability to perform daily tasks |
45.0% |
40.1% |
85.1% |
|
Ability to work or study |
37.0% |
30.2% |
67.2% |
And when it came to how effective they found their medical cannabis treatment in helping to manage their health condition:
|
Treatment effectiveness (primary condition) |
Share of patients |
|
Extremely effective |
34.9% |
|
Very effective |
44.9% |
|
Moderately effective |
15.9% |
|
At least moderately effective |
94.5% |
*All figures are rounded to one decimal place and may not sum exactly to the totals shown.
While this is patient-reported data, not a lab-run clinical trial, the consistency in positive outcomes is difficult to dismiss.
How does improving a patient's life ease the load on carers?
Here is where we have to be totally transparent about the limitations of this data, especially when it comes to the impact on carers. As mentioned earlier, we did not ask the respondents to discuss the potential positive impact on their carers' lives. We can’t put a clearly defined figure on how much easier (or not) their medical cannabis treatment has made it for the people supporting them.
But we can infer quite a bit from what patients told us about managing life on their own terms, and the boost in meaningful quality of life.
Take the 81.5% who reported a boost to their ability to perform daily tasks. These are often the first things that carers step in to help with. Cooking, laundry, cleaning - those day-to-day tasks we all have to get done. When a patient can manage more of these jobs on their own, the level of direct support they rely on shrinks.
The treatment efficacy and quality of life figures point in same heading. A patient with less pain, less anxiety, or less fatigue usually needs less care. A patient who can be more independent, more engaged with the life they live, eases the worry carried by those who support them.
What does this mean for building carer friendly communities?
The ideas behind building a more carer-friendly community are often seen to be relatively obvious, and mostly practical. Better recognition for the carer, more workplace flexibility, more financial compensation, and respite support. All of these matter.
That said, patient treatment and the outcomes it delivers, apart from the direct effects that treatment option may have on the health condition itself, should not be pushed to the side. Every time a patient who needs a carer finds a treatment path that helps them manage their health and reclaim some level of independence also lessens the weight that carer must carry.
If you know someone who you think could potentially benefit from a medical cannabis prescription, or you yourself are living with a condition that has not responded well to conventional treatment options, our world-class clinical team can help you understand whether it might be right for you.
Head to our medical cannabis eligibility checker, it takes all of 30 seconds to compete and will give you a clear idea of your next steps.
Releaf - let’s rethink healthcare
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It is important to seek medical advice before starting any new treatments. The patient advisors at Releaf are available to provide expert advice and support. Alternatively, click here to book a consultation with one of our specialist doctors.
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The ripple effect: medical cannabis: another tool to support patients and carers
This Carers Week, we are thinking about all the people across the UK who help care for someone in need. Proper treatment that delivers the best clinical outcomes is often about far more than a single option, but rather a range of choices that fit the patient. For an increasing number of patients in the UK, medical cannabis is another tool that helps, and when it does, the people supporting them can feel the difference too. We surveyed 1,669 Releaf patients, and their answers point to a benefit that reaches beyond the patient alone.
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