Medicinal marijuana has been gaining wider acceptance throughout the
United States, but there are still plenty of things we don’t understand
about the effects of the drug.
We may be a step closer on at least one
angle, though — the ability of cannabis to dull pain. Using brain
imaging technology, researchers at Oxford University suggest that the
drug doesn’t actually lessen the intensity of pain that patients are
feeling. Instead, it seems to change the perception of the sensation,
helping patients find the same amount of pain more tolerable.
The results of the small MRI study were published this week in the
journal Pain, and show that the active compounds in marijuana —
cannabinoids — seemed to reduce activity in the parts of the brain that
registered pain, suggesting that while test subjects could likely still
experience pain, they didn’t seem to mind it as much. In other words,
it’s not working to change what nerves are feeling, but to change
patient’s perception of what their nerves are feeling.
That insight could have major potential for understanding how marijuana
and cannabis compounds help to relieve pain for some patients, a
mechanism that is still woefully misunderstood. While some patients get
no pain relief benefit from cannabis, others find it works where no
other drug has. So while it’s clear that cannabis can help patients
suffering from pain, understanding the mechanism of how it does so is
key to bringing that relief to more patients, and applying it more
effectively.
There’s a lot of work yet to do before these clues offer real world help
for people suffering from long term pain as this latest study was
carried out on healthy volunteers exposed to a pain causing
chili-cream.The next step is to start working on imaging studies that
can show whether the drug has the same effect on patients actually
suffering from long-term, chronic pain.
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