When talking about chronic pain management using medical marijuana and with many states in the USA agreeing on medical marijuana legalization it makes more sense to know with what sorts of medical disorders that medical marijuana will help. While there is a wide range of conditions to talk about, we will mostly discuss about the way this plant can help with chronic pain management. It has been found that medical marijuana can be at some point better in its effects over controlling pain than prescribed analgesics are for the patients.
If you take a look at the most common use of this drug you will find it administered mostly in cases of chronic pains. There are indeed those meds operating as opioid narcotics such as morphine, codeine, methadone and oxycodone, but they become highly addictive, not to mention that they can become more tolerated by the body which in this case their dosage needs to be increased to become effective again.
On the other hand, replacing these opioid with medical marijuana, patients can get rid of the addiction partly because marijuana doesn’t become addictive. Only in a psychological sense due to its benefits that are instilled in one’s mind and psyche. The main components responsible with these benefits are cannabinoids and THC that block the pain at the level where produced.
More than this, these components will bring relief with chronic pain management associated with inflammation and nerve damages. While it is true that not many medical studies have been conducted on this plant, many medical marijuana patients stand as testimony for the beneficial effects that medical marijuana brings them. For instance, cases of people who have suffered from limb amputation have claimed to feel relief from the pain that usually occurs after the amputation. Cancer patients who use medical marijuana have claimed that the nausea caused by chemotherapy dissipates when using marijuana.
Chronic Pain Management Through use of Cannabinoids
Both opiates and marijuana work in the same way: they block the pain pathways located in the central nervous system, but each of them does this through different neuro-chemical signaling systems. For instance, cannabinoids presented in marijuana will act directly on the injured tissue resulting as such in reduced inflammation around the damaged nerves.
There are cases when a nerve is surgically freed up and over the time when scar tissue develops around it, the nerve can be felt with the patient experiencing a lot of pain. At this stage no surgery is possible to change the situation and this is where medical marijuana can be used to relieve the person from that pain.
Another pain that can be effectively relieved through marijuana use appears in the form of peripheral neurology brought in by various conditions among which: HIV, diabetes, post-surgical scarring, and multiple sclerosis. With the later one, some sort of pain can develop known as allodynia which is a pain occurring because of a stimulus which in other situations wouldn’t normally provoke pain.
THC use for Chronic Pain Management
When it comes to opiates, no such effects have been found with these ones while THC has proved effective to treat pain occurring with amputations, neuralgia and causalgia. If we look at things a little bit further, you will find medical marijuana helpful in cases of pain with patients suffering from cancer. An oral administration of 5 to 10 mg THC was found as effective as 60mg of Codeine for those patients suffering from the terminal cancer pains. Opiates that have been tested with many patients, have been found to lead to constipation and worse, depression.
Many people still wonder whether or not the effects that have been shown above are mostly as a result of the fact that patients simply do not care anymore about it and are as such tempted to shift from one state to another through the help of medical marijuana. But even if things were so, wouldn’t it be better to have these patients focusing on other things than focusing on the pain they feel with their disease?
Only a person who has never met with pain before has no idea how debilitating and mind wrecking chronic pain can be when not managed or is not taken care of. Did you know that back in the 1800s people suffering from migraines used cannabis as a way to treat the excruciating pain that this condition comes with?
So, all those states in the U.S. that have voted favorably for medical marijuana legalization have definitely done a good thing for their citizens who happen to go through the misfortune of suffering. Chronic pain management using medical marijuana simply makes sense.