An agency nurse at one of the UK’s largest medical centres have been found to commit misconduct and struck off after an independent regulator heard she was selling cannabis oil to a cancer patient.
The BBC reports that the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) said Eliska Neuzilova, a nurse who, at the time, was working at the Queen’s Medical Centre (QMC) in Nottingham, gave her cancer patient cannabis oil “so she could profit” in June 2018.
While the nurse has denied the accusation, the panel found her to “fail to maintain professional boundaries” and provide “unsolicited medical advice” for a patient with a serious medical condition.
It is now reported that while Ms Neuzilova was working at the medical centre in 2018, she was also involved in a company selling “cannabis oils.”
Her actions were denounced by the patient’s family, who claimed she “tried to convince [the patient] to stop eating sugar and to take cannabis oil to cure her cancer.”
She was also found to “misuse of patient information” as she was posting leaflets about the benefits of cannabis oil through the patient’s letterbox.
Ms Neuzilova, the BBC reports, categorically denied any wrongdoing or sought for financial gains, however, the panel didn’t believe her.
They “found it implausible [she] would go out of her way to deliver a leaflet to [the patient] which advertised products her company sold for purely altruistic reasons.”
The panel, after concluding that she committed misconduct, added: “A health care professional giving advice on supplements or treatments that are not supported by medical evidence is inappropriate and potentially dangerous.”
There are still way too few studies to be done in relation to cannabis’ potential benefits in cancer treatments.
While governments around the world, including in the UK, have begun to allow the use of medicinal cannabis products for the treatment of a limited number of conditions, cannabis products may only be prescribed for chemotherapy-induced nausea in relation to cancer.
