Live data from Hacker News

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

sciencedaily.com

41–50 of 244 posts

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

#41

The studies cited by this metastudy all suffer from the same issue: They aren't studying the cannabis plant at all and even if they are, it's not in the chemovars (chemical makeups) that real consumers are actually consuming - due to cannabis sourcing issues stemming from cannabis's continued illegality. For randomized controlled trials, even in "legal" states, university scientists can't just walk into a dispensary…

>The headline could read instead: No evidence cannabinoid isolates help anxiety, depression, or PTSD. There’s no evidence that what they tested with was pure THC isolates. If they’re using cannabis in plant form, even if it was bred for higher thc content, there is still cbd.

Those that are interested to click through should and see the studies cited by this metastudy and whether they used whole plant cannabis extracts, cannabis isolates, or even non cannabis derived isolates.

tldr; "If they're using cannabis in plant form" is a very, very high bar for the current state of cannabis (really cannabinoid) research.

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

#42

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

> 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 ce…

Alcohol too.

It's not a cure. It's a high.

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

#44

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

Doing ten shots of tequila is a 100% scientifically proven cure for social anxiety then. If you take it and your anxiety lessens, that's the greatest proof you can ask for! Let's just completely ignore the crippling morning hangover and liver damage

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

#45

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

> 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 ce…

> Cocaine was originally believed to be a viable treatment for depression.

Is it not??

Sure there's the addiction and harm from abuse that make it less than ideal for long term use, to put it mildly, but weed isn't coke so what's really the argument here?

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

#46
I see problems with this meta-analysis.

- Not adjusted for strain, dose or delivery method across all studies.

- Not adjusted for receptor downregulation, for which rotation and/or drug holidays would be appropriate strategies.

- Not adjusted across all studies for time effect, e.g. 6 hours of relief, 1 hour, etc.

I can tell you from personal experience with a related disorder that disciplined rotation of 10mg edible cannabis provides 90% relief, 90% of the time, with far fewer side effects than alternative medications for the same disorder.

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

#47

The studies cited by this metastudy all suffer from the same issue: They aren't studying the cannabis plant at all and even if they are, it's not in the chemovars (chemical makeups) that real consumers are actually consuming - due to cannabis sourcing issues stemming from cannabis's continued illegality. For randomized controlled trials, even in "legal" states, university scientists can't just walk into a dispensary…

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…

That's a great example study to highlight what I really mean by entourage effect. I've edited my post to emphasize most not all - i only looked at the 6 anxiety studies as that's what I have the most experience with - as well as the included table which highlighted that the vast majority of studies included in this metastudy only looked at THC.

That particular study did look at High THC low CBD, mid THC mid CBD, and high CBD low THC. There's no information on the terpene profile of the smoked cannabis preparations, though, and that is a confounding variable in the entourage effect that potentially defeats the part of the entourage effect they did test. Additionally, a quick look at the cannabinoid %s in those smoked preparations rehighlights my point that these are not inclusive of all the chemical compositions that the cannabis plant could present itself in.

I still stand by my point and hope the clarifications bring the conversation back on track to the fact I was highlighting which is simply that this is a metastudy built off of studies that were conducted with restrictions on experimental design that few observers fully understand the research implications of.

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

#49

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

same lancet that tried to bury covid lab leak theories in february 2020

Evidence for lab leak is extremely weak, zoonosis is the most likely origin:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r...

https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-...

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

#50

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

Psychiatric treatments return a person to a baseline that can be managed with therapy or healthy coping mechanisms.

Chasing a high is not a treatment, it merely defers the problem. As tolerance to the high builds, patients lose the therapeutic value but have gained crippling dependency and addiction.

Post reply on HN