It’s a shame that potential treatments are being held back from those who need them
(Mirror Daily, United States) – While hitting record levels of controversy last year, 2015 was a good year for medical marijuana. And seems it has already started the new year successfully, winning a few important battles. But to what extent does medical marijuana actually help? A team of researchers looking into that found out that migraine headaches are reduced by medical marijuana.
Medical marijuana’s efficiency in treating various afflictions has been talked about intensely for decades. But only in recent years have various research groups managed to actually look a bit into the beneficial qualities of the green herb.
One of these studies was performed by a team at the University of Colorado’s Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Anschutz Medical Campus.
After performing an intensive, yet very shallow study, the team concluded that migraine headaches are reduced by medical marijuana from 10.4 headaches a month to a very statistically significant 4.6.
The 121 study participants were observed from the beginning of 2010 to sometime in September 2014, and they were all migraine headache sufferers.
Two thirds of the participants had already used medical cannabis before, or they were using it at time of the study.
And the results were unexpectedly positive. Of course, the researchers expected their premise to be true, but they did not expect such a drastic drop in migraine frequencies.
The study’s lead author, despite the praise offered by the patients thanks to the significant improvement their lives suffered after the new treatment, wanted to stress that medical cannabis is still a drug, and like most drugs, it still has side effects.
Pushing the boundaries of federal law as much as they could without actually breaking it, the researchers also investigated what forms of medical marijuana were preferred by the patients.
As it turns out, edible marijuana products, which take longer to affect the body, were preferred for preventing the migraine headaches, while smoking, which affects the body much faster, was preferred in stopping on-going migraine headaches.
Despite the huge success shown by the treatment, the researchers are still kind of unhappy with what they managed to find out.
Mainly, the study was observational, so no cause-effect relationship was established between the two, meaning that the team still doesn’t know how exactly marijuana affects the human body in order to get rid of headaches, although they do assume that it has something to do with the plant’s anti-inflammatory and pain relieving properties.
And more intensive, more to the point studies will most likely not be performed until the federal law limiting such trials is changed.
Image source: Wikimedia
Joe Hennessey
