Medical marijuana could ease cancer pain

Cannabis can’t cure cancer, but it can help in a variety of ways, including pain, neuropathy, nausea, appetite, and more. But in everyday life, pain and appetite have an outsized influence. Over half of patients undergoing cancer treatment and two-thirds of patients with advanced or terminal disease experience pain. Now studies are starting to look deeper into whether medical marijuana can help with cancer pain.

Medical marijuana can be helpful in treating cancer-related pain when traditional therapies are ineffective or cause side effects. For patients with severe cancer pain, opioids are still considered standard treatment, but concurrent use of marijuana can reduce pain signals in the brain and have additional anti-inflammatory properties. This could lead to a decrease in opioid addiction.

Medical marijuana may help people suffering from cancer-related pain, according to a Technion study published Friday in the journal Frontiers in Pain Research. Almost half of the patients included in the study stopped taking other pain medications after six months of treatment with medical cannabis.

“Traditionally, cancer-related pain is treated primarily with opioid analgesics, but most oncologists find opioid treatment dangerous, necessitating alternative therapies,” said author David Meiri, assistant professor at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.

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According to the peer-reviewed study, medical cannabis helps reduce pain in oncology patients while also relieving other symptoms. Cancer patients are also known to suffer from depression, anxiety and insomnia, which can also negatively impact treatment and prognosis.

Although opioids are effective in relieving pain, they have numerous negative side effects. For example, the synthetic opioid fentanyl is highly addictive and can cause death if overdosed. The United States is in the midst of an opioid crisis, with two-thirds of overdose deaths attributed to illegal use of the opioid fentanyl.

To address this problem, federal health officials have signaled they are willing to try new approaches to stem the tragedy. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra announced that the Biden administration’s strategy to combat the epidemic may include authorizing supervised consumption sites.

Research gives hope

It appears that this new Israeli research also offers hope that medical marijuana can be used as an alternative to opioids. The study involved certified oncologists who prescribed medical marijuana to their patients and reported on their progress.

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“Patients completed anonymous questionnaires before starting treatment and at several points over the following six months,” said study co-author Gil Bar-Sela, associate professor at Ha’Emek Medical Center Afula. “We collected data on a range of factors, including pain measures, analgesic consumption, burden of cancer symptoms, sexual problems and side effects.”

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After analyzing all the data collected, the results showed that patients were doing significantly better and, more importantly, their opioid consumption was reduced.

“Although our study was very comprehensive and provided additional perspectives on medical cannabis, gender, age and ethnicity, as well as cancer types and cancer stage, meant that the diversity of patients in our study was large,” Meiri said. “Therefore, future studies should examine the degree of effectiveness of medical cannabis in specific subgroups of cancer patients with more common characteristics.”