A study observing the impact of medical cannabis on prescribed opioid usage in chronic pain patients has revealed interesting results.
The US opioid epidemic claimed 47,600 lives in 2017 and it’s estimated 10.3 million people were misusing opioids in 2018 – a staggering 3.7% of the US population. It’s thought medical cannabis may be able to help address the situation and various studies have indicated this might be the case.
One of the more recent studies involved 525 patients from three medical cannabis practice sites who had used prescription opioid medications to treat chronic pain for at least 3 months continuously – and were using medical cannabis in combination with these medications.
40.4% reported they stopped all opioids while 45.2% reported some decrease. 13.3% reported no change in opioid usage, and 1.1% reported an increase. Furthermore, 48.2% reported a 40-100% decrease in pain, 80.2% reported an improved ability to function and 87% an improved quality of life using medical cannabis. 62.8% didn’t want to take opioids in the future.
“We believe our results lend further support that medical cannabis provided in a standardized protocol can lead to decreased pain and opioid usage, improved function, and quality of life measures, and even complete cessation of opioids in patients with chronic pain treated by opioids,” state the paper’s authors.
A change in pain level was reportedly not affected by age and gender. However, the younger age group (