Two Synthetic THC Medicines, One Evidence Review, Opposite Results for Pain
An updated federal evidence review of 25 randomized trials found that nabilone for chronic pain reduced pain severity by a pooled 1.59 points while dronabinol, the other oral synthetic cannabinoid, reduced it by 0.23. Across product categories,…
Does Cannabis Let People Take Fewer Opioids? The Trials and the Surveys Disagree, and the Trials Are Better
Cannabis opioid sparing is the most common reason patients give for wanting medical cannabis, and it is the claim with the widest gap between belief and randomized evidence. Pooled trials in acute and cancer pain show no reduction in opioid dose, a…
Core Symptoms, or Everything Around Them? What Cannabis Trials in Autism Have Actually Measured
Cannabis for autism core symptoms is a claim that depends entirely on which instrument a trial used, and the randomized evidence separates cleanly along that line. Global clinical severity, anxiety, mood and caregiver burden have improved against…
A Cannabinoid Agonist Raised Insulin Sensitivity and a CB1 Blocker Lowered It: Inside an NIH Clamp Study
A National Institute on Aging crossover study used sequential glucose clamps in 21 healthy men to test whether the endocannabinoid system insulin sensitivity link holds up under direct measurement. The cannabinoid agonist nabilone significantly raised…
Short Trials Found Almost Nothing for MS Spasticity. Longer Trials Found More. The Numbers Need Care.
A nine-trial meta-analysis of 2,544 patients speaks to how long cannabis takes to work for MS spasticity, finding no statistically significant benefit in short-duration trials and much larger effects in longer ones. The pooled magnitudes are not usable,…
A Rare Class of Plant Molecule Turned Up in Cannabis Leaves, and Nobody Has Tested What It Does
Chemists at Stellenbosch University reported cannabis flavoalkaloids for the first time, sixteen compounds in four classes found mainly in the leaves of one of three cultivars analyzed. Every identification is tentative, the alkaloid portions could not…
A Phase 3 Trial Put a Cannabis Extract Head to Head With Opioids. The Primary Endpoint Was Constipation.
A randomized phase 3 trial of cannabis extract vs opioids in 384 adults with chronic low back pain made constipation its primary endpoint, and the extract group was roughly fourfold less likely to develop it. Pain relief favored the extract by 0.34…
Two Major 2026 Reviews Went Looking for Cannabis Trials in Depression. One Found None at All.
Two systematic reviews published in 2026 searched forty-five years of psychiatric trials, and the column for cannabis for depression came back effectively empty. One review found no qualifying randomized trial at all, and the other found a pooled effect…
24 Million Americans Microdose Cannabis: What the New National Data Means for Patients and Clinicians
New national survey data show that cannabis microdosing is now the most common form of microdosing in the United States, reported by 9.4 percent of adults. Unlike psilocybin, LSD, or MDMA, cannabis is microdosed primarily for medical reasons such as…
Does a Cannabis Tolerance Break Work? What Brain Imaging Shows About CB1 Receptors, Recovery, and the Limits of the Evidence
Brain imaging in chronic daily cannabis smokers found CB1 receptor binding about 20 percent lower in cortical regions, and that reduction rose again after abstinence, which is the real biology behind a cannabis tolerance break. Two strong studies…