According to a new study, there is one main reason why people turn to medical marijuana and that’s because of chronic pain.
The study, which was published in the journal Health Affairs, aimed to determine exactly how people are utilizing medical marijuana.
It found that over 62% of people had used the drug medicinally to treat chronic pain.
Authors of the study looked at state registry data to determine what conditions qualify for medical cannabis treatment. They discovered that 20 states and Washington, D.C. had data on total patient numbers while 15 states had data on reported qualifying conditions.
The authors then compared all of this information to data laid out in an expansive 2017 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, which is a review of 10,000 scientific abstracts on the health effects of both recreational and medical cannabis.
According to the authors, there were 641,176 registered medical cannabis patients in 2016 and 813,917 a year later in 2017, but they believe that number is lower than the actual number of people who use medical marijuana.
The data found that 85.5 percent of these people with a license to take medical marijuana were using it to seek treatment for “evidence-based conditions.”
Chronic pain was number one with 62.2 percent of people using it to treat their enduring pain.
“Many observational surveys have found that many people use cannabis for chronic pain, but whether these surveys were representative was uncertain. To our knowledge, this was the first study that examined nationwide trends of patient-reported qualifying conditions based on these state registries,” said lead author Kevin Boehnke, PhD.
“We now know that chronic pain is indeed the most common qualifying condition for which people obtained medical cannabis licenses. Given the context of the opioid epidemic and the consistent observational studies that report medical cannabis patients substituting cannabis for pain medications, we now have a better sense of how widespread that practice and rationale may be.”
