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How Medical Marijuana Can Help With Arthritis

Arthritis is one of the most popular conditions in Americans today, afflicting over 31 million individuals with either pain and swelling or limited movement to the joints. Arthritis presents itself in one of two ways: rheumatoid arthritis, which appears when there is malfunctioning in the immune system, and osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis is also known as arthritis of the bones and will most commonly present in elderly patients after cartilage has been eroded from years of use. Along with the standard symptoms, both of these types of arthritis may also appear due to injury as chronic joint inflammation.

Multiple studies have shown that cannabis and its derivative drugs may indeed be effective at combating arthritis along with many other degenerative disorders in the joints, hips, and connective tissue. Because each of these conditions imply a large amount of constant pain, cannabis’ natural pain-fighting abilities make it a natural choice for relieving the effects of arthritis. Furthermore, treatment of musclo-skeletal pain with cannabis has been documented as part of western medicine since the 1700s.

Hand-in-hand with cannabis’ ability to relieve pain is its effectiveness as an anti-inflammatory immune-modulator, which means that it has the potential to be a very valid form of treatment for multiple types of chronic inflammatory diseases along with arthritis. Multiple sources cite ancient Chinese text from around 2000 BC that talks of cannabis reversing rheumatism. One of the non-psychoactive chemicals in marijuana, known as CBD or cannabidiol, has even been found to protect mice and rats in modern studies from large amounts of joint damage and improve their overall condition, further proven by the human studies whose results have cemented arthritis as a condition for which medical marijuana is legally able to be prescribed in states that have legalized the plant.

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