Can Medical Marijuana Help With Degenerative Disc Disease? Chronic pain is the most reported qualifying condition for medical marijuana programs across the country (an estimated 64.2% amongst states who release data). Not only are a large portion of medical marijuana patients medicating for chronic pain, they are also lowering prescription pain medication use, and in some cases dropping prescription pain medication altogether.Degenerative disc disease is one of the most common causes of low back and neck pain, and also one of the most misunderstood. More than 14,000 Americans died in 2014 from unintentional overdose of prescription opioids, making this the leading cause of death among younger individuals in many states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” “The Institute of Medicine estimates chronic pain affects 100 million Americans at an annual cost of $600 billion.”   There is surmounting evidence that medical marijuana is a safe, and efficient alternative for relieving back pain/spinal injury related pain. “A recent research project at the University of Colorado’s Spine Center looked at 200 patients suffering from degenerative disc problems and other back pains. Of the participants that consumed marijuana, 89% said “it greatly or moderately relieved their pain, and 81% said it worked as well as or better than narcotic painkillers.” Participants in the study that consumed marijuana used it “no more than one or two times a day.” “The United States constitutes less than 5 percent of the world’s population, and we consume 80 percent of the world’s opioid supply.  Simply put, degenerative disc disease refers to symptoms of back or neck pain caused by wear-and-tear on a spinal disc. In some cases, degenerative disc disease also causes weakness, numbness, and hot, shooting pains in the arms or legs (radicular pain) say Marijuana Doctors in Florida. Degenerative disc disease typically consists of a low-level chronic pain with intermittent episodes of more severe pain. Painful disc degeneration is common in the neck (cervical spine) and lower back (lumbar spine). These areas of the spine undergo the most motion and stress, and are most susceptible to disc degeneration. The term degenerative understandably implies that symptoms will get worse with age. However, the term does not refer to the symptoms, but rather describes the process of the disc degenerating over time. Despite what the name suggests, degenerative disc disease is not a disease, but a condition in which natural, age-related wear-and-tear on a disc causes pain, instability, and other symptoms. This condition usually does not result in long-term disability, and most cases can be managed using non-surgical treatment methods. While it is true that disc degeneration is likely to progress over time, the pain from degenerative disc disease usually does not get worse and in fact usually feels better given enough time. Disc degeneration is a natural part of aging, and over time everybody will exhibit some changes in their discs. However, a degenerating disc does not always cause symptoms to develop. In fact, degenerative disc disease is quite variable in its nature and severity. This article provides in-depth information about aspects of degenerative disc disease based on commonly accepted principles, such as how a degenerated disc causes pain and common symptoms and treatments. There is little consensus in the medical literature regarding what does and does not constitute a diagnosis of degenerative disc disease. This lack of agreement may be attributable to the condition’s nature of causing symptoms off and on over the span of many years, making symptoms difficult to track. It is important to note that disc degeneration can lead to or hasten the onset of additional spinal conditions, such as: Spinal Stenosis: Spinal stenosis, a form of spinal degeneration that leads to nerve root or spinal cord pinching. If you or someone you know has back pain, please contact our office today to get qualified and get started on medical marijuana in Florida.

How Many Patients Have Signed Up for Medical Marijuana Doctor Certifications and ID Cards in Florida you ask?

There are now over 150,000 patients in the Florida medical marijuana registry with many many more coming.

Yet marijuana’s official designation in the US as a Schedule 1 drug— something with “no currently accepted medical use” — means it has been pretty tough to study.

Despite that, a growing body of research and numerous anecdotal reports link cannabis with several health benefits, including pain relief and the potential to help with certain forms of epilepsy. In addition, researchers say there are many other ways marijuana might affect health that they want to better understand.

Along with several other recent studies, a massive report released last year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine helps sum up exactly what we know— and what we don’t — about the science of weed.

One of weed’s active ingredients, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, interacts with the brain’s reward system, the part primed to respond to things that make us feel good, like eating and sex. 

When overexcited by drugs, the reward system creates feelings of euphoria. This is also why some studies have suggested that excessive marijuana use can be a problem for some people — the more often you trigger that euphoria, the less you may feel during other rewarding experiences.

Within a few minutes of inhaling marijuana, your heart rate can increase by between 20 and 50 beats a minute. This can last anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The NASEM report found insufficient evidence to support or refute the idea that cannabis might increase the overall risk of a heart attack. The same report, however, also found some limited evidence that smoking could be a trigger for a heart attack.

In August, a study published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology appeared to suggest that marijuana smokers face a threefold higher risk of dying from high blood pressure than people who have never smoked — but the study came with an important caveat: it defined a “marijuana user” as anyone who’d ever tried the drug.

Research suggests this is a poor assumption — and one that could have interfered with the study’s results. According to a recent survey, about 52% of Americans have tried cannabis at some point, yet only 14% used the drug at least once a month.

Other studies have also come to the opposite conclusion of the present study. According to the Mayo Clinic, using cannabis could result in decreased— not increased — blood pressure.

So while there’s probably a link between smoking marijuana and high blood pressure, there’s not enough research yet to say that one leads to the other.

Pot contains cannabidiol, or CBD, a chemical that is not responsible for getting you high but is thought to be responsible for many of marijuana’s therapeutic effects. Those benefits can include pain relief or potential treatment for certain kinds of childhood epilepsy.

The new report also found conclusive or substantial evidence — the most definitive levels — that cannabis can be an effective treatment for chronic pain, which could have to do with both CBD and THC. Pain is also “by far the most common” reason people request medical marijuana, according to the report.

One of the ways scientists think marijuana may help with pain is by reducing inflammation, a component of illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis.

A preliminary 2005 study of 58 patients with RA, roughly half of whom were given a placebo and roughly half of whom were given a cannabis-based medicine called Sativex, found “statistically significant improvements in pain on movement, pain at rest, quality of sleep” for patients on Sativex.

Other studies testing other cannabinoid products and inhaled marijuana have shown similar pain-relieving effects, according to the report.

Some people with inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis could also benefit from marijuana use, studies suggest.

A 2014 paper, for example, describes two studies of people with chronic Crohn’s. Half were given the drug and half got a placebo. That study showed a decrease in symptoms in 10 of 11 subjects using cannabis, compared with just four of 10 on the placebo. But when the researchers did a follow-up study using low-dose CBD, they saw no effect in the patients says one Bradenton Florida marijuana doctor.

Researchers say that, for now, we need more research before we’ll know whether cannabis can help with these diseases.

Marijuana may throw off your balance, as it influences activity in the cerebellum and basal ganglia, two brain areas that help regulate balance, coordination, reaction time, and posture.

Feeling as if time is sped up or slowed down is one of the most commonly reported effects of using marijuana. A 2012 paper sought to draw some solid conclusions from studies on those anecdotal reports, but it was unable to do so.

“Even though 70% of time estimation studies report overestimation, the findings of time production and time reproduction studies remain inconclusive,” the paper said.

In a 1998 study that used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to focus on the brains of volunteers on THC, the authors noted that many had altered blood flow to the cerebellum, which most likely plays a role in our sense of time.

Limitations on what sort of marijuana research is allowed make it particularly difficult to study this sort of effect.

Since weed makes blood vessels expand, it can give you red eyes.

A case of the munchies is no figment of the imagination — both casual and heavy marijuana users tend to overeat when they smoke.

Marijuana may effectively flip a circuit in the brain that is normally responsible for quelling the appetite, triggering us to eat instead, according to a recent study of mice.

It all comes down to a special group of cells in the brain that are normally activated after we have eaten a big meal to tell us we’ve had enough. The psychoactive ingredient in weed appears to activate just one component of those appetite-suppressing cells, making us feel hungry rather than satisfied.

Marijuana can mess with your memory by changing the way your brain processes information, but scientists still aren’t sure exactly how this happens. Still, several studies suggest that weed interferes with short-term memory, and researchers tend to see more of these effects in inexperienced or infrequent users than in heavy, frequent users says a Florida marijuana doctor near me.

Unsurprisingly, these effects are most evident in the acute sense — immediately after use, when people are high.

Scientists can’t say for sure whether marijuana causes depression or depressed people are simply more likely to smoke. But one study from the Netherlands suggests that smoking weed could raise the risk of depression for young people who already have a special serotonin gene that could make them more vulnerable to depression.

Those findings are bolstered by the NASEM report, which found moderate evidence that cannabis use was linked to a small increased risk of depression.

The NASEM report also found substantial evidence of an increased risk among frequent marijuana users of developing schizophrenia — something that studies have shown is a particular concern for people at risk for schizophrenia in the first place.

Researchers think it’s possible that CBD might be a useful treatment for anxiety disorders, and that’s something that several institutions are currently trying to study says on Tampa Florida Medical Marijuana Doctor.

The recent report suggested that evidence of a link between marijuana and an increased risk of most anxiety disorders was limited.

However, the authors wrote that there is moderate evidence that regular marijuana use is connected to an increased risk of social anxiety. As in other cases, it’s hard to know whether marijuana use causes that increase or people use marijuana because of an increased risk of social anxiety.

The THC content of marijuana across the US has tripled since 1995, according to a large recent study in which researchers reviewed close to 39,000 samples of cannabis. While THC levels hovered around 4%, on average, in 1995, they skyrocketed to roughly 12% in 2014.

Meanwhile, the CBD content in marijuana — the part that’s responsible for many of the drug’s therapeutic effects— has dropped, the researchers found, shifting the ratio of THC to CBD from 14:1 in 1995 to about 80:1 in 2014.

Still, tracking THC potency over time can be tricky. The older a weed sample gets, the more its THC appears to degrade. How it is stored matters too. These two barriers could be interfering somewhat with the metrics on pot’s potency.

In a recent study, scientists used MRI brain scans to get a better picture of the brains of adults who have smoked weed at least four times a week for years.

Compared to people who rarely or never used the drug, the long-term users tended to have a smaller orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region critical for processing emotions and making decisions. But they also had stronger cross-brain connections, which scientists think smokers may develop to compensate says a medical marijuana doctor in Miami Florida.

Still, the study doesn’t show that smoking pot caused certain regions of the brain to shrink; other studies suggest that having a smaller orbitofrontal cortex in the first place could make someone more likely to start smoking.

Most researchers agree that the people most susceptible to brain changes are those who begin using marijuana regularly during adolescence.

Some athletes, especially in certain endurance and adventure sports, say marijuana use can boost their athletic performance. This may be because of anti-inflammatory or pain-relieving effects that make it easier to push through a long workout or recover from one.

At the same time, there are ways that marijuana could impair athletic performance, since it affects coordination and motivation, and dulls the body’s natural recovery process.

Without more research, it’s hard to know how marijuana affects athletic performance.

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If you or a loved one you know is suffering and could use the medical benefits of marijuana, please contact us or book your appointment online in Florida today.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA): An autoimmune disease in which a person’s immune system attacks their joints, causing inflammation. RA commonly affects the hands and feet and leads to painful, swollen, and stiff joints.

Osteoarthritis (OA): A degenerative disease that affects joint cartilage and bones, causing pain and stiffness. It often affects the hip, knee, and thumb joints.

Some studies on animals suggest that Medical Marijuana could help to treat arthritis and relieve the associated inflammatory pain:

• A 2011 study found that Medical Marijuana/CBD helped to reduce inflammatory pain in rats by affecting the way that pain receptors respond to stimuli.
• A 2014 review of the existing body of research on animals concluded that Medical Marijuana/CBD may be an effective treatment for OA.
• A 2016 study found that the topical application of Medical Marijuana/CBD had the potential to relieve pain and inflammation associated with arthritis.
• A 2017 study found that Medical Marijuana/CBD might be a safe and useful treatment for OA joint pain. 

However, to date, there a lack of scientific evidence to prove conclusively that Medical Marijuana/CBD is an effective arthritis treatment for humans says marijuana doctors. A 2006 study found that a cannabis-based mouth spray called Sativex helped to relieve arthritis pain. However, the cannabis plant extracts that the company use to make the spray contain both Medical Marijuana/CBD and THC. While findings so far have been encouraging, more research is necessary to confirm that Medical Marijuana/CBD oil is an effective treatment for arthritis pain. Cannabinoids, such as CBD, attach themselves to specialized receptors in a person’s brain and immune system. One of these receptors, called a CB2 receptor, plays a role in the immune system by managing pain and inflammation. Researchers believe that when CBD enters a person’s body, it may attach to CB2 receptors. Alternatively, it may cause the body to produce natural cannabinoids that attach to the CB2 receptors. Either way, scientists think CBD affects the way that these receptors respond to the signals that they receive, possibly helping reduce inflammation and pain says a few miami marijuana doctors. A 2008 review of research into CBD and its possible mechanism of action suggested that CBD could play a role in chronic pain management. The FDA do not currently approve CBD oil as a medical treatment for arthritis. The only use that CBD has FDA approval for is to treat two rare and severe types of epilepsy. It received approval for this use in June 2018. CBD is legal in some states in the U.S., but not all of them. Therefore, people should check the laws in their area before purchasing or taking CBD oil. Some people may have an allergic reaction to CBD oil, so it is best to try applying the oil to a small area of skin first.

Please contact our offices or visit our website to get started on your medical marijuana card in Miami today.