Website intended for a NZ health professional readership
When it came to Green Doctors, he never really stopped talking about it or forging ahead with it
With his pioneering medical cannabis clinic, the late Mark Hotu was a person “obsessed”, his former partner says.
“When it came to Green Doctors, he never really stopped talking about it or forging ahead with it,” says Natalie Lowe, who was both the business partner and life partner of Dr Hotu.
The couple together had two children, aged 11 and 17, and Miss Lowe is now running the central Auckland clinic she co-owned with her partner.
Dr Hotu (Ngāti Maniapoto) died in January. Miss Lowe says he had a long battle with cancer but had been doing well until around August last year when they both caught COVID-19.
“[He] just didn’t really recover from that.” Dr Hotu was the oldest in his family of four siblings, of whom three – Mark, Cheri and Sandra – became medical practitioners.
“Mark started off his career as a maths teacher and wasn’t enjoying that very much, and so [the younger of his two sisters] had suggested they go to medical school together, so they did,” Miss Lowe says. “He retrained at around 30.”
Dr Hotu was also a rapper. He was in the band Houseparty in the early 1990s which, soon after he left, changed its name to Otara Millionaires Club and released the hit song “How Bizarre”.
Green Doctors, established in 2019, was among New Zealand’s first clinics dedicated to prescribing medical cannabis. There are now at least seven.
The business grew out of NZ Home Doctors, a medical home visiting service established by the couple in 2018 after they returned from Australia, where Dr Hotu had been involved in a home visiting service.
Always one to have several projects on the go, Dr Hotu was looking at extending NZ Home Doctors into retirement villages. And some of the service’s patients mentioned chronic pain.
The couple knew people at medical cannabis firm Helius Therapeutics. “[We] would talk with them for a brief time about how we could work together, but Mark was always very keen just to have his own clinic,” Miss Lowe recalls.
On a South Island family ski trip – Dr Hotu loved skiing, surfing, rugby, science, black holes and medicine – they nutted out their Green Doctors plan. Back in Auckland, they found premises in Herne Bay where they opened the clinic, and moved in with the kids.
“It was an expensive place to rent and so we had to make some compromises because we were still trying to build a house at the same time.”
The pandemic hit and they moved into, and worked from, their rental property. Later, the clinic shifted to Ponsonby and now, after outgrowing that site, Upper Queen Street in the central city.
Miss Lowe says when Green Doctors began, just two medical cannabis products were available, Tilray and CBD oil from Medleaf; now there are about 15.
Miss Lowe, who is from an advertising and marketing background, says she and Dr Hotu took on a huge risk with their business ventures. “We don’t have any investors, we don’t have any affiliations with any overseas companies; we’ve done it all on our own…”
Dr Hotu told New Zealand Doctor Rata Aotearoa in 2019 that most New Zealand GPs were underinformed about medical cannabis and would prefer being able to refer patients, who might find medical cannabis suitable, to specialist practices such as his.
I think there’s a lot of fear amongst GPs around prescribing CBD, you can multiply that by a factor of 10 for prescribing THC.
“I think this [medical cannabis space] is going to be big enough for more clinics.
We're publishing this article as a FREE READ so it is FREE to read and EASY to share more widely. Please support us and the hard work of our journalists by clicking here and subscribing to our publication and website
Pharmacist prescribers Linda Bryant and Leanne Te Karu discuss positive polypharmacy for heart failure. Current evidence shows the intensive implementation of four medications offers the greatest benefit to most patients with heart failure, with significant reductions in cardiovascular mortality, heart failure hospitalisations and all-cause mortality
