Tennessee, US: Two research reviews suggest that these are less evidence which shows that medical marijuana help in fighting chronic pains and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
That’s because there hasn’t been enough high-quality research to produce conclusive evidence of the benefits or harms of cannabis for pain or PTSD, the studies found.
According to a post on Fox News, both studies were conducted by a team of researchers at the Veterans Health Administration and published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
“The current studies highlight the real and urgent need for high-quality clinical trials in both of these areas,” said Dr Sachin Patel, a psychiatry researcher at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
“If cannabis is being considered for medical use, it should certainly be after all well-established treatments have failed,” Patel said in an email.
As per the researchers, one in 10 adults in the US, that is between 45 and 85 percent of people seeking medical marijuana do so for pain management. But when they examined 27 previously published studies on this topic, they found too little information to determine whether the drug helps most types of pain.
They found only low-quality evidence that cannabis may help nerve pain, and this wasn’t for smoking pot, it was for what’s known as nabiximols, or oral mixtures sprayed into the mouth.
A separate analysis of five previous studies of cannabis for PTSD found too little data to determine whether this would help relieve symptoms.
One of the studies in the analysis focused on veterans with PTSD and found a small but statistically meaningful decline in symptoms for patients who started using cannabis, however, compared with people who never tried it or quit.
Among the general population, not just people with pain or PTSD, the researchers concluded cannabis may carry harms including an increased risk of car crashes, psychotic episodes and cognitive impairments.
Several countries, but not the U.S., have approved a cannabis-based drug to treat painful muscle spasms from multiple sclerosis.