Author: thcscout

Chronic pain’s a big problem in our country, in the United States and around the world. It can lead to loss of functional work opportunities. It can lead to depression. It can, people take long acting, long term medicines that can potentially cause lethality if used in a high dose, could cause constipation, that cause itching, that cause hypogonadism. All of these problems are from the use of opioids which are derived from the opium poppy which are mainstays in the treatment of chronic pain.

The problems with chronic pain are that it’s disabling and also that the treatments for it can also come with a whole host of very difficult severe to mild side effects. But it turns out that marijuana also is effective in numerous chronic pain syndromes, has been shown in actual clinical studies, controlled trials, especially nerve-type chronic pain syndromes where you have damage to a nerve or some type of situation going on where a nerve-type pain is going out of control and going on for more than three months. And it turns out that if you smoke cannabis, in clinical studies, compared to a placebo cannabis, you can get greater than 30 to 40 percent reduction of pain in a large percentage of those subjects compared to placebo. That’s been shown over and over.

And then in the basic studies where they use animals and try to, like, develop models for pain, every model that you develop for pain in those models, cannabis or cannabinoids relieves pain. So it’s really a natural or well-established pain relieving compound. In some cases, you might be able to reduce. If you use cannabis or marijuana in your pain treatment you can reduce the risk of other treatments that may be more toxic. In some cases you can go off of all other treatments. I’ve seen patients like that.

I’ve written up some review articles like in the Clinical Journal of Pain called Cannabinergic Pain Medicine as a whole field of subfield in pain itself relies on the system in the body that’s called the cannabinoid system that actually helps to send pain signals up and down in the body and actually helps our natural pain, one of our natural pain suppressing systems. And also, these different compounds called cannabinoids in cannabis that have been shown to relieve pain. It’s itself a whole field in pain.

So in clinical journals of pain it turns out that there is actually articles about the use of cannabinoids, which are the chemicals in cannabis, as its own treatment system for pain because the system in the body that the cannabinoids interact with is itself involved in our pain pathways.

So there is a huge interest in literature in the world of pain treatment which relies on all the science that we have accumulated with how cannabis works in the body.

The use of marijuana to mitigate the effects of chemotherapy has been
around for almost 30 years or more in the United States. In fact, the very
first wave of medical marijuana laws were in the 70’s and early 80’s and
they were geared toward patients using marijuana in studies who were
receiving cancer chemotherapy. The amazing thing is the marijuana has a
dramatic effect on relieving nausea and vomiting associated with
chemotherapy.

Turns out there are receptors or meaning little locks, molecular locks in
the part of your brain stem that are involved in the vomiting circuit, the
nausea circuit. Those locks are actually the keys, the chemical keys that help to
change those locks situation is found in marijuana and so like lock fits a
key or a key fits into a lock, marijuana can directly chemically change
your state of nausea and vomiting.

So that has a huge impact. It’s been studied in clinical studies and been show
to relieve chemotherapy related nausea and vomiting. Also the government helped
to back studies to make certain chemicals, single molecule pills derived
from marijuana compounds and those have been approved by the FDA for the
relief of nausea and vomiting in chemotherapy. Without this discovery, we
really wouldn’t have moved medical marijuana as far forward as we have
today.

Oncologists are surveyed even in prestigious medical centers, even as far as
in the early 90’s were reporting a large percentage that they would be
recommending marijuana to their patients to tolerate the effects of
chemotherapy. It turns out nowadays, we even know that marijuana has anti-
cancer chemicals in it that we’ve been able to show that some compounds in
marijuana can kill cancer cells in Petri dishes and animals and in one human
study.

So some groups have called for the use of marijuana compounds in chemotherapy
regimen themselves, so that’s a very exciting development and can
potentially help to relieve not just the effects of cancer related
chemotherapy, but cancer itself. So marijuana has a lot of promise in this
area.