There are groups of people for whom prescription medicines offer little or no relief from severe symptoms that frequently cause distress, disability and depression. Some people have discovered through personal experience, friends, books and other means, that cannabis can help them manage and live with their symptoms even when other medicines have failed.
It is this evidence together with supporting evidence from laboratory research and limited research in patients that has led to an increasing awareness of cannabis as a medicine.
For instance, people with MS regularly report that cannabis relieves and can even prevent tremor and bladder dysfunction, disabling symptoms experienced by most people with MS. Other people, with spinal cord injury also report good relief from pain and spasm that they cannot get from prescription medicines.
Research to date suggests that medicinal cannabis research has the potential to make exciting breakthroughs in the management of severe symptoms such as pain, spasm, bladder dysfunction and nausea and could therefore bring a dramatic improvement in quality of life for people with:
| AIDS wasting syndrome | Glaucoma | ||
| Alzheimer’s disease | High blood pressure (hypertension) | ||
| Arthritis | Multiple sclerosis (MS) | ||
| Asthma | Nail Patella Syndrome | ||
| Brain injury/stroke | Nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy | ||
| Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis | Pain | ||
| Depression and mental illness | Phantom limb pain | ||
| Eating disorders | Migraine | ||
| Epilepsy | Spinal cord injury | ||
| Fibromyalgia | Tourette’s syndrome |