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

sciencedaily.com

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

#121

Post by mapt »

johnisgood wrote: post #88
Aurornis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point Im making is this is true for a ton of psychiatric or even non psychatric treatments That point wasn't intended to be taken in isolation. I was making statements about how long-term treatment of an underlying condition is not the same as taking a drug which temporarily masks a problem or induces altered mood states. The fact that a drug has acute effects, good or bad, is separate from any conversation abo…

You keep ignoring the fact that what you just said applies to current medications used to treat depression and anxiety. They do not treat the underlying issue long-term, and if you stop them, you are worse off than before due to rebound effects, and even if those effects subdue, your depression and anxiety returns. And just to add to this for clarification, antidepressants may treat depression, but it does not cure i…

The difference between your positions is not about acute vs chronic, it's about tolerance. If a drug for a long term condition has short term effects the first few times and then they fade under regular use, it's less of a valid treatment. Especially if there is a withdrawal effect, and any negative side effects of regular use.

We absolutely overprescribe a lot of psychiatric meds that do not have significant beneficial long term effects. "Stabilizing" a patient in an inpatient hospital psych ward may as well involve a Magic 8-Ball picking the particular antipsychotic for its short term effects, while on the other hand doctors and nurses put people on Seroquel at the drop of a hat in reported sleep problems, and don't take them off until natural death or until the essential tremors get reported decades later.

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

#122

Post by dns_snek »

j45 wrote: post #112
anewcolor wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we don't understand the brain well enough for images to be of any use. amen is a fraud.

Would love to learn more about how this is the case (both assertions). Mind sharing? Neuroscience seems to be coming through with more and more understanding using technologies like fMRI and others the past 5-10 years. There is definitely some understanding there.

Amen are definitely fraudsters. Russell Barkley talks about this topic in this video: https://youtu.be/R_HCw-QePaA?t=900

The short version, as I understand is, is that brain scans show differences at the population level but not on the individual level. Amen claim to both diagnose ADHD through brain scans (which is already impossible) and also diagnose various "subtypes" of ADHD like "Limbic ADD" which have no scientific backing for their existence.

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

#123

Post by contravariant »

joquarky wrote: post #113
cluckindan wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”There’s a difference between intoxication and treating the chemical imbalance behind depression or anxiety.” There is no significant, rigorous evidence that depression or anxiety are caused by an inherent ”chemical imbalance”.

Am I an idiot or is it not glaringly obvious to everyone that the cause is our individualistic hyper competitive culture?

I won't call you an idiot, but assuming that all cases are simply people being sad is a bit simplistic.

Some people are going to be more susceptible to depression, for whatever reasons, and improving someone's surroundings is probably going to prevent or alleviate depression to an extent, but to people who are depressed now it's somewhat pointless advice.

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

#124

Post by mjmsmith »

ecshafer wrote: post #77
Kon5ole wrote: post #66

American media has really been shockingly pro weed/cannabis for the past 20 or so years. Really astounding to witness considering the well known downsides to human health and cognitive function. Main characters smoke weed as a cool disobedience, in sitcoms even. Wonder what is behind it, from my perspective it's quite remarkable.

Since the 1960s and the emergence of the New Left, and the introduction of the Frankfurt School and 60s post modernism into academia, there has been a widespread belief amongst a large segment of the population that everything traditional is wrong. A social stigma is merely ignorance, that which is seen as bad is actually good, traditions are wrong. All of these things need to be overturned for the enlightenment. Sin…

Students in the 90s had also lived their entire lives under the counter-productive and utterly racist War on Drugs. That might have colored their attitude more than the leftist indoctrination bogeyman.

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

#125

Post by dns_snek »

andoando wrote: post #63
phainopepla2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But a lot of psychatric treatments are just that. Treatment for ADHD for example is giving ampethamines (which btw are chemically no different than a low dose of meth), which have a duration of 3-6 hours and its back to worse than baseline after the effect has worn off.

That's a terrible oversimplification. Stimulant treatments for ADHD are not supposed to produce pronounced mood-enhancing effects. Stimulant treatment has been shown to be effective indefinitely in majority of people without increasing the dosage over time.

These days formulations like lisdexamfetamine and extended release methylphenidate are preferred because they have all-day efficacy with typical duration of action of around 8-12h which carries lower abuse potential.

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

#127

Post by contravariant »

roywiggins wrote: post #89
paxys wrote: post #61

Title says "helps" but the summary says "it doesn’t effectively treat anxiety, depression, or PTSD". Big difference between the two IMO. Plenty of people use cannabis to alleviate symptoms. I don't think they expect to be cured entirely. Getting a good night's sleep or being without chronic pain for a few hours is often enough.

It's a meta-study and came to the conclusion that there isn't reliable evidence that it alleviates symptoms of a bunch of stuff: > There were no significant effects on outcomes associated with anxiety, anorexia nervosa, psychotic disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and opioid use disorder. There were insufficient data to meta-analyse studies of ADHD, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and tobacco…

They have some more useful figures in the paper, but for a lot of things they're essentially saying there is not enough evidence to support using cannabis yet.

The strongest claim is the lack of significant effects for anxiety, ptsd etc. but it varies a bit whether that's because the effect is too small or because it is not studied enough.

For anxiety for instance the effect they list in the paper is quite big but the error bars are even bigger so the net result is inconclusive. This is quite different from PTSD where they note little to no effect with small error bars.

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

#128

Post by charles_f »

paxys wrote: post #61

Title says "helps" but the summary says "it doesn’t effectively treat anxiety, depression, or PTSD". Big difference between the two IMO. Plenty of people use cannabis to alleviate symptoms. I don't think they expect to be cured entirely. Getting a good night's sleep or being without chronic pain for a few hours is often enough.

Beyond the semantics, this is what the meta analysis(1) actually says in the abstract

> There were insufficient data to meta-analyse studies of ADHD, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and tobacco use disorder. There was an absence of RCT evidence for the treatment of depression. Meta-analysis revealed higher odds of all-cause adverse events (OR 1·75, 95% CI 1·25 to 2·46) among those using cannabis versus control group

The paper says there's no evidence of effectiveness in treatment, and evidence of harm.

1: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

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

#129

Post by altmanaltman »

tapoxi wrote: post #52
altmanaltman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But I don't think we've seen cannabis, especially when not smoked, have anywhere near the health risk of alcohol.

Sure but my point was that you cannot have an argument where you go "yeah this happens so it's good" while you disregard everything else (it's a different question on how bad it is compared to alcohol etc). But if we follow the logic of the original comment, then it's valid logic since "hey it works so its scientifically proven!" You can replace alcohol with something else to highlight that as well, like how putting out a kitchen fire with a bucket of gasoline is a good idea. It completely covers the flames for a split second! Why worry about the explosion that happens immediately after?

So my comment wasn't about alcohol vrs cannabis but rather how that kind of logic is short-sighted and faulty.

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

#130

Post by estimator7292 »

sillywabbit wrote: post #92
landl0rd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's not that simple. It's reasonable to expect that you could see some increased level of oxidative and excitotoxicity. It's harder to draw a bright line around the dopaminergic system specifically because some level of neuronal death is expected over the course of a lifetime. We lose 5-10% starting with middle age yet don't tend to show parkinsonian symptoms until 60-80% are gone. It's pretty reasonable to ex…

Could you point me to your research?

You made the first unsubstantiated claim
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