Medical marijuana comes from marijuana plants that are used to treat particular diseases or health conditions. Generally speaking, it is the same plant used for recreational marijuana, but it is taken with the help of health professional supervision for medical purposes.
Marijuana plants contain potent chemicals called cannabinoids. Each one of these chemicals has a different effect on a human’s body. THC or Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol and CBD or also known as Cannabidiol are the primary chemicals used to create this powerful medicine.
According to research, medical marijuana is connected to treat different illnesses, especially chronic diseases that relate with moderate to severe pain. To give you a better understanding of medical marijuana and pain management, this article will provide an in-depth explanation of these two.
Different Types of Pain That Medical Marijuana Can Treat
Cannabis is a powerful pain management treatment for a patient who suffers from chronic illnesses. Many patients have been put for medical marijuana to treat a different kind of pain. These pains are not mild pain or muscle spasm – but intense, debilitating pain. It is a kind of pain associated with failed surgeries, pain from scoliosis, herniated disk, osteoarthritis, nerve pathology, neuropathy symptoms, and suffering from sciatica.
Pain associated with neuropathy can be traumatic. Not only patients can feel excruciating pain, but this type of pain doesn’t quickly respond to pain medications. Patients get damage from a different medical treatment like chemotherapy, infections such as Lyme diseases, HIV medication, and B-vitamins deficiencies.
It is also associated to treat diabetic neuropathy from Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. When prolonged high blood sugar level causes intense, permanent damage to any diabetic’s nerves, such as in the legs and feet is an extremely painful condition. And according to the recent study, experts are finding a piece of substantial evidence that cannabis can treat this kind of pain.
How Does Medical Marijuana Treat Chronic Pain?
In the human nervous system, the brain sends and receives signals of information that need to pass through via receptors that travel from different parts of the body that runs through the spinal cord to the brain and travel back again. Chronic pain is when the signals get inflamed and overworked.
With hundreds of phytocannabinoids that can be found in cannabis, especially the CBD – it helps to calm these pain signals in the human body via receptors CB1 and CB2. One more thing, CBG is a power anti-inflammatory substance having twice the power of hydrocortisone, and 20 times stronger than the effect of aspirin.
Why Medical Marijuana is Better Compared to Other Medication?
Depending on how the cannabis ingested, the effect of the medication can be fast or slow-acting. This plays an essential role in treating pain because more often, a patient needs both of these.
Here’s the level of pain:
- Baseline pain
- dull ache
- After that, the pain will be constant
- The “breakthrough” or acute pain
- Lastly, severe and intense pain
Severe pain is treated with the use of fast-acting form or medical marijuana like a tincture, vaporized oil, or a smokeable flower. For the baseline pain, it is treated with a longer-acting medication in the form of pills. But for a patient to purchase medical marijuana pills medication, he or she should have a Medical Marijuana Card. This card enables the patient to buy the said medication legally.
