Eight people with asthma were induced with bronchial spasms through chemical inhalation in some sessions and bicycle exercise on other sessions, according to a study published in the American Review of Respiratory Disease. The subjects receiving placebo marijuana had a gradual recovery during 30 to 60 minutes. The people who received actual marijuana recovered immediately, reported the researchers.
The primary active ingredient in marijuana, may cause modest short-term expansion of the air passages. But regular use of marijuana may lead to long-term consequences such as chronic cough and possible airway inflammation.
Medical Marijuana Doctors in Florida and Medicine: Many stated that marijuana damage has been seen in some animal studies but not in others. Various species showed signs of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) when given doses of marijuana. But rats exposed to increasing doses of marijuana smoke for one year showed no signs of COPD. Rats exposed to tobacco smoke did. The Institute did not reach any final conclusions.
People smoke Florida Medical marijuana in hand-rolled cigarettes (joints) or in pipes or water pipes (bongs). They also smoke it in blunts—emptied cigars that have been partly or completely refilled with marijuana. To avoid inhaling smoke, some people are using vaporizers. These devices pull the active ingredients (including THC) from the marijuana and collect their vapor in a storage unit. A person then inhales the vapor, not the smoke. Some vaporizers use a liquid marijuana extract
Evidence shows that marijuana works for pain, the medical reason most people want it — but doctors still have questions
The most common reason that people seek out medical marijuana is for chronic pain.
According to a report released earlier in January by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, that makes a lot of sense.
One of the strongest conclusions of the report, which provides basically the most comprehensive, up-to-date look at what all available research on medical marijuana doctors in Florida and cannabis tell us, is that there is conclusive or substantial evidence (in general, enough to make a firm conclusion) that cannabis or cannabinoids, found in the marijuana plant, can be an effective treatment for chronic pain.
This matters because it has implications for how we treat pain and how we assess the value of medical marijuana. It also helps illustrate how — despite its DEA Schedule I status that declares it has “no currently accepted medical use” — most research indicates there are indeed potentially important medical uses for cannabis.
But at the same time, doctors still want more research to help them decide when marijuana might help a patient and when something else is a better idea.
How marijuana can treat pain
Pain itself is a weird and complex thing. It’s subjective and personal and can’t be precisely measured with a test. That’s because even when it’s pain associated with a part of your body, it’s really your brain that’s telling you to hurt. If a pinched nerve in your spine is causing your back to spasm, your brain’s way of telling you that something is wrong is to make you feel an ache that might throb constantly or make you feel an explosive jolt if you worsen the pinch with certain movements.
But all those sensations are coming from your brain, telling you to take action to deal with some part of your body. And everyone reacts to these stimuli in different ways.
That’s why there are so many different ways to treat pain. Anti-inflammatory drugs reduce inflammation by blocking the chemicals your body creates in response to an injury that cause that inflammation. Opioids bond to opioid receptors you already have in your body, which can cause feelings of euphoria and block sensations of pain. Florida Medical Marijuana Doctors and others know that acetaminophen (Tylenol) can treat some forms of pain, but we don’t know how it works or why. Even non-pharmacological treatments can stop your brain from telling you to feel hurt, with interesting research showing that meditation and virtual reality can both effectively treat pain.
According to the report, studies show that both inhaled marijuana (vaporized or smoked) and cannabinoid compounds that come from the cannabis plant (like THC, mostly responsible for the high, or cannabidiol, CBD, one of the most medically promising of the hundreds of chemical compounds found in marijuana) work for pain. This is likely largely related to natural cannabinoid receptors that we already have in our body and that doctors think play a role in pain control. But the exact mechanisms showing how marijuana relieves pain are not fully understood yet.
It’s no surprise that people seek out cannabis for chronic pain, as it’s incredibly — in some ways disturbingly — common. About 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain, about one-third of the population, and it’s difficult to treat, especially in cases where the cause is unclear. Such pain is the leading cause of long-term disability. In some cases, opioids may be the best treatment for this pain, but the rapid rise in opioid addiction over the years makes many people want to find safer solutions.
With that in mind, cannabis seems like a good option. In states that have legalized medical marijuana for pain, addiction and opioid overdose rates have dropped.
But Florida Medical Marijuana doctors still have questions.
Why some doctors are still hesitant to suggest marijuana
“Usually when you make decisions about which drug you are going to take for pain, you make that decision based on the type of pain you have and the relative risks for side effects, an associate professor of psychiatry who researches marijuana.
When it comes to marijuana, “millions of people are using different types of cannabis products for supposedly therapeutic purposes. That introduces a lot of uncertainty to the equation. The marijuana bought at one dispensary is going to be very different from an oil bought at another medical marijuana shop; both will be different from a cannabinoid drug designed to help with pain. All of these substances fall under the cannabis umbrella, but depending on their specific cannabinoid content and the means through which they are ingested, they’re going to have different effects. All those people using those products for therapeutic purposes are “lacking information about which types of products to choose, what doses to use, and how cannabis compares to other medications.
Report of a chemical called cannabidiol (CBD) had reduced the seizures of a 6-year-old girl from near-death levels to almost zero sent desperate patients everywhere on a frenzied quest for treatment.
According to several media outlets, a patient was suffering 300 grand mal seizures per week and had lost the ability to walk, talk, and eat. Existing epilepsy medication had failed her. But CBD—a component of cannabis that does not trigger the plant’s characteristic high—reduced her episodes to a few per month, and, as her parents told reporters, ushered in a full cognitive recovery.
By most estimates, existing seizure medications fail about one-third of all sufferers, either because the drugs don’t stop the seizures or because the side effects are too severe. As story spread, families with loved ones suffering from this type of epilepsy (which can range from seriously debilitating to life-threatening) began relocating from states where CBD could not be legally obtained to states where it could. At least some of them reported similarly miraculous responses to it. Many Marijuana Doctors in Florida and Other states are prescribing this medicine in full speed. So when we reported earlier this month that a new National Academy of Sciences report—the most in-depth analysis of marijuana research to date—concluded that there was not enough evidence to say that cannabis oil could actually treat epilepsy, some people were surprised:
How could the panel draw such a conclusion? Isn’t the patients case, and others like it, proof enough that cannabis oil can succeed for epilepsy patients where so many other treatments have failed?
Because readers asked, and because this particular conclusion (one of almost 100 that the academy drew from their scientific review) is a good window into the whole report and the larger debate surrounding Florida Medical Marijuana Doctors, we decided to take a closer look.
Evidence Considered By The Panel
The reviewers restricted their evaluation to studies that involved humans, excluding any evidence from studies done on animals. That decision was based on sound scientific rationale (animal, or “pre-clinical,” studies can give us important clues about how a chemical might behave, not whether it will be safe or effective for humans). But limiting the studies in this way left the reviewers with some pretty slim pickings.
There were just three clinical studies where doctors treated patients with CBD and measured whether and by how much those patients’ seizures were reduced. The largest of those studies included a total of 162 patients, treated with 99 percent CBD oil extract for 12 weeks; it found that CBD worked about as well as existing anti-epilepsy medications do in treatment-resistant sufferers.
CBD reduced seizures by a monthly average of 36.5 percent; only five patients saw their motor seizures completely disappear during the study period, and only two patients became completely seizure-free.
Why That Evidence Was Deemed Insufficient
For three reasons, mainly.
First, there was simply not enough of that kind of evidence. FDA-approved drugs are usually deemed effective or ineffective based on large-scale clinical trials that study hundreds to thousands of patients over several years. These studies followed only a few hundred patients in all, and for only a few months.
Second, the studies in question did not include placebo controls. That is, all of the study participants were given actual CBD, and they knew they were getting it. Other research has found that the placebo effect can be especially strong when it comes to Florida Medical marijuana. In one study, patients of families who moved to Colorado for cannabis oil treatment were twice as likely to report a substantial reduction in seizures as those patients who already lived in the state.
The third major reason the studies were deemed insufficient involves drug interactions. Most of the patients in the studies we’re talking about were taking other anti-epilepsy drugs, such as clobazam and valproate, and it turns out that CBD is very good at blocking the liver enzymes that normally break down those other drugs. This drug interaction makes it impossible to say whether reduced seizure incidence seen in study participants was due to CBD by itself or whether it was simply the result of those other medications staying in the system for longer stretches.