Cannabis for Chronic Pain: Case Series and Implications for Clinicians
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Chronic pain is one of the most common reasons for therapeutic cannabis use. OBJECTIVES: To describe therapeutic cannabis use among patients with chronic pain. METHODS: Patients with chronic pain who voluntarily indicated that they used cannabis therapeutically completed a questionnaire about the type of cannabis used, the mode of administration, the amount used and the frequency of use, and their perception of the effectiveness of cannabis on a set of pain-associated symptoms and side effects. The study was approved by the McGill University Health Centre Research Ethics Board. RESULTS: Fifteen patients (10 male) were interviewed (median age 49.5 years, range 24 to 68 years). All patients smoked herbal cannabis for therapeutic reasons (median duration of use six years, range two weeks to 37 years). Seven patients only smoked at night-time (median dose eight puffs, range two to eight puffs), and eight patients used cannabis mainly during the day (median dose three puffs, range two to eight puffs); the median frequency of use was four times per day (range one to 16 times per day). Twelve patients reported improvement in pain and mood, while 11 reported improvement in sleep. Eight patients reported a 'high'; six denied a 'high'. Tolerance to cannabis was not reported. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this self-selected case series must be interpreted with caution. Small doses of smoked cannabis may improve pain, mood and sleep in some patients with chronic pain. Clinical trials are warranted to test these effects. Further prospective studies should examine the patterns and prevalence of cannabis use among chronic pain populations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".