Chronic pain impacts approximately 21% of the U.S. population. High impact chronic pain, which is to say pain severe enough to cause major disruptions in daily life, affects about 8%. When traditional treatments do not offer enough relief, many of these patients find themselves looking at alternatives. One alternative is medical cannabis. Are there others?
One of the mistakes we make with chronic pain is assuming that traditional treatments always work. If you are among the millions who live with chronic pain daily, you know the traditional treatments are not all they are cracked up to be. Just the fact that 8% of the adult population lives with high impact chronic pain is clear evidence that patients need alternative treatments.
The #1 Reason for Medical Cannabis
The operators of Utahmarijuana.org explain that chronic pain is the number one reason patients in Utah apply for their medical cannabis cards. Utah allows treating both chronic and acute pain with medical cannabis, provided that the pain either doesn’t respond to traditional treatments or would otherwise be treated with prescription pain killers.
Utah patients are not alone. Treating chronic pain is the most cited reason for using medical cannabis nationwide. Medical cannabis can be utilized to treat other conditions including PTSD, seizure-related disorders, nausea, and anxiety.
When Traditional Treatments Don’t Work
Utahmarijuana.org parent company operates a number of health clinics throughout the state. Their clinicians could tell one story after another about patients looking to try medical cannabis because all the traditional treatments their doctors have recommended have not delivered sufficient relief.
Traditional treatments include things like physical therapy, OTC pain relievers, prescription pain relievers, and surgery. Doctors tend to be reluctant to allow patients to rely on prescription pain meds over the long term due to the possibility of addiction. Physical therapy can help with certain types of pain, but its benefits are limited. As for surgery, it is no panacea.
What is a patient to do when pain is disruptive and traditional treatments do not work? Millions of them now rely on medical cannabis. But as the title of this post suggests, there are still other alternatives that patients and their doctors can look at.
Regenerative Medicine and Injection Therapies
Another pain treatment alternative that does not get nearly as much attention as it should is regenerative medicine. Regenerative medicine is built on the principle of encouraging the body to naturally heal itself through biological means. Three of the most common regenerative medicine procedures leveraged to fight chronic pain are prolotherapy, platelet rich plasma (PRP) therapy, and stem cell therapy.
All three therapies stimulate the body’s natural immune response. And in the case of PRP and stem cell therapies, the treatments provide some of the biological material the body needs to heal the area in question.
If regenerative medicine is off the table for one reason or another, yet another option lies in a collection of injection therapies. Injection therapies rely on a combination of anesthetic and steroid medications injected directly into the site of pain. The anesthetic immediately provides relief while the steroids reduce inflammation. Some injection therapies can relieve pain for six months or longer.
Patients Deserve Better
If you know people who live with chronic pain, you know that they deserve better than what western medicine often provides. Perhaps you are a chronic pain patient yourself. Regardless, the fact remains that traditional treatments are largely ineffective for millions of people in this country. They need and deserve alternatives to prescription medications and surgeries. Medical cannabis is just one of those alternatives. There are plenty of others to consider.
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