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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

#221

Post by swed420 »

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.

> Title says "helps" but the summary says "it doesn’t effectively treat anxiety, depression, or PTSD". Big difference between the two IMO.

Exactly.

People looking for long term solutions to those issues need to address the root cause(s), which often requires therapy, lifestyle alterations, and work on the self. Change doesn't happen overnight, and it might even take a few tries to find the right therapist.

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

#222

Post by zug_zug »

charles_f wrote: post #156
zug_zug wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me like you didn't understand the paper at all, or are worse willfully misrepresenting. The paper says "insufficient data" for helpfulness for most positive categories (but leans more positive than negative just doesn't reach 95% confidence), but also insufficient data on most negative categories. It finds 5 conditions it's helpful for, and 3 it hurts for.

I'm directly quoting the portion of the abstract related to anxiety and depression, tell me how that's misrepresenting? > 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 And my point was that the paper talks about absence of data about efficacy on treatm…

> I'm directly quoting the portion of the abstract related to anxiety and depression, tell me how that's misrepresenting?

No you aren't

You said "The paper says there's no evidence of effectiveness in treatment, and evidence of harm." which is a completely inaccurate summary.

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

#223

Post by zug_zug »

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.

> American media has really been shockingly pro weed/cannabis for the past 20 or so years

Really? I think the opposite is true.

Given 1/6 adults admit to using it, I think it's totally underrepresented in media -- in theory 1/6 characters would be using it.

It's only very recently that I see characters who just casually say something like "I take a gummy for a long flight" or whatever, rather than be a stereotypical comedic stoner character.

I feel like really it's alcohol that's glamorized in the media, and before that it was smoking.

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

#224

Post by perfmode »

wahern wrote: post #195
perfmode wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In emergency departments, Black patients are prescribed opioids for acute pain at a lower rate than White patients with matched chief concerns.4 Discrepancies in prescriptions for chronic pain therapies have also been identified in Veterans Administration and Medicaid payer databases, and several retrospective cohort studies have shown persistent underprescribing of analgesics to Black patients.6,7 White medical trai…

> White medical trainees, reflecting the general population, can have false beliefs about biologic differences between Black and White patients (eg, “Black patients feel less pain”), and this racial bias leads to inaccurate pain diagnoses and treatment recommendations.8 IMO, it's a little unfair to ascribe deliberate, knowing application of racist stereotypes. That kind of rhetoric by researchers can have unintended…

The original claim isn’t that trainees are deliberately applying racist stereotypes. The study (Hoffman et al., 2016) found that people who endorsed false biological beliefs about race made less accurate pain assessments and worse treatment recommendations. That’s a finding about cognitive bias, not about conscious malice. So the pushback here is against a reading the source doesn’t really support.

The detour into skin thickness is also a bit beside the point. The cited passage is about pain perception, not dermatology. The fact that there’s equivocal evidence on epidermal thickness doesn’t do much to complicate the finding that believing “Black patients feel less pain” leads to undertreating pain. Those are different claims.

I’d also push back a little on the framing that doctors are “stuck” with blunt epidemiologic classifiers until personalized genomics arrives. The disparity evidence here isn’t about doctors making reasonable inferences from imperfect population-level data. It’s about false beliefs producing worse care. You don’t need a genetic profile to stop believing something that isn’t true. The fix for that is education and awareness, which is considerably more available than whole-genome sequencing.

The point about overcorrection with opioids is fair and worth taking seriously. But “researchers pointing out bias might cause overcorrection” is a reason to be careful about how you design interventions, not a reason to soften the description of the problem itself.

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

#225

Post by zug_zug »

malfist wrote: post #62
jalla wrote: post #48

So, a meta study. While important, it assumes that the underlying studies are based on solid science. So, why do people use cannabis then?

Why do people use cigarettes? Cocaine? LSD? Not because they're effective treatments for mental disorders

There some evidence that nicotine may be inadvertantly used as a self-medication for schizophrenia and/or adhd

Cocaine is a party drug afaik, I'll give you that one.

Hallucinogens have the ability change people's perspectives on the world, often for the positive. Now the current psychiatry lens is you can only have "medicine" if you have a "disorder" but that doesn't really seem to make sense. Why can't you take medicine to move something from average to above-average? So I agree it's not prescribed for treating many disorders, but that doesn't mean it isn't therapeutic.

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

#226

Post by zug_zug »

renewiltord wrote: post #114

The entire point of the drug research is to make them palatable to authorities through plausible lies. American culture does not permit enjoyment for the sake of it. So you have to make up some stories and say “there is some evidence that psilocybin helps depression” or whatever and then slowly leak it towards legality. I mean if I told you I wanted to have fun you’d lose your mind. But if I told you I needed to heal…

I find your comment more interesting than the rest of the discussion. Specifically American culture does not permit enjoyment for the sake of it.

Sometimes I feel that way too, but I'd love to hear more on your theory of this.

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

#227

Post by LocalH »

Aurornis wrote: post #12

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…

> It's easy to mistake substances that temporarily boost your mood or calm your nerves for effective treatments for an underlying condition.

Perhaps the temporary boost can be used in such a way to effect change that lasts? Sometimes all a person needs is something small to change how their brain is processing things, and with structure perhaps that can be leveraged.

But then again, many people think that all brains work the same, and this underlies 99% of the failings of mental health care.

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

#228

Post by Kon5ole »

zug_zug wrote: post #223
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.

> American media has really been shockingly pro weed/cannabis for the past 20 or so years Really? I think the opposite is true. Given 1/6 adults admit to using it, I think it's totally underrepresented in media -- in theory 1/6 characters would be using it. It's only very recently that I see characters who just casually say something like "I take a gummy for a long flight" or whatever, rather than be a stereotypical…

>Given 1/6 adults admit to using it

That seems high to me. (sorry) ;-)

Seriously though, by the time I was 15 several of my classmates were drunk most weekends and smoked cigarettes regularly, but even decades later I have still never seen or heard of anyone I know smoking weed. That's why it sticks out so much to me.

If 1/6 is true it would be interesting to see how it has changed over the past say 20 years or so.

I think cigarettes and alcohol were established vices when media became a thing so media can be semi-excused from those. It would be interesting to know if the same is true for weed. Has it just gotten so common that media has to show it to be realistic, or did it get more common after media started to show it?

Cigarette smoking is an interesting counterexample, it has been extremely de-glamorized since the heydays and sales of cigarettes have halved since 2000.

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

#229

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

bfivyvysj wrote: post #194
contravariant wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I don't think I've ever heard that cannabis was a treatment for PTSD let alone a good one. Is this paper trying to confuse people about psilocybin?

How many veterans do you know? How many veterans that you know use cannabis to treat their PTS? I guess I might be living in a bubble but there are plenty of videos of veterans and others talking about how exactly it is that they use cannabis for PTS. I recommend watching some.

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

#230

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

Perenti wrote: post #65

I've always been suspicious of the claims THC helps anxiety. CBD may, but my experience is that high doses of THC without corresponding CBD tends to induce anxiety in many people. I also found the brief notes in the article about MMJ and autism intriguing. I'm diagnosed ASD. I would think the use of THC to manage overstimulation could be problematic, as it tends to make colors and sounds and flavours _more_ intense.…

Without getting too much into the sativa/indica dichotomy - in my personal experience, I find the secondary metabolite profiles (terpinolene as opposed to the beta Caryophyllene dominant profiles associated typical with 8 week “indica dominant hybrids”) associated with longer flowering cultivars to be preferred by those dealing with what would might be undiagnosed ASD related things.

Would love to hear your experiences. What is the longest flowering cultivar you’ve tried, versus the shortest, and difference in effects on your ASD?

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