cannabisnews.com: Pot for Pain





Pot for Pain
Posted by CN Staff on August 24, 2004 at 11:00:14 PT
By Christine Haran
Source: ABCNews.com
Recent surveys conducted in people with multiple sclerosis and epilepsy suggest that many people with these diseases are using marijuana to treat pain, stress and other symptoms associated with their conditions.  While little research is being done on the medical uses of marijuana, a new study suggests that a drug modeled on a cannabinoid chemical in marijuana may help ease the pain associated with multiple sclerosis and perhaps provide a safer alternative to smoked marijuana for people with chronic pain conditions. 
Treating Pain in Multiple Sclerosis The MS study, published in a recent online edition of the British Medical Journal, evaluated 24 people with MS between the ages of 23 and 55 who had central pain. Up to 80 percent of people with multiple sclerosis experience pain, including pain generated in the central nervous system known as central pain. The researchers, of the University Hospital of Aarhus in Denmark, divided the participants into two groups, giving one a placebo and the other group dronabinol (Marinol). Dronabinol contains a synthetic form of THC, which is believed to be the primary active ingredient in marijuana, or cannabis. Dronabinol, a prescription medication that is given as a capsule, is the only cannabinoid approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It is currently indicated for loss of appetite in people with AIDS and for the treatment of nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy for cancer. The Danish researchers found that dronabinol reduced pain intensity and improved pain relief in participants, and concluded it should be offered to people with MS whose pain is not severe enough to be treated with medications such as anticonvulsants, antidepressants or opioids. Some side effects, such as dizziness, were associated with dronabinol. Marinol and Marijuana: What's the Difference? Dronabinol contains just one of the more than 60 cannabinoids in the marijuana plant, many of which may contribute to its beneficial effects. But unlike marijuana, which is illegal under U.S. federal law, dronabinol provides a standardized THC concentration and is free of impurities such as leaves, bacteria and mold spores. In addition to the quality control concerns, there is still a need for randomized trials of medical marijuana to establish its therapeutic value. Surveys, however, suggest that people with MS, for example, are smoking marijuana for medical purposes regardless. Of the 220 people with MS interviewed for a Canadian survey that was published in June in the journal Neurology, 29 said they used marijuana regularly for symptom relief. About half of these patients said marijuana eased pain and spasticity. "I think the survey findings point to the reality that a proportion of patients with MS are using cannabis," says Mark Ware, an assistant professor of anesthesia and family medicine at McGill University in Montreal who conducted the survey. "If physicians don't ask their patients about cannabis, the use may go undetected by the physicians, and cannabis may not be totally beneficial; it may cause harm and interact with other medications." While Ware does not advocate the use of medical marijuana at this time, he thinks that its use among patients points to a need for pain to be taken seriously. He and other physicians who treat people with painful conditions say that more research on dronabinol and marijuana is needed for this reason. "I think that clinical trials such as the one recently published in the BMJ add significantly to the body of evidence suggesting that cannabis, and products based on cannabis, have a role to play in the management of painful chronic diseases like MS," Ware says. Source: ABCNews.com (U.S. Web)Author: Christine HaranPublished: August 24, 2004Copyright: 2004 ABC News Internet VenturesWebsite: http://www.abcnews.go.com/Contact: http://www.abcnews.go.com/onair/email.htmlRelated Articles & Web Site:Medical Marijuana Information Linkshttp://freedomtoexhale.com/medical.htmEpilepsy MS Patients Trying Marijuana http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread18968.shtmlMontel Speaks for Medical Marijuanahttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread18831.shtmlMontel Williams Pushes Pot -- for Medical Reliefhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread18797.shtml 
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Comment #2 posted by ElPatricio on August 25, 2004 at 11:56:18 PT:
The Pharmaceuticalization of Marijuana
You can almost hear Big Pharma salivating at the prospect of being the first to introduce cannabis medicines that control or enhance appetite, subdue pain without the fog of opiates, or calm the tremors of MS. You can bet that the FDA won't have the slightest hesitation to approve single-compound medicines that exploit the knowledge gained by the new study of the human cannabinoid system.How exciting. Single cannabinoids derived from a plant that produces more than 60 unique cannabinoid compounds, not to mention the minor constituents of flavinoids and terpentines.Too bad. For thousands of years, humans have relied on a natural, herbal remedy for dozens of serious illnesses. Call it what you want -- whole cannabis, pot, marijuana, or reefer. Marijuana remains the only multispectrum cannabinoid medicine on the market. Of course, that's the -black- market.
http://www.mikuriya.com/
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Comment #1 posted by Virgil on August 24, 2004 at 17:23:48 PT
Sounds like advertising for Marinol
They can extract THC from cannabis much cheaper than Marinol at $800,000 a pound. This is much more of a soft sell for Marinol than any honest attempt to explain cannabis and MS/epilepsy. September is coming and where are the GW extracts? Sativex is the 1 to 1 ratio of THC and CBD in an alcohol extract that GW Pharmaceutical and Bayer will sell for MS. The silver bullet approach is much more for pharmaceutical profits than for real use in medicine. Here is the way Dr. Andrew Weil says it as reported in an article titled "Honor Complexity"- http://www.mapinc.org/newscc/v04/n752/a08.html?397Weil's UCLA talk drew a crowd of about 200, including medical students and physicians who were getting Continuing Medical Education credit. The following excerpt seems particularly apt, given the neo-prohibitionist party line -repeated ad nauseum at the recent Souder subcommittee hearings- about marijuana containing one or more beneficial molecules that the pharmaceutical industry will, in due course, identify and produce for us in a form that is "pure."Weil[, MD] said, "One of the most dramatic advantages of learning to use plants in medicine is their relative lack of toxicity compared to isolated derivatives of plants. This should be obvious. If you find something in nature that has a biological effect, that affects animals, and you attempt to concentrate that therapeutic power, you inevitably concentrate toxicity because they're one and the same thing....When you present the body with a complex array, you're giving it choice in how it responds. That's fundamentally a different kind of pharmaco-therapeutics from giving a person a purified, isolated molecule that's a shove in one direction."I think both those kinds of medicine have their place. But I have to tell you, as somebody who's practiced botanical medicines for many years, there's often great value in using these natural mixtures."The reason that pharmacologists and most physicians have such trouble with this concept is that we are strongly under the spell of reductionism. Reductionism is a useful tool. It makes life simpler. It is very difficult to study complex substances. How do you study a plant with 50 complex molecules, all of which might contribute to its activity? It is much simpler to say that one of these equals the whole, and to isolate that and study it. But you're missing out on the clinical relevance of the whole plant, which may be very different from that of the isolated molecule...""In other areas of science -outside of medicine-there's a rising interest in complexity... If you want to describe changes in weather patterns or the shapes of clouds, you can't use simplistic, classical formulas, you have to use new mathematical models based in complexity. The rise of complexity theory and its success in physics, mathematics and other disciplines has not made the slightest inroad into medicine. Pharmacology is locked into reductionist ways of thinking, especially when it approaches natural products. We're dealing with the most complex phenomenon that nature has produced, the human organism. It seems to me it makes much more sense, if you're treating a complex thing, to treat it with a complementary complex thing." 
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