Patients with chronic pain are increasingly using medical cannabis. A welcome result: they take less pain medication, including opioids. But there is a downside.
As more states in the US legalize cannabis for medical and recreational use, more people try to relieve their pain by experimenting with the substance. According to a cross-sectional study published in JAMA Network Open, nearly one third of patients with chronic pain reported using cannabis as a pain killer.
The authors included adult patients with noncancerous chronic pain who lived in the 36 U.S. states with active medical cannabis programs. More than half of the 1,724 adults surveyed reported that using cannabis made them reduce their use of pain medications, including prescription opioids and over-the-counter analgesics. Less than 1 % reported that consuming cannabis increased their use of these medications.
On the flip side, cannabis had varying effects on the use of other non-drug pain relief methods. Some individuals indicated that cannabis caused them to turn to techniques that many clinical guidelines recommend as first-line therapies, such as physical therapy (38.7 %) and cognitive behavioral therapy (26.0 %), less frequently. Fewer patients with chronic pain increased their use of physical therapy (5.9 %) or cognitive behavioral therapy (17.1 %) while using medical cannabis.
“The high degree of substitution of cannabis with both opioid and nonopioid treatment emphasizes the importance of research to clarify the effectiveness and potential adverse consequences of cannabis for chronic pain,” the authors state. “Our results suggest that state cannabis laws have enabled access to cannabis as an analgesic treatment despite knowledge gaps in use as a medical treatment for pain.”
Image source: GRAS GRÜN, Unsplash
