Medical Marijuana and Migraines
As usual I was looking up some info on medical marijuana and migraine’s and I came across this article called: Marijuana Vs. Migraines: Modern Medical Miracle
What I always find interesting is the lack of info out there regarding this topic. Medical marijuana is the best for migraine’s and I am glad more and more doctor’s and patients are coming out about it. As someone who has suffered with migraine for decades, I can tell you cannabis works!
Migraine headaches are possibly one of the most misunderstood maladies of man. The Merck Manual states “The cause is unknown and the pathophysiology (mechanism) is not fully understood.” Except that it has something to do with brain blood vessel dilation/constriction; nobody seems to know what is going on here. If I’m wrong about this I’m sure I will hear plenty.
To save myself professional embarrassment, I checked the Merck Manual. One would think some mad scientist produced the highly diverse pot pourri of drugs which have been used to alleviate these severe and paralyzing headaches, with nausea and vomiting, which affect some 10 million people in the U.S.
To start with, migraines are headaches but not all headaches are migraines. Many headaches can be successfully treated with aspirin or Tylenol but, if my patients are correct, they don’t touch migraines. Because of the extremely wide variety of non-effective medicines, which have been used, I take a dim view of any new medicine being heavily advertised on TV.
In my own regular medical practice I discovered that an injection of Demerol with Benadryl was effective but the patient was out of action for at least 24 hours.
When I stared seeing patients for Medical Marijuana permits, I was surprised when the first migraine patient showed up. I knew that marijuana worked for severe pain, nausea and vomiting and I knew that it also causes vasodilatation but I couldn’t quite put the two together, pharmacologically, for migraines.
The light bulb over my head lit up and I said to myself “if the patient says marijuana works for this, and they were willing to pay the $300 clinic and State fee, it must work”.
I ended up with about 30 migraine patients out of 4,000. I have since heard that the California Marijuana doctors, with some 300,000 patients, have the same experience.
I hope readers of this series will write in their own experiences about this.
A few of my personal opinions of cannabis in regards to medicating debilitating migraine headaches:
1. Unlike traditional medicine medical cannabis (when consumed through a vaporizer) produced a very fast release from the pain associated with the inflammation in the head.
2. It’s natural, unlike anything the Big-Pharma companies are selling these days. You can grow your own!
3. And unlike other medicine, it gets rid of nausea not causes it!
The reason I started this site is because of the lack of web sites on the internet about using medical marijuana for Migraine headaches. Hopefully by helping spread the word others who suffer the same may find relief through medicinal cannabis.