Did You Know: Using CBD Oil for Pain

Until you have lived with chronic pain yourself, or know someone close to you who has had to live with it, you truly cannot understand it. I have been blessed to not have to experience it in my lifetime yet, and I am hoping that I never do. In the United States, it is estimated that roughly 12% of all prescriptions filled are related to some sort of pain relief. Also, opioid use and addiction has become so prevalent in the United States that many public health officials are looking for a way for medical patients to find other pain relieving alternatives.

That is why we are getting closer and closer to witnessing medical marijuana being legalized on a federal level. This is because cannabis is generally considered a natural and risk free alternative to opioids, and it can do a lot of the things that opioids do without the withdrawal symptoms, addiction, and possible overdosing. Cannabis has been used as a medicinal plant long before the formation of modern civilization, and it wasn’t until the mid 1900s that it became so heavily stigmatized that it was labeled as a controlled substance.

Thankfully, we are slowly but surely making our way back to having access to medical and recreational marijuana, but there is still a lot of progress to go in order to have equality of compassionate care in the United States. Some of the better news that the pro-cannabis community has gotten in the last decade or so is the National Academies of Science study on the use of medical marijuana for a variety of health conditions. There is a lot of research that suggests cannabis may be able to relieve cancer-related pain, migraines, and other painful conditions. 

Medical marijuana could really be the new treatment option when it comes to managing pain in a variety of chronic health and pain conditions. One of the leading methods of using cannabis as a treatment option is through CBD topicals, because of their effectiveness, portability, and discreteness. There are a lot of medical marijuana patients out there who don’t want to be associated with smoking marijuana regularly, which I understand. For those people, using topicals and creams has become a great option, especially for patients struggling with arthritis pain. Arthritis is the leading cause of disability in the United States, and there are currently over 50 million Americans struggling with this disease. Several studies that have been done over the past few years have suggested the use of CBD oil as an effective treatment method for managing arthritis pain with both rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and osteoarthritis (OA).

CBD refers to cannabinoids, which is the part of the cannabis plant that can help reduce inflammation and relax joints and muscles, as well as reduce levels of pain. What this means is that medical patients finally have an effective means of treating their arthritis pain naturally and do not have to rely on prescription medications that can have some nasty side effects.

Many medical patients with arthritis, either RA or OA, have lived through many years of marijuana’s stigma as an illegal substance. With that being said, many of these people are not wanting to associate themselves with cannabis for fear of being looked down upon. However, I am hoping to live in an American society that values and protects the right to use medical marijuana instead of demonizing it. That is all I have to write about today, so come back tomorrow to find some more great articles about all things cannabis related! Like I always say - live, laugh, love, marijuana.