Does medical cannabis help chronic pain?
Added on 26 May 2023
In 1996, California became the first state to make medical marijuana legal. Today, using cannabis to treat health conditions is now legal in 38 states, three territories, and Washington, DC.
As legalization has spread through the United States, the percentage of people who report having a doctor’s authorization to use cannabis has doubled over the last decade, increasing from 1.2 percent to 2.5 percent between 2013 and 2020.
But Thomas Arkell, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, says that clinical evidence for the efficacy of medical marijuana’s active ingredients — THC and CBD — is still in its early days.
“We do need to build a stronger evidence base around what sort of THC and CBD doses are most efficacious for certain conditions, what forms of administration work best, and what the reasons are for some patients discontinuing treatment because of a lack of symptom improvement,” says Dr. Arkell, who coauthored a new study on cannabis use and health-related quality of life, published on May 9, 2023, in JAMA Network Open.
The study — “perhaps the largest study of its kind,” according to Arkell — found that medical cannabis resulted in significant improvements across a range of quality of life measures, including both physical and emotional health.
2 in 3 Participants Using Medical Cannabis for Chronic Pain
For the study, researchers analyzed data from 3,148 patients. About 54 percent were female and 30 percent were employed, with an average age of 56 years.
Image by jcomp on Freepik
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