The years of wear and tear finally took their toll a couple of years ago and I had to have hip surgery to repair a torn labrum and remove an impingement (shave down the bone of the femur in the socket to keep it from tearing things up).
By all accounts this is supposed to be an incredibly painful recovery for the first couple of weeks and they loaded me to the gills with opioids. I hate opioids as they make me itchy as all get out and I’m basically a worthless zombie for the day.
In Seattle, marijuana is legal so I went to the local dispensary for drinkable high CBD oils and chocolate squares on the recommendation of a buddy. It helped with the pain better than the pain killers, plus my high wasn’t the debilitating drool on yourself stupid that the painkillers were giving me. I wasn’t going to be operating a vehicle, but I could still pull out my laptop and write code.
A week later my pain was sufficiently under control I went back to work and the dosage was low enough I could be nearly pain free all day at work and not be high.
The original prognosis was likely 3 weeks due to pain management issues.
I’ve not taken it since, but if I ever have surgery again it’ll be my go to.
You probably wanting something in the 40:60 to 20:80 THC:CBD range if you're looking for less intoxicating pain management. In genearl, CBD > THC will lower the intoxication (though not completely remove it!), with the higher ratio lowering it more. However, having some THC will make it much more effective at pain management. (Too much lone CBD veers into being psychoactive-esque, as an anti-psych.)
(The interaction between cannabinoids and you is complex.)
Allow me to get a little metaphorical about my chronic pain. Personally I don't think the major pain relief component of marijuana has much to do with physical reality. When you're a chronic pain sufferer your mind starts to expect pain and you build an entire world of psychological expectation around your pain. What marijuana does is it forces your mind to wander away from what it thinks it should be thinking about.
So in short what I'm saying is marijuana makes you forget you suffer from pain. I think it has something to do with how in clinical studies it's proven that marijuana has an impact on short term memory.
Some strains will make you feel dumb, make your head cloudy, and make you forget everything. Some will keep your mind 100% clear but make your body feel like its floating.
I don't think many people realize how useful marijuana is for pain management. I have a chronic illness and I've been able to get off all prescription drugs in place of medicinal marijuana.
[1]: http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/22.html
[2]: https://www.huxley.net/soma/meaning.html
(fair disclosure: I have inhaled.)
In my own experience as someone who does not suffer chronic pain, it helps me relax, and doesn't increase paranoia. I could definitely understand it being useful in limited doses for people it works for.
Indica has more cbd and Sativa has more thc.
cbd -> good against pain; thc -> good for high.
As for THC, without even looking at the label I can tell you indica has just as much THC because nothing gives me "couch lock" (just sit on the couch and binge Netflix) like a good indica. In comparison to sativa, which will get me high but I can still get off the couch.
Some of you seem so predisposed to be on the defense in this topic it's difficult to even have a casual discussion without becoming adversarial.
It's worth knowing if some forms of marijuana can effectively treat pain without significant impairment.
You sound pretty glib and uninformed, which is not a useful combination.
That's the problem, you seem content to feel superior rather than offering useful information. Granted, you actually did both, but if you had simply posted your link without the snarky assumption of the OP's state of mind, perhaps you would have been better received.
Based on my own experience (and that of other weed smokers), I can confirm that weed heightens sensations, paranoia, and appetite, and it's not so weird to conclude that this might not be too compatible with a toothache.
And finally, unless I missed it, your study in fact does not appear to claim that weed helps with toothaches. My own experience is that it doesn't really help much with toothaches, and the desire to eat everything in my fridge combined with paranoia is not nice in combination with a toothache.
I suppose perhaps I was a bit unclear in my comment, so my apologies for that.
I'll leave it at that, though, because I find your conduct extremely unpleasant. It can be hard enough to talk about the pros and cons of weed without the 'it cures cancer' and 'it will make you addicted after one puff' crowds. And talking about it is something that I strongly support, because cannabis is a pretty powerful thing (both good and bad).
I do not suffer from chronic pain, and never have. Marijuana just has never crossed my mind as something to consume when injured to treat the pain.
People are downvoting my comment as if I said marijuana has no medicinal value, that's obviously not the case. I was only expressing my surprise at these applications of something which, for me, never seemed particularly numbing except in quite incapacitatingly high doses. When I take a pain killer, it's generally undesirable for it to make me completely useless for a day. I'm just curious if that's how it's being used or if my experience is not representative.
I've vaped pure CBD oil a few times as well, the effects were interesting and not at all disabling or paranoia-inducing, but no pain relieving effects were noticable either. I could see how it might be huge for preventing pain resulting from some neuropathic disorders, however.
To be clear: my post was not intended in any away to judge the patients finding physical pain relief in weed. It just surprises me, weed doesn't fill that role in my mind.