THC and CBD improve wound healing, may be valuable as skin rejuvenators, study
mdpi.com
mdpi.com
Anecdotally, I have never found cannabis to be effective at pain relief. I tried it, but it only enhanced my perception of the pain (just as it enhances my perception of taste, music, etc...) When I broke my foot I refused any prescriptions and tried a high-CBD strain of cannabis instead, but it made the pain worse. OTC paracetamol/acetaminophen proved far more effective.
Same, I tried to do some research about the effects of weed on a certain chemical in the body, and every paper I found had some completely different conclusions.
I will say the one thing cannabis does for me that’s absolutely amazing is as an anti-emetic/anti nausea remedy. Nothing else I’ve ever tried has come close to relieving those sort of symptoms. It does also seem to work for me as a sleep aid, but in the same way as say, antihistamines do (i.e. I’ll sleep, but I’ll have an intense brain fog the next morning)
Agreed, cannabis seems to work great as an anti-nausea remedy. I've also found ginger to be effective for this (wikipedia claims evidence for that is inconclusive, but it definitely works for me.)
(A) There's huge motivation to find medical benefits to anything. Indeed you should be skeptical of any "substance X improves Y!" claims, as they're usually in rats and not reproducible anyway. (If there's an actual backing study at all!) The idea that cannabis is particularly singled-out by researchers with some woke agenda seems rather silly to me.
(B) Nobody needs to prove cannabis is helpful to show that it's an extreme social injustice to imprison people for its use. It would be an injustice to imprison people for drinking soda, and soda is awful for you.
The specific nature of American federal drug laws concerning cannabis makes dodgy medical research an effective method for breaking those laws down. And the severity of the American penal system makes it easy for activist researchers to decide that the ends justify the means.
Even if the study were one hundred percent well done[0][1] and described a real link between wound healing and Cannabis, it's relevance to the question of any actual benefits in actual human is almost zero. At best it is an extremely weak signal. Of course nobody would care about the study if it was somewhat truthfully reported about.
Please look at Figure 1 and tell me what they are doing. Are they doing what I think they are doing, are they actually doing the statistical test on the whole sample? Without any controls? Doing NOTHING obviously increases \beta-Gal activity, so of course even a treatment which does NOTHING has a positive effect. Are they actually ignoring that? Are they literally just running random data through a statistics program and get excited because they get out p < 0.0001, because their Null hypothesis isn't "no difference", but "nothing changed", which is obviously ridiculous. Please tell me I am totally wrong.[1]
[0] "All anti-aging drugs were dissolved in DMSO and then dissolved in the media before being applied (n = 3 for each condition) for 2 h daily for 5 days." - from section 2.3 in the paper in question. Yes n = 3[2].
[1] I highly recommend reading: https://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pd...
[2] Granted, this isn't as bad as it sound, since they try to measure differences of groups of samples.
Here is one of the many discussions on this topic. [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYCkVjdgDqQ [video] [58 minutes]
It does work for blood pressure, anxiety, pain management, arthritis management, and just being able to relax and let your body heal.
Oh that's right, we have sick-care and a broken fucking system in the US where even maintenance medication (about to be discontinued) was billed at $35,000 a month if you include shipping. I used to get 90 day supplies. Now it's every month. I can only imagine what something newer than 20 years old costs here.
Hence I'm happy to have met some Nepalese and will likely travel to the capitol with guidance from a North Texas immigrant peer who shares the love of Guns N Roses and thinks I'd really like it there. Free health care. They speak English. They like music and don't throw people in jail for that plant that grows naturally in their environment. They might not have pets, but pets are a luxury. I'd rather go to a place that can enjoy an evening of food and music more than trying to get together for some cultish sports thing creating regional rivalries that mean abso-fuckin-lutely nothing.
There are often many minor cuts and nicks and scrapes on the fingers in the process. They rarely tend to be serious, but now I think about it they're not as annoying as papercuts.
Suspect the mechanical "wound glue" action of the resins is more important immediately; and the fact that they pretty much only wash off with alcohol means the wounds are disinfected then too.
I also used canola or coconut oil to clean the resin off as that worked really well and was an inexpensive way to do it (and seems better than pouring alcohol all over your skin... which would cause it to absorb even more of the resin). Just don't get your hands wet before you put the oil on.
Even though the resin is oil based, you definitely absorb it into your skin. Hours of trimming turns into a spin.
Ooo that's a great tip, thanks.
I wish I knew what caused my allergy to appear, whether age, COVID, or something in the oil that wasn't supposed to be there perhaps.
I wonder because there used to be a "wormwood oil" from some other plant that I used as a kid and, like you said, it really was great at healing skin abrasions (cuts, scrapes, kids stuff).
Topically apply two compounds to either side of a minor wound and see which side heals faster and better.
Seems like with a large enough sample the truth would become clear pretty fast.
They often (a) ask me to review papers that have nothing to do with my research activity and (b) ask me to be an editor of special issues that, again, are in fields unrelated to my work. I can think of no well-respected journal that does such things. The other side of the coin is that I know of no serious researchers who submit to, or read, MDPI journals, despite the fact that they have some journals that would, based on title alone, be relevant.
There is a bit of discussion of whether to consider MDPI a "predatory" publisher at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI.
None of this need reflect on the paper in question, of course. Perhaps this particular journal is of high quality. And, even if not, perhaps the paper is of high quality.
[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/does-cannabis-actually-r...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36441553/
you will notice that "studies were excluded if they treated patients with [...] severe skin disorders". Which seems relevant in integrating those findings with these.
Bet you they were smoking it, as compared to vaping or eating.
Side-bet that they were using isolated THC instead of actual plant.
And even if recovery time was extended - what was the subjective experience of the patient?
Finally, and perhaps most importantly - every time that cannabis gets legalized, opioid overdoses drop significantly. How many people get hooked on opiates post-surgery every year?
(You can check easily that this was funded by manufacturers of cannabis beauty products via MITACS)
Edit: Thanks. I wasn't familiar with MITACS. It does look like they exist to assist industry funding of studies like this.