An estimated 20.4% of American adults have experienced chronic pain. That amounts to some fifty million people. For some, the chronic pain is debilitating. Traditional treatments include everything from prescription medications to invasive surgeries. But what can patients do when traditional treatments do not work?
That is the question millions ask themselves before turning to medical cannabis. Although not a perfect solution either, medical cannabis does show promise as an alternative to traditional treatments. That could explain why, in states like Utah, chronic pain patients make up the vast majority of those applying for medical cannabis cards.
Beehive Farmacy is a Utah medical cannabis dispensary operating locations in Brigham City and Salt Lake City. They say the vast majority of their patients are persistent pain sufferers. Beehive Farmacy operators also say that many of their patients report choosing medical cannabis after other treatments failed to help.
Doing Nothing Is an Option
Imagine patients sitting at the kitchen table wondering what they were going to do upon realizing that their current prescriptions were not working. Perhaps some of them have undergone surgery but still don’t feel any better. Now what?
Doing nothing is always an option. The patients could just accept the fact that the rest of their lives will be defined by pain. They could suck it up, live with it, and try to get by as best they can.
As horrible as that might sound, there are undoubtedly some chronic pain patients who do just that. They feel like their options are limited and they have nowhere else to go. So rather than keep fighting to find an answer, they simply grin and bear it.
Alternative Medical Treatments Are Another
When doing nothing just does not work, patients can turn to alternative medical treatments. For example, a patient experiencing debilitating pain from a condition like facet joint syndrome can investigate the possibility of pain-relieving injection therapies. Pain medicine clinics offer injection therapies alongside things like kyphoplasty and spinal cord stimulation.
A good example is a nerve block procedure. The procedure relies on an injection that temporarily inhibits the nerve associated with the patient’s back pain. Pain signals never reach the brain while the nerve remains affected. The injections work for some patients but not for all.
Spinal cord stimulation is designed to do something similar. It doesn’t directly inhibit the nerve, but it does replace pain signals with electrical impulses the brain translates as a tingling sensation. Most spinal cord stimulators can be adjusted as needed, to increase or decrease the amount of pain relief a patient experiences.
Medical or Black Market Cannabis
Yet another option is to turn to cannabis. In states like Utah, patients experiencing chronic pain for which other treatments don’t seem to work are eligible for medical cannabis cards. Those who do not want to go through the time, hassle, and expense of obtaining a card can always turn to the black market. Doing so is not advised.
Patients in states with recreational programs can always purchase marijuana at a dispensary without having to go through the steps necessary to get a medical cannabis card. I am sure that plenty of them do.
A careful analysis of chronic pain reveals that traditional treatments don’t always work as well as the healthcare system would have us believe. There is no shortage of people suffering from chronic pain despite the best efforts by their doctors to leverage prescription meds and surgeries on their behalf. Some of them go to pain doctors for alternative treatments. But millions of them have ultimately turned to medical cannabis.
