Headaches are common, about half the population routinely suffers from pain coming from within the cranium, and so is using cannabis to seek relief.<\/p>\n
But just like with other sources of chronic pain, as well as the nature of pain itself, exactly how cannabis provides relief is\u00a0poorly understood, mostly because it\u2019s understudied<\/a>.<\/p>\n Depending on the study you\u2019re citing,\u00a0between 25<\/a>\u00a0and about 33% of medical cannabis users say they self-treat migraines or less-severe headaches with weed. Exactly how cannabis works on pain relief is the subject of\u00a0upcoming research to be conducted at the Cannabis Research Initiative at UCLA<\/a>. In the meantime,\u00a0as New Atlas recently observed<\/a>,\u00a0most of the research<\/a>\u00a0on the subject is based on data from self-reported surveys, and the only clinical study on the link between headache and cannabis\u2019s ability to relieve same looked at a synthetic cannabinoid.<\/p>\n So what do we know? First, women might benefit the most from any breakthroughs regarding cannabis and headaches: Women are 2 to 3 times more likely to suffer migraines, research finds, and in what animal studies do exist, females seem most sensitive to cannabis\u2019s effects. Second, in all genders of humans who use cannabis, headaches are a common cause, and cannabis is a common solution.<\/p>\n In recent research conducted at Washington State University\u00a0and published in the Journal of Pain<\/a>, about 2,000 medical-cannabis patients tracked their cannabis use, the strains used, the purpose and the result via an app called Strainprint. The users reported about 20,000 cannabis use \u201csessions\u201d in which relief from headache or migraine was the desired result. And these were almost always successful: 90% of the time, the user reported a reduction in duration or severity of the headache and the average \u201cperceived reduction\u201d was 50%, New Atlas noted.<\/p>\n Significant success, and significant reduction. Great! But how does it work, and how might the result be reliably repeated? That\u2019s something this study can\u2019t tell you.<\/p>\n As New Atlas noted, this particular study did not ask patients to try specific strains or specific THC-CBD ratios. The fact that the patients still seemed to experience notable relief despite using vastly differing cannabis strains is both encouraging and confusion: encouraging because it seems highly likely there is something in the cannabis plant that soothes pain; confusing because it\u2019s not clear which cannabinoid, terpene<\/a>, or combination thereof is doing the work.<\/p>\n This is also a little inconsistent with earlier findings. Contrary to what the CBD industrial complex might have you believe, high THC strains high in the terpenes\u00a0myrcene<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0caryophyllene<\/a>\u00a0seemed to work best on headaches, a 2018\u00a0study published in the\u00a0<\/a>Journal of Headache and Pain<\/a><\/em>\u00a0found.<\/p>\n And the Washington State study has another flaw. As New Atlas noted, all the study participants were already medical cannabis users. Thus, they may be biased towards over-reporting the drug\u2019s effectiveness, lead author Carrie Cuttler told the website.<\/p>\n One reason why could be the nature of cannabis itself. Unless cannabis is reducing inflammation in tendons or nerves that are then not impinged during movement, cannabis doesn\u2019t \u201creduce pain\u201d in the way pain pills do. As a brain imaging study conducted at the\u00a0University of Oxford in 2012 found<\/a>, people experiencing pain after taking an oral tablet of THC affected their \u201cemotional response\u201d to pain. That is, they were still \u201cin pain\u201d but just didn\u2019t care about it as much while under the effects of cannabis. However, more frustrating for cannabis advocates, results were erratic across population groups. \u201cSome people respond really well, others not at all, or even poorly,\u201d as scientist Michael Lee, one of the 2012 researchers, said at the time.<\/p>\n This uncertain and erratic nature is the main reason why mainstream clinicians won\u2019t recommend cannabis as a pain management tool.<\/p>\n Pain management itself is a very broad rubric. Is the pain you seek to treat stemming from an actual tissue injury, \u201cnociceptive\u201d pain? Or is it the nervous system itself that is the cause, \u201cneuropathic\u201d pain? One or the other may also coexist with pain caused by inflammation.<\/p>\n That inchoate nature, plus the drug\u2019s \u201cunsettling safety profile, the lack of strong empirical support for its efficacy\u201d as well as common barriers to research and general randomness of what cannabis is available are all reasons why \u201ccannabis should not necessarily be considered an optimal choice as a drug for pain management,\u201d\u00a0as physicians Daniel Carr and Michael Schatman wrote in the American Journal of Public Health earlier this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n About the best anyone can say is that cannabis seems to work really well on some pain patients, but not on others \u2014 but for those that do find relief, that\u2019s more than enough.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, has cannabis helped with your headaches?<\/p>\n The post Cannabis Seems Good for Headaches, But Why?<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Headaches are common, about half the population routinely suffers from pain coming from within the cranium, and so is using cannabis to seek relief. But just like with other sources of chronic pain, as well as the nature of pain itself, exactly how cannabis provides relief is\u00a0poorly understood, mostly becauseContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,6928,5954,4609,53,2919,4224,187,1598,420],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39842"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39842"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39843,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39842\/revisions\/39843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: Cannabis Seems Good for Headaches, But Why?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"