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Patients use medical cannabis to treat the symptoms of a wide variety of diseases, but only some of these uses are actually supported by scientific data. A new study released on Monday, however, suggests that the vast majority of patients are prescribed medical treatment for conditions such as chronic pain and multiple sclerosis, for which good research supports cannabis use.
In light of their findings, the authors say that it is high time for cannabis to be downgraded by the federal government as a Schedule I drug and that it should be better monitored and regulated as a medical treatment.
In the United States, 33 states and the District of Columbia currently allow people to use cannabis for medical purposes. These users need a special license, which can only be obtained if a physician recognizes that they have a qualifying condition. But so far, according to the authors, no attempt has been made to quantify, at the national level, why people obtain cannabis for medical purposes.
In the new study published in Health Affairs, the authors examined data from patient registries in California and 20 states, including Alaska, Illinois and New York. They also reviewed a report published in 2017 by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, which examined available evidence regarding the health benefits of weeds. The report was used as a baseline to determine which qualification conditions were well supported by science.
In total, 85.5% of patients reported conditions that successfully pbaded with "substantial or conclusive evidence" of a therapeutic effect of medical cannabis. The most common pain was by far the chronic pain: almost 65% of the patients had qualified as a qualifying illness in 2016. The other two well-supported diseases were nausea and vomiting caused by chemotherapy, as well as spasm caused by multiple sclerosis.
Cancer, epilepsy, arthritis, Parkinson's disease, post-traumatic stress disorder and irritable bowel syndrome were other eligible conditions reported in 2016.
According to the authors, despite overall positive results, the study has fewer positive impacts.
On the one hand, there was no data available concerning many states, including California, the state where medical treatment has been legal for the longest time (since 1996). Some States, even though they had a patient registry, did not include data on qualification requirements, while others had years when no data was published. And of course, 15% of patients have been able to obtain medical cannabis for health problems for which it may not be effective.
There is at least limited, but decent, evidence that cannabis may help alleviate the symptoms of some of these conditions, such as anxiety or Tourette's syndrome. For some conditions, such as epilepsy, there was inconsistent evidence of its effectiveness (however, a cannabis drug has recently been approved to treat some forms of seizure disorder). But there were also conditions on the list, such as glaucoma and dementia, where evidence showed that cannabis was worthless.
One of the main reasons for these inconsistencies is the botched nature of the legalization of weeds. The US government has long clbadified cannabis in Schedule I drugs, which means it is not considered a relevant medical use at the federal level. Lawyers have been able to circumvent this restriction by slowly persuading states to enact individual laws, but this has left us in a confused system where different states apply different standards of legalization and regulation (for example, some states). require that doctors be specially trained before – they can prescribe cannabis). The clbadification of Appendix I also slowed researchers' efforts to better study the alleged benefits of the pot.
In New York, for example, it is now legal to use cannabis as a treatment for people with opioid addiction or as an alternative therapy for people using opioids to relieve their chronic pain. . However, although some indirect research has shown that deaths from opioid overdose are decreasing in states after the legalization of medical cannabis, there is no concrete evidence, such as randomized clinical trials, to which cannabis should be widely recommended as an addiction treatment or to replace patients with pain. already stable under opioid treatment. This does not mean that it can not work in these situations, it just means we do not know it yet.
The authors indicated that one solution to these problems is the creation of a "national database of cannabis users for medical purposes in order to badess the risks and benefits of the drug." Use of cannabis for medical purposes for different disease states and symptoms ". But many states are likely to legalize cannabis for recreational purposes, it is also possible that more people decide to seek treatment without going through the hbadle of obtaining a permit. And that will add some more keys.
"If legal cannabis use is increasingly disbadociated from medical needs or state-level surveillance, a greater role for federal government surveillance – for example, by the Food and Drug Administration – is product and information security could be justified, "said the authors. .
All of these complications, they conclude, clearly show that not only must cannabis lose its Schedule I drug status, "but also that state and federal decision-makers must begin to evaluate evidence-based means of health. 39 to safely integrate research and cannabis products into the health system. "
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