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Marijuana Provides More Pain Relief For Men Than Woman, Says Study (psypost.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PsyPost: Researchers from Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) found that men had greater pain relief than women after smoking marijuana. In this study, the researchers analyzed data from two double-blinded, placebo-controlled studies looking at the analgesic effects of cannabis in 42 recreational marijuana smokers. After smoking the same amount of either an active or placebo form of cannabis, the participants immersed one hand in a a cold-water bath until the pain could no longer be tolerated. Following the immersion, the participants answered a short pain questionnaire. After smoking active cannabis, men reported a significant decrease in pain sensitivity and an increase in pain tolerance. Women did not experience a significant decrease in pain sensitivity, although they reported a small increase in pain tolerance shortly after smoking. "These findings come at a time when more people, including women, are turning to the use of medical cannabis for pain relief," said Ziva Cooper, PhD, associate professor of clinical neurobiology (in psychiatry) at CUMC. "Preclinical evidence has suggested that the experience of pain relief from cannabis-related products may vary between sexes, but no studies have been done to see if this is true in humans." You can view the results of the study online in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
If you think there's less pain, is there, really? How do you know? Are the nerves still transmitting the same signal and the brain tunes out? Can that be measured without requiring a verbal response from the patient?
Don't take this wrong. I firmly believe that prohibition must be abolished. I just don't like that we have to beg like this. There is no right to arbitrarily prohibit the possession and consumption of weed, especially without any scientific basis.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Does it only work for chronic pain or something in particular? I've tried to use it in place of aspirin to little or no effect.
I snapped an achilles tendon and to control pain after the surgery, I polished off over a litre of morphine and had been using codine for several months. I had reached a level of use where the doctor told me I was facing liver or kidney failure if he proscribed any more and he suggested THC as an alternative to the pain killers.
It worked while I healed, during rehabilitation and it took two years to be able to walk again. Six months to recover from the surgery and eighteen months learning to walk again all of which required some really painful physiotherapy. It took another four years before I could sit in a car longer than 20 minutes. I used and recognised signs of THC dependency as simply getting tired of consuming it. So it was a lot easier to overcome, reduce and tolerate the withdrawal symptoms of the THC compared to being on morphine or codine for that long which made me feel like a zombie unable to do much.
To compare physical amounts, 25 cigarettes of tobacco as weed would take me about a week to consume to deal with chronic pain. The same amount may take over a month to consume recreationally as I am physically unable to consume that much weed.
My experiences were that you won't get high or euphoric when you use THC as a painkiller, however the sensation of pain will reduce and that helps you to relax. It also helped maintain my appetite when I didn't feel like eating. I also suffered several spinal injuries and found pain controling that using THC left me more alert and functional compared to opiate based pain killers.
For me pain control with THC help me through significant physical trauma, several times.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Is it pot that's destroying lives or other factors surrounding it, where most can be mitigated? For example, being illegal and getting arrested. Cost due to (somewhat) scarcity. Social stigma related to it. The person themselves, if it wasn't pot they're abusing it would be some other substance, and most are far worse, including alcohol.
On the plus side from the point of view of TPTB, keeping marijuana illegal keeps the privately-run prisons full and lawyers, cops, and judges fully employed in a 'growth industry' with room to advance. It protects the liquor industry and other jobs created to deal with high auto accident/injury/death rates from alcohol and all the alcohol-related auto and infrastructure damage repair. It protects alcohol tax revenues to the government.
It also protects the profits of the pharmaceutical corporations and contributions/kickbacks/bribes to the politicians and political parties. It allows the construction of a police/surveillance state as a means of enforcement which might upset the livestock without a proper imaginary threat to keep them too frightened to listen to warnings about allowing government too much power.
There are many, many benefits to keeping marijuana illegal. It's just that the benefits are pretty exclusive to those in government and those in the private sector who bought favor from those in government.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Not to be funny, but there's a well-established phenomenon where men exhibit greater pain tolerance in the presence of a woman, but women don't exhibit similar bias in front of men. If any of the researchers were female (and from their names, some were), that would bias the results.