What About Medical Marijuana for Chronic Pain Management?

Written By: Dr. Stephen F. Grinstead, LMFT, ACRPS, CADC-II Date: April 14th, 2009. Topic: Member Blogs.

Last week I conducted a three day Addiction-Free Pain Management® (APM) Certification Training for the Best Care Treatment Services program. As you may know Oregon is one of the Medical Marijuana states and many of the people Best Care sees are on Medical Marijuana. Many of the clinicians asked me my thoughts about this issue and I’m more than happy to share my views.

First of all there are many risk factors associated with marijuana, especially smoked marijuana, that must be considered not only in terms of immediate adverse effects on the lung; e.g., bronchi and alveoli, but also long-term effects in people with chronic diseases and those with a poor immune status. Another major problem I have with someone smoking marijuana as a medicine is the inability to regulate the dosage and, even more important the delivery system.

The level of THC varies so greatly in the marijuana that is currently available, that coming up with a therapeutic dose for smoked marijuana is extremely difficult. In addition, marijuana has other ingredients that may have problematic side effects. Then there is the dangerous delivery system—the issue of smoking it. The components of the smoke are hazardous, especially in the immuno-compromised patient. No other medication we have is administered that way because of the potential dangers.

Several years ago (about 2000) I wrote an article titeled The Mecical Marijuana Controversy. This January I posted a new article on our Aricle Page that you can download for free; my new article is titled 2009 Medical Marijuana Update (below you will find a link to download that article). Since my original article in 2000 there has been significant research on THC and other cannabinoids that do show promise for chronic pain management that you can learn about in my new article.

To learn more about medical marijuana and chronic pain management please check out my article 2009 Medical Marijuana Update that you can download for free on our Article page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are working with people in chronic pain management or are living with chronic pain yourself and have any resistance or denial and want to learn how to develop a plan for helping to identify and manage denial please go to our Publications page and check out my book the Denial Management Counseling for Effective Pain Management Workbook. To purchase this book please Click Here.

We have two more APM™ Certification Trainings scheduled this Spring—one in Sacramento California in May and the one at Valley Forge Medical Center and Hospital in June. It’s not to late for people to sign up and in fact by mentioning this Blog I will make sure you get a $20 discount for either training. To get this discount you must call Ellen at (916) 575-9961 and ask her for the discount. Also, for these and other upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.

To listen to a radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to this interview.

To read the latest issue of Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please Click here. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, please Click here and input your name and email address. You will then recieve an autoresponse email that you need to reply to in order to finalize enrollment.