Looking For Alternative Ways to Deal With Pain
Dealing with stiff, cramping muscles, and daily aching is just another way of life for 2.5 million people who live with MS. Another 15 million people who suffer from spinal chord injuries have similar pains on top of limited movement and the lack of sleep they most desperately need.
Several conventional medications are available to help mitigate some of the discomfort, yet they rarely provide the patient with total relief. These conventional drugs often times cause weakness, make the patient constantly sleepy, and has side effects that many of the patients find intolerable such as constant constipation.
With an outlook such as this, many patients with both spinal chord injuries and MS have sought out medical marijuana because of the complete decrease in pain.
Patients of spinal chord injuries and MS also said they valued the drug because it relieved nausea or helped them sleep. A’82 study of people with spinal cord injuries, found that 21 of 43 of the case studies reported that marijuana lessened muscle spasticity (a condition in which muscles tense reflexively and resist stretching), while nearly every participant in a’97 survey of 112 regular marijuana users with multiple sclerosis replied that the drug lessened both pain and spasticity.
This case study is not intended to prove that all people who suffer from MS find marijuana useful, but those that use marijuana do.
Test to prove that marijuana helps in spasticity has been done on animals. The area of the brain that controls movement is thought to create spasms-including many cannabinoid receptors.
One such experiment showed that when rodents receive small doses of cannabinoids they become more active, yet when they receive higher doses they are less active
Many marijuana users also note that the drug affects movement, making their bodies sway and their hands unsteady.
It’s still unknown how the compounds of the cannabinoids create this effect. With all of the findings that suggest the plant has anecdotal properties, clinical research remains largely untested.
Very few reports are helpful because they are limited in the amount of people and in general hard to find.
Still, the lack of good universally effective medicine for muscle spasticity is a compelling reason to continue exploring cannonaded drugs in the clinic.
For three decades, Dr. Julian Reindhurst has studies the medicinal benefits of marijuana. He currently has a blog that gives the historical perspective of how nirvana seeds benefited other ancient civilizations. He also has a website site that looks at the medicinal benefits of the nirvana seeds.