A not-so-surprising lack of evidence
Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.
Cannabis is commonly viewed as a natural alternative for a variety of medical and mental health conditions. Currently, anxiety ranks among the top five medical symptoms for which North Americans report using medical marijuana. However, upon careful review of the extant treatment literature, the anxiolytic effects of cannabis in clinical populations are surprisingly not well-documented.
Is it “surprising,” though? It seems routine for popular ideas about remedies to be so dominant that they obscure a glaring absence of evidence. Exactly the same goes for the pain-killing reputation of cannabis, unfortunately. (Only in that case its closer to evidence-of-absence than absence-of-evidence.)