Does Marijuana Kill Your Nerve Pain, Or Simply Distract You From It?

Today's short post from smithsonianmag.com (see link below) is an interesting one which poses the question as to whether marijuana actually reduces pain, or simply makes it less apparent and invasive. Does it kill the pain, or simply distract you from it? The only answer that counts of course is, 'does it matter, as long as it works?'. Nevertheless, proper large scale studies on the subject may reveal which patients will be better suited to marijuana treatment than others and that will be useful when deciding whether to start using it or not. The question for readers is thus: are you already using marijuana to help with your nerve pain symptoms and if you are, do you think there is less pain as a result, or does that pain just have less of an impact on your daily life? Remember, there are many ways to use marijuana, from smoking, vaporising and, patches, to CBD pills and the like. If you use marijuana or cannabinoid derivatives - how does that influence your experience of neuropathy? Interesting question - I think we're all curious at to what the answers may be.

Marijuana Isn’t a Pain Killer—It’s a Pain Distracter
By Joseph Stromberg smithsonian.com December 20, 2012


A new study finds that under the influence of marijuana, the same levels of pain are simply less bothersome

A new study indicates that marijuana isn’t a painkiller, but a pain distracter: Under the influence of THC, the same levels of pain are simply less bothersome. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Cannabis Training University

One of the chief arguments for the legalization of medicinal marijuana is its usefulness as a pain reliever. For many cancer and AIDS patients across the 19 states where medicinal use of the drug has been legalized, it has proven to be a valuable tool in managing chronic pain—in some cases working for patients for which conventional painkillers are ineffective.

To determine exactly how cannabis relieves pain, a group of Oxford researchers used healthy volunteers, an MRI machine and doses of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Their findings, published today in the journal Pain, suggest something counterintuitive: that the drug doesn’t so much reduce pain as make the same level of pain more bearable.

“Cannabis does not seem to act like a conventional pain medicine,” Michael Lee, an Oxford neuroscientist and lead author of the paper, said in a statement. “Brain imaging shows little reduction in the brain regions that code for the sensation of pain, which is what we tend to see with drugs like opiates. Instead, cannabis appears to mainly affect the emotional reaction to pain in a highly variable way.”

As part of the study, Lee and colleagues recruited 12 healthy volunteers who said they’d never used marijuana before and gave each one either a THC tablet or a placebo. Then, to trigger a consistent level of pain, they rubbed a cream on the volunteers’ legs that included 1% capsaicin, the compound found that makes chili peppers spicy; in this case, it caused a burning sensation on the skin.

When the researchers asked each person to report both the intensity and the unpleasantness of the pain—in other words, how much it physically burned and how much this level of burning bothered them—they came to the surprising finding. “We found that with THC, on average people didn’t report any change in the burn, but the pain bothered them less,” Lee said.

This indicates that marijuana doesn’t function as a pain killer as much as a pain distracter: Objectively, levels of pain remain the same for someone under the influence of THC, but it simply bothers the person less. It’s difficult to draw especially broad conclusions from a study with a sample size of just 12 participants, but the results were still surprising.

Each of the participants was also put in an MRI machine—so the researchers could try to pinpoint which areas of the brain seemed to be involved in THC’s pain relieving processes—and the results backed up the theory. Changes in brain activity due to THC involved areas such as the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, believed to be involved in the emotional aspects of pain, rather than other areas implicated in the direct physical perception of it.

Additionally, the researchers found that THC’s effectiveness in reducing the unpleasantness of pain varied greatly between individuals—another characteristic that sets it apart from typical painkillers. For some participants, it made the capsaicin cream much less bothersome, while for others, it had little effect.

The MRI scans supported this observation, too: Those more affected by the THC demonstrated more brain activity connecting their right amydala and a part of the cortex known as the primary sensorimotor area. The researchers say that this finding could perhaps be used as a diagnostic tool, indicating for which patients THC could be most effective as a pain treatment medicine.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/marijuana-isnt-a-pain-killerits-a-pain-distracter-169786068/#ZddTDfeLjBz9ElJ8.99
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/marijuana-isnt-a-pain-killerits-a-pain-distracter-169786068/