Cannabis questions … so many questions!

Recently I wrote a summary of my readings around cannabis for pain. It’s a hot topic in New Zealand because we’re holding a referendum on cannabis law reform next year, and as expected, all the lobby groups are out in force! My interest is sparked because so many of the people I work with as patients also use cannabis – and the evidence from RCTs is pretty poor. And YET as a recent study colleagues and I carried out with people who have spinal cord injury and neuropathic pain, cannabis is something that holds appeal, and interestingly, seems to provide some useful effects. The study we conducted (see it here: https://rdcu.be/bTuup) was a qualitative investigation of people with spinal cord injury who used and found cannabis helpful. Tweet We found that people mainly trialled “conventional” pain relief such as gabapentin, pregabalin, nortriptyline, amitriptyline, and a range of opioids before they started testing cannabis and derivatives. The side effects and poor effect on pain of these pharmaceuticals have been well-documented so I wasn’t at all surprised to hear our participants describe feeling “foggy”, “unable to think”, and limited effect on their pain. This is common because neuropathic pain is such an extraordinary problem – there’s no single mechanism involved, there’s a cascade of effects, many of them in the brain and that means drugs effective on on those mechanisms are also likely ...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Coping strategies Pain Pain conditions Research cannabis medicinal cannabis qualitative Source Type: blogs