A New Marijuana To Relieve Pain Without The High

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The medicinal value of the intoxicating plant Marijuana has often been contested because of its side effects but a recent study claims it can be successfully used as a pain reliever and that too without getting high!

According to the Washington Post marijuana consists of two main molecules, one is an intoxicating agent called tetrahydrocannabinol or THC a mind altering substance and the other cannabidiol or CBD which does not get the user high.

Earlier researchers were of the opinion that CBD had no use in the human body while THC was used to treat pain, nausea, loss of appetite and other problems but that notion has changed as CBD has been used in the treatment of diseases like epilepsy, anxiety, schizophrenia, heart disease and cancer.

"CBD has been a game-changer for medical marijuana," says Martin Lee, the Director of Project CBD, a Northern California nonprofit organization involved in promoting the use of the compound. "Its safety and lack of psychoactivity undermines any argument that it should be illegal. It's really shifted the national discussion on this issue."

Another New York University neurologist Orrin Devinsky and his colleague Daniel Friedman observed that patients receiving CBD apart from their usual medicines had 39 percent lesser convulsive seizures than others. According to them it was an excellent response.

Though much more research is needed to affirm the medicinal use of CBD in treating diseases, many of the severely ill patients are not wanting to wait for the end result. After the confirmation of CBD doing exceedingly well among the patients, a British pharmaceutical company GW Pharma has come out with two drugs namely Sativex with 1-to-1 ratio of THC and CBD prescribed for painful muscle spasms and Epidiolex which is pure CBD prescribed for childhood seizures.

Interestingly the cost of treatment while using CBD is not covered by insurance as it is not considered to be a pure medicinal drug by most of the Health Institutions in the world.

According to Alpha Galileo, led by Mario van der Stelt (Leiden Institute for Chemistry) a team of researchers at Leiden University have set 'gold standards' for developing new painkillers based on the medicinal effects of CBD. The study has been published in Nature Communications.

If the compound gets the status of a drug for medicinal use, it might also bring down the cost of treatment for many diseases to an affordable amount.

More experiments and researches are needed before CBD is considered to be a full fledged medicinal drug suitable for all age consumption without its usual intoxicating effect.