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Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

sciencedaily.com

31–40 of 244 posts

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#31

This is a hard topic to communicate in depression treatment. It's easy to mistake substances that temporarily boost your mood or calm your nerves for effective treatments for an underlying condition. There was a brief period of time before the opioid prescribing backlash when some fringe psychiatrists were proposing weaker opioids as adjunctive treatments for treatment resistant depression. It's hard to fathom now, b…

This point of view makes no sense to me. If you take it and you feel your anxiety is lessened, that's the greatest proof you can ask for. All the psychiatric studies are already based on self assessment. Second, a lot of psychatric treatments are temporary, ending whenever the medication is stopped or wears off so I dont see how this would be any different

> If you take it and you feel your anxiety is lessened, that's the greatest proof you can ask for.

This mistake has been made many time throughout history. Cocaine was originally believed to be a viable treatment for depression. Opioids and amphetamines too. You take them and you feel good for a while, which was mistakenly equated with treating depression.

Many drugs will make you feel good temporarily by blocking certain feelings or tricking your brain into feeling good. This is not the same as treating a condition.

You can think of actual treatments as working closer to the source to reduce the problem, not temporarily overriding it with a powerful drug-induced sensation.

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#32

This is a hard topic to communicate in depression treatment. It's easy to mistake substances that temporarily boost your mood or calm your nerves for effective treatments for an underlying condition. There was a brief period of time before the opioid prescribing backlash when some fringe psychiatrists were proposing weaker opioids as adjunctive treatments for treatment resistant depression. It's hard to fathom now, b…

This point of view makes no sense to me. If you take it and you feel your anxiety is lessened, that's the greatest proof you can ask for. All the psychiatric studies are already based on self assessment. Second, a lot of psychatric treatments are temporary, ending whenever the medication is stopped or wears off so I dont see how this would be any different

Duration of effect matters when it comes to successful treatments.

If we take your position and apply reductio ad absurdum, we could say that cocaine is a highly effective treatment for anxiety, although of course we know that in the not-so-long run it has the opposite effect.

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#34

Matthew Hill offers a great interview on Andrew Huberman's podcast - https://open.spotify.com/episode/26PR93gyNcs8YPlQ9dypW3?si=V... As someone who's used cannabis regularly for over a decade, I tried to start to explain in this body my experience but every sentence written ends with me deciding, "that's too circumstantial to my lifestyle-physiology to include." I think at the end of the day, empirical research's pur…

This is the most reasonable take I’ve seen in this whole thread. Alcohol doesn’t reduce anxiety either yet tons of people take it as a social lubricant and it probably does more damage to those consuming it than those who consume weed. So shrug? Just be responsible folks and let people blow off steam how they like without judging it like weed is an 8 ball.

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point of view makes no sense to me. If you take it and you feel your anxiety is lessened, that's the greatest proof you can ask for. All the psychiatric studies are already based on self assessment. Second, a lot of psychatric treatments are temporary, ending whenever the medication is stopped or wears off so I dont see how this would be any different

Duration of effect matters when it comes to successful treatments. If we take your position and apply reductio ad absurdum, we could say that cocaine is a highly effective treatment for anxiety, although of course we know that in the not-so-long run it has the opposite effect.

[deleted]

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using quantified isolates is the correct way to do a controlled study. Dosing is important. Claims that you need a special combination of exactly the right strains are just a way to move the goalposts forever. They could study 10 different strains in controlled trials and the same people would show up to dismiss this study because they weren't using some random strain that has some perfect combination of entourage ef…

Way to completely misunderstand and try in an underhanded way to the dismiss entourage effect. It’s not smoking 10 strains in a row it’s the fact that you need CBD THC and all the terpenes to get the effects. So the current growing trend of just getting the THC number higher tends to result in plants that don’t actually give people the full spectrum of effects, beneficial or not. So the correct way to do this would b…

> It’s not smoking 10 strains in a row

I never said it was. I was saying you could run 10 different studies on 10 different strains with 10 different "entourage effect" profiles and even if all of them were negative, they would be dismissed as not having precisely the right entourage effect.

If there are anti-depressant compounds in cannabis plants then they can be extracted and isolated, too.

> So the correct way to do this would be a full spectrum isolate, which again you coincidently forgot to mention I’m sure.

Of course, the correct formulation is something other than what was tested, right? And if they tested a full spectrum isolate with negative results, we should assume that it just wasn't the right blend of terpenes and therefore that study should be dismissed too? Repeat ad nauseum?

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#37

This is a hard topic to communicate in depression treatment. It's easy to mistake substances that temporarily boost your mood or calm your nerves for effective treatments for an underlying condition. There was a brief period of time before the opioid prescribing backlash when some fringe psychiatrists were proposing weaker opioids as adjunctive treatments for treatment resistant depression. It's hard to fathom now, b…

This point of view makes no sense to me. If you take it and you feel your anxiety is lessened, that's the greatest proof you can ask for. All the psychiatric studies are already based on self assessment. Second, a lot of psychatric treatments are temporary, ending whenever the medication is stopped or wears off so I dont see how this would be any different

I think the problem is that, at least in my experience, you end up with more anxiety once the initial high wears off. Paranoia is an extremely common side effect of Marijuana, and so are nightmares with prolonged use. And once you kinda get into a routine with it, you have a hard time quitting, because your overall anxiety is raised, and you need it just to get back to a normal functioning level. My guess is that this is due to the effects that THC has on blocking your REM sleep. Without the proper REM sleep, it seems pretty common to be anxious and foggy-brained.

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#38
post #22
post #5

Still ok with it being legal but yeah that doesn't mean it's beneficial

Yep. Of course alcohol is depressive.

“Depressant” refers to its impacts on nervous system activity, not that it causes feelings of depression.

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#39

Isn't the lancet the same journal that has published the vax-autism and hydroxychloroquine studies?

These dismissals based on the source rather than the material are getting really annoying. We’re supposed to be intellectuals here, we can do better than that.

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#40
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using quantified isolates is the correct way to do a controlled study. Dosing is important. Claims that you need a special combination of exactly the right strains are just a way to move the goalposts forever. They could study 10 different strains in controlled trials and the same people would show up to dismiss this study because they weren't using some random strain that has some perfect combination of entourage ef…

I think that's a bit of a straw man. You could study one combination that is broadly representative and is much much closer than the isolate.

They included studies which looked at multiple different smoked cannabis varieties.

The claim above about only looking at isolates was false.

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