Sometimes in life people encounter such situations, which change them overnight. These situations are not your daily life’s simple ups and downs but something very serious that seems to hold the person in a state of a nightmare for a very long period of time.
This is the case with 44.7 million people in the US. These people have witnessed something which is so scary like natural disasters, combat or sexual assault that the pain and anxiety of the event follow them long after the incident.
After being exposed to some scary events in one’s life, a person develops a very serious form of anxiety known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. According to reports, 1 in 9 women is seen to be affected by this disorder in America. People are getting treatment from CBD companies like Proleve.com
Not just this, PTSD is a psychological condition which has been seen to be increasingly affecting people every year. There are not many treatment options available for PTSD. The medicines which are being prescribed are not successful in providing satisfactory relief to the patients.
But people suffering from this distressing condition no longer have to suffer anymore as studies have shown promising results in the effectiveness of treatment of PTSD with the help of Cannabis. Many states in the US have accepted the use of marijuana for PTSD, which is good news for the patients who have been searching for an alternative solution.
More about PTSD:
To know about the solution to the problem of PTSD, it is necessary to know about PTSD in a little detail. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a form of mental disorder which has been triggered in a person’s body as a reaction to a traumatic experience in the past and because of the past incident, the body suffers an extreme level of anxiety.
Some of the symptoms of this disorder are:
- Nightmares
- Flashbacks
- Episodes of a panic attack
The people who are prone to developing PTSD in their life later are those who have witnessed traumatic events like, major accident, loss of a loved one or sexual assault.
The amount of stress that a person has to suffer while having a PTSD episode highly depends on the changes that were brought about by the nervous system chemistry during the traumatic event. The severity of the symptoms also depends on how extremely the person was affected during the event and on that basis, the variety, as well as the intensity of the symptoms, are brought about by the stress hormone and adrenaline release which causes the patient to have a PTSD episode.
Some misconceptions about cannabis:
Yes, cannabis is the same plant which the weed smokers use to get a pleasant high, but there is more to this plant than just being used for recreational purposes. There are around 80 different chemical compounds found in cannabis. Each has their own characteristics. Most of the people are familiar with only the two of its famous compounds, namely CBD or THC.
THC is the main compound which has the psychoactive property. It also has some medicinal value though it is a psychoactive compound.
CBD is different from THC because it doesn’t have any psychoactive properties but has many positive medicinal benefits which can be used for the treatment of many diseases.
Most of the diseases which the cannabis plant seem to solve has been due to the positive effects of the compound CBD, but in case of solving problems of PTSD patients, a combination of both CBD and THC may be needed.
How CBD and THC help PTSD?
A cure of PTSD has still not been found, but scientists are very hopeful on the fact that medicinal cannabis is going to be successful in curing this condition when they are a little bit clearer about the workings of our endocannabinoid system.
The presence of anandamide, an endogenous cannabinoid has been seen to influence the levels of PTSD. Moreover, THC and the other marijuana compounds have also been observed to activate the same receptors as anandamide.
Scientists were able to draw a correlation that people suffering from PTSD had a very low level of anandamide in the body, which led them to the conclusion that a deficiency of the endocannabinoid may be the major reason behind PTSD.
So this explained the effectiveness in treating PTSD by cannabis. Cannabis can make up for the deficiency of the endocannabinoid in the body lowering the symptoms of PTSD patients.
Not just lowering of the symptoms but the best part of using cannabis for treatment of PTSD is that it has been found to make the patient completely forget about the negative sensations brought about by the traumatic event.
Clinical Trials:
It is just recently that PTSD has been approved to be a viable condition for Marijuana treatment. Therefore, the clinical trials of marijuana on PTSD are still to be started in full swing. It is also partly due to this being very recent news that many scientists didn’t get approval for their studies earlier. CBD Gummy Slices have been found useful. The evidence which has been found from some of the studies are as follows:
- Martin Lea conducted Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). According to this study, it was found that PTSD is the result of the endocannabinoid deficiency in the patient’s body. That endocannabinoid deficiency is mainly of cannabinoid name Anandamide. He drew the conclusions that cannabis helped to fill up this deficiency as well as greatly reduced the stress of PTSD. Moreover, cannabis may also be able to completely eliminate the experiences of the traumatic events.
- An Israeli scientist also conducted a research involving 10 chronic sufferers of PTSD. In this study the researcher made the patients take a mild dosage of 5mg of THC in addition to the traditional synthetic medicine. The result of this study was that only 3 out of 10 patients had an episode of PTSD later. So the study concluded that orally administered THC was safe and tolerable by chronic PTSD patients.
- Good news just came through a researcher of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. This researcher who just had his study approved from the United States Drug Enforcement Administration has got a finance of 156 million US dollars to conduct a large study on PTSD and the effectiveness of cannabis in treating this condition. Now, we may be just some months away from solving the mystery of the problems associated with PTSD.
