Medical Marijuana for Pain

Here's the latest on the medical uses of marijuana: a research team from Canada's McGill University Health Centre has published a study showing that smoking marijuana at home three times a day reduced chronic nerve pain in patients who had failed to achieve relief from other treatments. Some participants had pain following nerve injury due to accidents, and some cases were due to surgical trauma, including cut nerves. During the study, the patients smoked low doses (25 mg) of marijuana three times a day over the course of five days; they all used a pipe, and the marijuana they were given contained approximately 10 percent THC, the primary active ingredient. The researchers described the pain reduction as "modest" but said that the marijuana also improved patients' moods and helped them sleep better. They noted that bigger, longer-lasting clinical trials investigating higher doses of THC would be needed to further evaluate the effectiveness and long-term safety of medical marijuana for pain relief. The study was published online August 30, 2010 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.