Crohn’s Disease And Marijuana: Exciting New Study Shows That The Drug Can Send Crohn’s And Other Inflammatory Diseases Into Remission
As the tide is turning in the U.S. and around the world in favor of liberalizing ridiculous anti-marijuana laws, the new freedom to test the plant’s well-known but little lab-tested healing properties has opened up a whole new world.
Studies that previously might not get funded by universities and other institutes fearful of the mindless thugs of the DEA kicking down their doors, or even just potential studies that fell victim to the chilling effect of doubtful administrators are now bursting out of an academia that is finding new, innovative ways this wonder plant can be used to benefit the suffering.
One such study looked at sufferer’s of Crohn’s disease, an immune deficiency that gives rise to a chronic inflammatory disorder that attack’s a person’s gastrointestinal tract. The symptoms can range from mild abdominal pain to nausea, vomiting, weight loss, fevers and even bloody diarrhea, so it’s no picnic.
But a new study published in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology looked at the effects of marijuana on Crohn’s patients who suffered from severe forms of the disease. For some people in the 21-person study, the consistent use of marijuana tamed their symptoms; for others it sent the disease into complete remission.
“The marijuana plant Cannabis sativa has been reported to produce beneficial effects for patients with inflammatory bowel diseases, but this has not been investigated in controlled trials,” said the researchers in their study abstract. “We performed a prospective trial to determine whether cannabis can induce remission in patients with Crohn’s disease.”
Of the 21 people in the study, the researchers at the Meir Medical Center in Israel had 11 of them smoke two joints a day for eight weeks, while the others served as a placebo group. Of the 11 in the marijuana group five showed total remission of the Crohn’s by the end of the eight-week span. They reported better appetites and better sleep patterns–important to Crohn’s sufferers considering that some of them may defecate up to 20 times a day, even waking up in the night several times to do so.
Indeed, what the researchers are calling a “clinical response” was found in 10 of the 11 subjects in the marijuana group.
There is no known cure for Crohn’s disease, but for the 400,000 to 600,000 people who suffer from it in North America alone, more studies like this one using marijuana to its full, healing effect are certainly a ray of hope in an otherwise bleak world.
Imagine how much further along we might be in terms of understanding marijuana’s benefits, and how much suffering could have been alleviated had we not spent the past hundred years under the hell of ridiculous, racist, narrow-minded marijuana laws.
At long last, some light is finally starting to shine through the clouds.
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http://www.medicaldaily.com/medical-marijuana-achieves-complete-remission-crohns-disease-drug-improves-247783