How Medical Marijuana Manages Chronic Pain

Doctors are fearful of creating dependency since many pain management medications are highly addictive. This fear often makes patients who have legitimate pain feel that they are perceived as drug seekers and junkies. Medical marijuana, a non-addictive but effective alternative, could be the solution that both patients and doctors are seeking.

What is Chronic Pain?

Chronic pain is not like acute pain. Acute pain is the body’s way of telling someone to seek immediate treatment for an injury. Instead, chronic pain is a nagging — sometimes excruciatingly nagging — pain that lasts for months and even years with varying degrees of severity. Often, chronic pain is associated with a previous injury, but it can also be headache pain, arthritis, cancer, and even pain without a readily identifiable source.

Chronic pain frequently causes psychological pain, exacerbating the problem. The anxiety and depression associated with chronic pain reduces the body’s innate production of painkillers. At the same time, the psychological fallout from chronic pain causes the body to produce substances that increase its ability to feel pain. Fortunately, according to the Montreal Gazette, cannabis has been used to treat both pain and its accompanying psychological baggage of anxiety and depression since about 3,000 BC.

What is Medical Marijuana?

Medical marijuana refers to the medical use of the cannabinoid tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), found in Cannabis sativa, to address medical issues. For example, glaucoma patients use medical marijuana to reduce the pressure in their eyes.

Medical marijuana can be smoked, cooked into recipes, vaporized or applied to the skin. However, only 18 states and the District of Columbia have legalized the use of medical marijuana. Furthermore, even in places where local laws allow the use of the drug, federal law prohibits it. While the current federal policy is not to prosecute medical marijuana users, a policy is not a law. This policy could change with the climate of public opinion.

How Does Medical Marijuana Alleviate Chronic Pain?

THC has long been considered an analgesic, and a recent clinical trial published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal confirms this designation. Even in the United States, the American Medical Association (AMA) initially objected to the 1937 legislation that made cannabis illegal.

Several studies confirm that THC relieves pain. However, exactly how this is accomplished is still being researched. A recent Oxford University study observed participants by using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an acute pain inducer, and THC tablets. The resultant MRI scans indicated that THC alleviates pain by impacting the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, a part of the brain that governs the emotions associated with pain.

Other studies have concluded that medical marijuana is particularly effective on chronic neuropathic pain. Effectiveness on this type of pain is particularly important because neuropathic pain often does not respond well to opioids. In addition, continued use of opioids to control pain is obviously less than ideal. Most illuminating for chronic pain patients, a University of California San Francisco (UCSF) study concluded that using medical marijuana in combination with the typical opioid treatment reduced the amount of opioids necessary to control pain.

Medical marijuana appears to address pain because peripheral nerves are particularly sensitive to the cannabinoid THC. In fact, medical marijuana’s pain relieving properties are on par with codeine’s. This may be because the body’s own cannabinoid system complements the pain relief brought by THC.

Although large-scale studies have not been conducted due to marijuana’s legal standing, preliminary small-scale studies and studies on laboratory animals seem to confirm the accepted medical uses of Cannabis sativa from 3,000 BC until 1937. Marijuana may, in fact, be the natural solution to chronic pain treatment.

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