Medical cannabis: research and patient questions

Researchers investigated what cancer survivors think about using cannabis and whether they worry about being judged for it. They interviewed and surveyed adults who had finished cancer treatments, comparing those who used cannabis to manage symptoms with those who did not.

Researchers studied whether patients with digestive system cancers who received prescriptions for Food and Drug Administration-approved cannabis medications during early chemotherapy reduced their reliance on opioid pain medications. They analyzed electronic health records from a large national network of health systems covering more than one hundred forty thousand patients over a multi-year period.

This study followed 52 people with long-lasting nerve pain caused by diabetes who had not improved with standard medicines. Each person was given medical cannabis breathed in through a vaporizer or smoked, with the amount adjusted to their pain, and they were checked once a year for five years.

The Blowing Minds protocol establishes a robust framework to evaluate the complex, real-world interactions between cannabis use (medicinal vs. recreational), affect, cognition, and legal context using ecological momentary assessment. By capturing unsupervised medicinal use and granular daily variables, this study will help clinicians better understand the dual mental health outcomes associated with regular cannabis exposure.

This study followed 241 adults with long-standing lower back pain that had not improved with usual treatments such as prescription painkillers, nerve medicines, antidepressants, anti-inflammatory tablets and physiotherapy. Each person started a medical cannabis treatment that was mostly smoked, and their progress was tracked once a year for five years.

This study followed 192 adults in the United Kingdom who had long-lasting pain from arthritis and were given medicinal cannabis by a private clinic. Each person filled in questionnaires about pain, mood, sleep and daily life over two years. The researchers looked at how these answers changed over time.

This review looked at how medical treatments that were recently made legal get put into real healthcare settings, such as assisted dying, medication abortion and medical cannabis. The researchers gathered and sorted a large number of published studies to find what helped and what got in the way.

Researchers reviewed the best available medical studies that tested cannabis-based medicines in people with a long-lasting condition that causes widespread body pain, poor sleep and tiredness. They looked at a few different versions of these medicines and compared them with dummy pills or standard painkillers.

This study looked at how using cannabis before surgery might affect pain and the need for painkillers after surgery. Researchers reviewed existing studies to see if there is a clear link between using cannabis before surgery and pain management after surgery.

This review looked at many earlier studies of people who were given medicinal cannabis (a prescribed, plant-derived treatment) for long-term health problems. It checked how well those studies explained and measured how people felt about their overall quality of life.