Medical Pot May Help You Avoid Opioids for Back Pain, Arthritis

TUESDAY, March 22, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Medical marijuana might be a viable various to opioid painkillers for individuals coping with arthritis or persistent again ache, two new research present.

Many sufferers prescribed opioids for his or her persistent ache wound up taking fewer painkillers — or stopping them altogether — after docs licensed them for medical hashish, stated lead researcher Dr. Asif Ilyas, an orthopedic surgeon at Rothman Orthopaedic Institute in Philadelphia.

“We discovered broadly a big discount in opioid use after they began utilizing medical hashish,” Ilyas stated. “We noticed a lower in roughly 40% of opioid use after beginning medical hashish, with 37% to 38% of sufferers utterly discontinuing opioid use altogether.”

If validated, these outcomes point out that medical marijuana might be a possible technique of combating America’s opioid epidemic, which has been pushed partly by prescription painkillers, stated Dr. Stuart Fischer, an orthopedic surgeon with Summit Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine in Summit, N.J.

“We have an enormous variety of people who find themselves on opioids who’re being handled for persistent again ache,” stated Fischer, who wasn’t a part of the research. “If we may transfer that inhabitants to one thing that is safer however simply as efficient, we might do very effectively.”

For the research, Ilyas and his colleagues recruited 186 sufferers with persistent again ache and 40 sufferers with persistent arthritis ache.

Between February 2018 and July 2019, docs licensed the sufferers to buy medical marijuana within the state of Pennsylvania. The sufferers have been allowed to make use of pot as they selected — some vaped or smoked, whereas others used edibles.

Doctors then tracked the sufferers’ opioid painkiller use for six months utilizing a state-run prescription drug monitoring database, and utilizing an opioid measurement referred to as morphine milligram equivalents (MME):

• Average every day opioid prescriptions for arthritis sufferers declined throughout the research interval, falling from 18.2 to 9.8 MME.
• Back ache sufferers additionally expertise a discount of their common every day opioid prescriptions, from 15.1 to 11 MME.
• About 37% of arthritis sufferers and 38% of again ache sufferers give up opioid painkillers altogether.

Patients in each teams skilled a discount of their ache signs and an enchancment of their bodily well being.

Medical hashish additionally does not seem to hold the identical danger of habit as opioid painkillers, Ilyas added.

“One of the largest central issues with opioids is each habit and the necessity for greater dosages to realize the identical outcomes,” Ilyas stated. “Based on our present understanding of medical hashish, you don’t want rising doses to realize the identical outcomes and we’re not but seeing any addictive qualities to it.”

These outcomes present contemporary proof for the potential to deal with ache with medical pot, Fischer stated.

“Obviously these research are early. Medical marijuana has not been in public use for all that lengthy, so we’d like extra knowledge and we’d like extra research. We want extra data,” Fischer continued. “Nonetheless, these two research are a really, excellent begin.”

More analysis is required, partly, to persuade insurance coverage firms to cowl the price of medical pot as they do prescription opioids, the specialists stated.

“One of the largest obstacles to utilization is value,” Ilyas defined. “It’s fairly costly, and there is not any insurance coverage protection for it at the moment, even with non-public carriers.”

Ilyas stated his future analysis will concentrate on how advantages differ, relying on the kind of medical hashish product, and completely different supply strategies.

“We wish to emphasize this appears very promising, however we’re very early in our understanding of this. More investigation is required,” Ilyas stated.

Ilyas introduced outcomes from the 2 research on the annual assembly of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, happening this week in Chicago. Information introduced at conferences needs to be thought of preliminary till revealed in a peer-reviewed journal.

More data

The Mayo Clinic has extra about medical hashish.

SOURCES: Asif Ilyas, MD, orthopedic surgeon, Rothman Orthopaedic Institute, Philadelphia; Stuart Fischer, MD, orthopedic surgeon, Summit Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine, Summit, N.J.; March 22-26, 2022 displays, American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, annual assembly, Chicago