Chronic pain cannabis: Pain management is one of the most common reasons for individuals to switch to medical cannabis. Traditionally, pain medication is used to treat pain, but recently many doctors have been handing out medical marijuana cards as an alternative.
Chronic pain is now a qualifying condition to receive medical marijuana in just about every state in the US. Due to this new shift in medicine, many scientific studies have begun popping up to show marijuana's pain management effectiveness instead of the traditional opioid route.
Chronic Pain Cannabis: Not So Helpful After All
A new study was just published in The Lancet and was funded by the Australian Government and the National Health and Medical Research Council. The group is challenging the firmly held assumptions held widely about medical cannabis.
Human studies on cannabis effects are often not found, due to legal restrictions that prohibit these studies from actually occurring. So, the human studies that are out there are extremely important.
According to the data found on the 1514 participants, a majority of the users in the study did not use cannabis for pain (75%), and those that did ended up not having worse pain outcomes.
Specifically, researches concluded that "compared with people with no cannabis use, we found that participants who used cannabis had a greater pain interference score, lower pain self-efficacy scores, and greater generalized anxiety disorder severity scores."
This study also found that the patients who used cannabis for pain had greater pain severity scores than those who did not use cannabis.
However, the patients who used cannabis daily had slightly lower pain scores than those patients who used cannabis less frequently.
Ultimately, the research concluded that there was no strong evidence to support the use of cannabis for pain management. For the group of 1514 participants, there was no strong evidence to suggest that cannabis is a good solution for pain management in non-cancer chronic patients.
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