Tag Archive for: Health Services

In Canada, cannabis for medical reasons has been legal since 2001. It has been used as one of the many strategies for chronic or ongoing pain, but doctors are not given consistent information regarding its use, and existing guidance does not include the patient point of view. We did this study to explore how people living with chronic pain feel about the use of medical cannabis. We asked 52 people living with chronic pain, including current medical cannabis users, previous users, and non-users. We found that many people who used cannabis for their pain had to experiment to determine what cannabis products, routes, and doses worked for them. Benefits of medical cannabis included relief from pain, better sleep, and improved mental health. Reasons for stopping medical cannabis included no to little improvement in pain and/or sleep or the presence of unwanted side effects. Cannabidiol (CBD) products resulted in fewer unwanted effects (eg, physical or mental impairment) compared to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) products. People discussed different routes of cannabis use including oral routes that provided longer-lasting pain relief but with a slower onset and inhaled routes with a faster onset of relief but with shorter-lived effects. People’s decisions regarding medical cannabis use for chronic pain were varied, suggesting these decisions are likely to be sensitive to individual’s values and preferences. More research is needed to learn what doses, products, and routes work for specific chronic pain conditions.