How does Cannabis Help in Treatment of Chronic Pain?

A variety of health conditions and symptoms can be treated using medical cannabis. For alleviation of chronic pain, cannabis is commonly prescribed. THC and CBC provide relief effectively from pain and is a safe choice than other conventional medications.

What is Chronic Pain?

A pain that is lasting for around 12 weeks or more is chronic pain. It means that the pain that is lasting for a long time is chronic pain. The pain can be severe, moderate and mild, and can come to one is a different form such as stinging pain, soreness, dull ache, throbbing pain, burning sensation, and many more.

A known health condition or an injury can be the reason for chronic pain, for example, cancer, past surgery, HIV or AIDS, migration, infection or arthritis. But sometimes chronic pain can develop without any discernible reasons.

Regardless of the cause of chronic pain, it is one of the phenomena that affect a large number of populations. In a journal Pain Research and Management, 18.9 percent of people over the age of 18, i.e., around 1 out of every five people in Canada suffers from chronic pain.

In some chronic cases, the pain is low and can be treated with benign medication, but severe cases of chronic pain require opiates to treat them. By taking opiate one can get relief from pain effectively, but it is very addictive and has dangerous side effects. Therefore, physicians and patients are now turning towards medical cannabis for treating chronic pain.

Pain Relief via Cannabis

The endocannabinoid system of cannabis gives it the characteristics to treat. Endocannabinoid makes cannabis effective to treat and manage pain. Though the mechanism of how cannabis work is not yet perfectly understood, extended studies are going on throughout the world with cannabis showing great results. In a research, it was seen that when using CBD oil for back pain, it relieved the patient from pain.

The job of an analgesic is to provide relief and cannabis does it the best. In a Harvard study, 28 random clinical trials were reviewed, it was found that when patients with pain are administered medical cannabis, they felt significant improvement and mainly patients who were suffering from multiple sclerosis.

Addiction Risk

The risks with traditional opioid-based pain medication are their addiction. The number of people getting hospitalized due to consumption of opioid increased 30 percent from 2007 to 2014. The Canadian Centre of Substance Use and Addiction mentioned it in their data.

Using medical cannabis would be a much safer option. It doesn’t only provide a same or better result in pain management, the potential to get addicted to cannabis is much lower, and it also helps patients to reduce their addiction to opioids.

In the Journal of Pain, it was published that around 64 percent of opioid consumption gets reduced when a patient uses cannabis for their chronic pain.

There is strong evidence that a better relief can be achieved by using medical cannabis as well as cannabis will let you live a better quality of life.