Smoking can help with the symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in the short term, but it can make the long -term prognosis worse.
Such as this study ask“Medical marijuana: a panacea or scourge?” For 5,000 years, the cannabis ”was used All over the world medical, entertaining and spiritual. “He was even defined by American doctors” for a multitude of evidence “from the mid -19th century to the 1930s, which is often used From marijuana medical supporters as evidence that justifies modern medical applications. “But the field of old medicine is” full of filters and herbal drugs “, so as not to mention hemostatic and other questionable and harmful treatments.
Skeptics criticize the marijuana medical movement as the “Marijuana Medical Etor” movement, implying that children with epilepsy and terminals are “are”used As a “Trojan Horse” for legalizing the use of cannabis “or peddle “Outlandish claims” on “Miracle Cancer Cures”, frustrating researchers in the field who just want to get to science.
For example, what about the therapeutic use of cannabis for inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis? Conventional treatments work Mostly by suppressing the immune system to try to prevent inflammation. “Taking into account the limited treatment options and known unwanted side effects with chronic use” from these medicines, people who suffer from these diseases often must have inflammatory parts of their intestines are surgically removed, so it is clear because there is so much interest in alternatives.
About one in six patients with IBD using marijuana say it helps with their symptoms, so the researchers decided to try it. Thirteen patients with IBD were given One -third of the marijuana pound to smoke in their spare time for a period of three months and said they feel significantly better with the “reported improvement of the general perception of health, social functioning, working, physical pain and depression”. There was no control group, so it is unknown if they would have improved anyway or what role the placebo may have played. It’s like some of the cannabis studies used For pediatric epilepsy that had a response rates of more than 30 % and a reduction in half in a third of children. Amazing results until you realize that you can sometimes take Similarly amazing answers from giving children rather than a placebo for the sugar pill, as shown below at 2:21 in my video Favorite Favorites: Cannabis for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). That is why it is crucial to do randomized, double blind, placebo -controlled testing, but there were no cannabis and IBD by 2013.
For 21 patients with Crohn’s disease, nothing looked aid. Thus, their researchers randomized either to smoke two joints per marijuana day or in a placebo. The results? Ninety percent in the cannabis group improved, compared to only 40 % in the placebo group. Appears below and at 3:11 in my video It is a graph of the scores of their symptoms. As you can see, there were There is no major change in the placebo group during the study of two months, but the cannabis team cut their symptoms by about half.
Researchers acknowledge that long-term cannabis use is not without risks, but it may be a cakewalk compared to possible adverse-and even life-threatening in some of the strongest conventional therapies, so the study was announced In a document entitled “High Hope for Medical Marijuana in Digestive Disorders”.
The study was financed With a medical marijuana defense organization, the main supplier in the country, in fact. Thus, expectations may have been placed on the participants for how much it would feel better – in other words, they may have been prepared for the placebo. But the researchers were checked for it, right? Those who received the real hemp did significantly better than those randomized to take placebo. But the point of a placebo is that it is not distinguished by the real thing, so participants do not know which group are – the control group or treatment group. How can this be achieved with a psychoactive drug? It can’t, which is the problem. The researchers tried to hide participants in groups only from the recruitment of patients who had never tried cannabis before hope that they would not observe the placebo pot, but, without surprise, most of them. So we are basically left with another non -blind study. The researchers have asked for a beam of subjective questions such as “how do you feel?” And those who knew they received the drug said they felt better.
There were There are no significant changes in objective laboratory values, such as CRP, a sign of inflammation, so maybe “cannabis can simply cover the symptoms without affecting intestinal inflammation”. Another indicator that may not be moving The course of the disease itself is how quickly the symptoms recover. Two weeks after the end of the study, those of the cannabis team were just behind the point they started, as shown here (see week 10) and at 5:05 in my video.
So, “there were There is no difference in objective inflammatory indicators to indicate the modification of the disease. Given the rapid recovery … at pre -treatment levels after the 2 -week rinsing period, it seems more likely that cannabis improves the symptoms of Crohn’s disease, rather than shaping the disease. “
A study study published next year found that hemp provided The same immediate symptomatic relief but was associated with a worse prognosis of diseases over time. Patients with IBD reported that hemp has improved their pain, cramps and diarrhea, but use for more than six months by Crohn’s patients seems to be a strong predictor that they end up in surgery. They had five times the chances of going under the knife. There are two possible explanations for this: it is very likely that the increased severity of the disease leads to cannabis use and not the other way around. The alternative explanation: “Cannabis use can aggravate the IBD prognosis, leading to larger surgery and hospitalization”.
That is why we need future clinical trials where people are being watched over time to see who came first. Until then, we may have to consider the use of cannabis for IBD as “potentially harmful”. Not only to burst on errors on the part of attention, but because there were A study for patients with hepatitis C who found that daily cannabis use was associated with almost seven times the chances of worse liver fibrosis, which is like scar tissue. If hemp really does brand Fibrosis worse, which can explain why IBD cannabis users may be more likely to require surgery.
