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

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, but opioids were more casually prescribed a few decades ago. I recall some discussion where one of them said they were seeing good initial results but the effects faded, and then it was hard to get the patients off of the opioids when they were no longer helping. Not surprising to anyone now, but remember there was a period of time where many seemingly forgot about their addictive properties.

I feel like I've seen a weaker version of this in some friends who turned to THC to "treat" their depression: Initial mood boost, followed by dependency, then eventually into a protracted period where they know it's not helping but they don't want to stop because they feel worse when they discontinue. This wasn't helped by the decades of claims that claimed THC was basically free of dependency problems.

But it can cause memory loss, impaired motor coordination, and food craving. Also memory loss.

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 effect.

Using actual plants and smoking would also introduce another major variable, with further claims that the strains they were giving patients were too weak or they were smoking it wrong.

EDIT: I don't have time to read every single citation included, but the claim above that they were all THC or CBD isolates does not appear correct. One randomly selected citation:

> The short-term impact of 3 smoked cannabis preparations versus placebo on PTSD symptoms: a randomized cross-over clinical trial

So the claim above that they didn't investigate smoked cannabis or "entourage effect" is false.

>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.

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