More than half of patients stopped medical cannabis within a year, especially older adults. Discontinuation was unrelated to pain type or overall health:
New research shows that more than half of patients prescribed medical cannabis for chronic musculoskeletal pain stop treatment within a year. The findings raise concerns about the drug's durability as a long-term pain management option, particularly for older adults.
The study, recently published in PLOS One by researchers at the Rothman Institute Foundation for Opioid Research & Education, reported that 57.9 percent of 78 Pennsylvania patients certified for medical cannabis discontinued use within twelve months. Nearly half of these patients—44.7 percent—stopped during the first three months.
Researchers conducted a retrospective review, following patients newly certified through Pennsylvania's medical marijuana program to determine whether they renewed their certifications or pursued other treatments over a two-year period. Age emerged as the only statistically significant predictor of discontinuation: patients who stopped were, on average, about seven years older than those who continued (71.5 years compared with 64.5 years). Measures of baseline physical and mental health, assessed through PROMIS Global Physical Health and Global Mental Health scores, were similar between the two groups, suggesting that the decision to stop was not linked to overall health status at the outset.
Contrary to what some pain specialists might assume, the location of a patient's pain—whether in the lower back, neck, joints, or elsewhere—was not a significant factor in whether they discontinued cannabis treatment. While a slightly larger proportion of those who stopped reported low back pain, the difference was too small to be statistically meaningful. The results instead suggest that a variety of influences, including dissatisfaction with treatment, unwanted side effects, or choosing more definitive procedures such as injections or surgery, may be more important in determining whether patients continue using cannabis.
[...] The authors caution that their study, while among the first to carefully monitor one-year certification status for medical cannabis in orthopedic pain patients, leaves key questions unanswered. Specific details about cannabis formulation, dosage, and method of delivery were not consistently documented, nor were side effects, functional improvements, or patients' perceptions of relief. This makes it unclear whether discontinuation was due to a lack of effectiveness, adverse effects, financial burden, or even symptom improvement to the point where cannabis was no longer needed. They also point out that their sample was taken from a single institution's patient population and may not represent broader trends.
Journal Reference:
Mohammad Khak, Sina Ramtin, Juliet Chung, et al. Discontinuation rates and predictors of Medical Cannabis cessation for chronic musculoskeletal pain, PLOS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0329897)
(Score: 5, Touché) by Gaaark on Monday September 01 2025, @10:17AM (1 child)
So, the research was of no real use at all! Money well spent.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday September 02 2025, @02:53AM
Well, there is one part of it that's useful, we've now got a clinical study showing it's not addictive if the majority of users dropped it voluntarily.
I'm sure cannabis prohibition laws will be updated shortly to reflect this newest finding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2025, @10:20AM
I guess more and more researchers are trying to stretch their "research" to try to get funding for years or even till retirement?
Let's not ask any important questions this round, maybe just ask two questions the next round and so on? 🤣
Thing is if you don't ask soon enough, more of the patients often forget why they stopped.
(Score: 5, Funny) by looorg on Monday September 01 2025, @10:45AM
You know your weed is bad when you can't even get sick people to smoke it. Medical grade weed ...
You gotta love these conclusions. So something happened and the patient was unhappy. Right. OK. Great conclusion. "Unwanted side effects", getting stoned wasn't good enough anymore? Legally stoned one might add so the police can't even have issues with it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pe1rxq on Monday September 01 2025, @11:27AM (7 children)
How about the stigma associated with Cannabis?
Taking a regular 'pill' for any chronic condition is almost universally accepted by society.
However cannabis still has a huge stigma associated with it. Even in those places where it is legal.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday September 01 2025, @02:55PM (4 children)
Is there still stigma? Sure myself and a lot of other people think that you're a psychopath if you loose those noxious fumes in public, but there's edibles and just not smoking anywhere near people that are sensitive to the smell. But, the legal status on it in many areas changed rather a long time ago and it's not like we've had a massive problem with medical pills being abused.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday September 01 2025, @10:46PM (3 children)
Today, not much if any stigma, but people tend to hold on to outdated attitudes and people in their 70s definitely grew to adulthood when there was a stigma.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday September 01 2025, @11:19PM (2 children)
I'm not really sure how many of the oldsters still take that view. My Dad was never the tough on drugs sort, but he wasn't exactly in favor of them either; and he uses the topical stuff on his joints. I'd wager that there's a bunch of people that are in the same position where some of the products that can be produced now are preferable to the shots and pills that had been the only alternatives until recently.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday September 03 2025, @09:05PM (1 child)
I'm sure not all do. I'm not even sure a majority do. It's just a statistical difference that could explain the results.
It seems as people get older, they either dig in and become set in their opinions or they decide that none of it actually mattered that much anyway.
Some do a little of each depending on the topic.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday September 03 2025, @09:15PM
My personal suspicion is that it probably depends a bit on the form, the closer it is to things like pills and creams probably the more support there is for it. It is a bit of a moot point as the oldest Boomers are starting to enter their 80s and the main reason why they're likely to remain a power for the foreseeable future is their money and that Gen X isn't anywhere near as large as either Boomers or Millennials are.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Monday September 01 2025, @06:56PM
The only stigma is from people with an (R) in front of their names. Every poll taken shows in a straight vote it would be legalized.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Monday September 01 2025, @10:44PM
The age split called out seems to support that. More people who discontinued were in the age group that more likely thought pot was a sin or a crime.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday September 01 2025, @11:43AM
The problem with competing pain management drugs is that they're addictive, and that addiction can kill you. Ergo, the fact that the cannabis patients can stop easily when it's either no longer needed or they hate the side effects more than benefit from the treatment is an indication that we should try it before we try the more addictive and dangerous stuff like opiates.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 01 2025, @11:45AM (13 children)
It was stupid to outlaw weed. It was stupider to forbid medical research on cannabis. But, on the flip side, a lot of stupid people pinned a lot of high hopes on medical cannabis. There are long, long, very long lists of the things that cannabis is supposed to be good for. And, the lists of snake oil salesmen in America's history is even longer.
I'm pretty much convinced that weed is about as effective as an aspirin. Maybe it works, maybe there is little more than a placebo effect. I'm damned sure there is no magic substance, weed or anything else, that fixes everything that might be wrong with you. People recommend weed for everything, from hangovers, to PMS, to cancer, to depression, to hangnails. And, the medical profession is happy to cater to all of that, and more. Remember, this is the same medical profession that went along with the Sacklers, and prescribed Sackler branded opioids for all those same problems.
If you want to smoke, go for it. But weed isn't going to fix any more problems than alcohol has ever fixed.
Alternative für Deutschland
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Monday September 01 2025, @12:30PM
I hear good things about potassium cyanide. No patents, cheap, a single dose required. :large-grin:
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday September 01 2025, @01:32PM (1 child)
FWIW, LSD has been reported to improve the mood of terminal cancer patients in constant pain. It didn't exactly ease the pain, it just made it less important. (One study, multiple decades ago.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday September 01 2025, @06:47PM
How to Change Your Mind [netflix.com] by Michael Pollan (who also did an investigation into food) is a survey of psychedelics in a political context, some research into their therapeutic value, and a bunch of anecdotes.
If nothing else, the timeline helps put things in recent context [nature.com], and makes you realize that some historical mysticism, literature, etc. lines up closely with some psychedelic effects.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Monday September 01 2025, @02:26PM (9 children)
It was stupid to outlaw weed.
Not stupid, simply evil. The fed in charge of drugs who had been in charge of alcohol when it was illegal was unhappy with the allowance for combating heroin congress had given him, so he cooked up a new drug; one with few exceptions only used by Blacks, Hispanics, and musicians.
So he made up a bunch of lies about how it made one a murderous, insane rapist (see Reefer Madness [youtube.com]).
The equally evil Hearst had just bought a few forests to make paper out of and someone was making hemp paper at a tenth of the cost, so the Hearst newspapers shouted the evil lies about hemp from the rooftops.
Ironically, one of the lies was that it leads to harder drugs. It does, but only when it's illegal! The same people who sold illegal weed sold other drugs, too. Reagan's "war on drugs" was really a war on marijuana. "Got any weed, man?" "No, it's been dry. Want some coke?"
I knew a man who became homeless because they started testing for weed at his work. Cocaine only stays in your system for three days, weed over a month, so he stopped his Friday night pot smoking and switched to crack. After all, they lied about pot, why should he believe them about crack?
Outlawing cannabis was just evil. Harry Anslinger was an evil man.
But weed isn't going to fix any more problems than alcohol has ever fixed.
But alcohol can cure ALL of your problems, by overdose or disease. I've known people alcohol has killed. But as an old country singer pointed out, the only way weed can kill you is if a two hundred pound bale of it fell on your head!
The "patriotic" Defense Secretary Hegseth carries an American flag in his jacket's snot rag pocket.
(Score: 1, Troll) by aafcac on Monday September 01 2025, @03:03PM (5 children)
That's stating it a bit strongly, and it's not like there aren't longer terms issues with abuse of cannabis or a bunch of stuff that's legal purely because people refuse to adhere to the law. It's worth noting that Reefer Madness is more or less just an example of how adults have tried to educate young people on things they consider to be dangerous going back forever. There's an entire generation of people that are now in our middle age that got scared by huge number of pictures of diseased genitals because that was how they went about trying to discourage underaged sex. And that's if you're lucky enough to have gotten any sex ed at all in the late '80s and into the '90s. A bunch of areas didn't even give you that much.
As far as pot goes, yes the government lied about it, so did the people pushing the stuff, that kind of logic really deserves to be heavily punished.
In an ideal world, things like pot and alcohol wouldn't be legalized without some degree of research ahead of time. All this Libertarian nonsense about how we should be free to put whatever junk we want into our bodies really doesn't work if we're talking about a society where we're required to treat the consequences of whatever psychoactive stuff is ingested.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday September 01 2025, @05:21PM (1 child)
If you take the 'harm reduction' approach to drugs, there's a famous graph produced by Professor David Nutt [wikipedia.org]contrasting the harms of various (then prevalent) drugs [bbc.com] - Normalised scores out of 100 gives Alcohol coming in at 70/100, Heroin at 55/100, Crack cocaine at 54/100, Canabis at 20/100, Ecstasy (MDMA) at 9/100, and LSD at 7/100.
You can argue the criteria used in the multicriteria analysis if you want.
https://www.ias.org.uk/news/professor-david-nutt-and-colleagues-reiterate-alcohol-more-harmful-than-heroin/ [ias.org.uk]
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)61462-6/abstract [thelancet.com] "Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis"
(Copy here: https://bigfatgenius.com/2220%20Fall%202010/Nutt%20King%20Phillips%20-%20Drug%20Harms%20in%20the%20UK.pdf [bigfatgenius.com] )
https://archive.org/download/scienceDEEPWEB/Drink__%20The%20New%20Science%20of%20Alcohol%20and%20Health%20-%20Professor%20David%20Nutt.pdf [archive.org]
However, his message was unpopular with the then British Government, as he didn't give the answers they wanted politically.
Cannabis is not harmless, but it is less harmful than alcohol, according to at least one expert.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday September 01 2025, @05:32PM
Don't get me wrong, I do think that marijuana being legal, or at least decriminalized, is probably the right way to go with it, it's certainly less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco are. We're just in a bad position in some ways because we've got liars and frauds on both sides making up stories to justify whatever they prefer the outcome to be. I'd personally much rather that the decisions related to what is and isn't legal and under what circumstances to be based in some sort of research. Reefer madness was in bad faith, but I'm not sure that lying about the substance being addictive is helpful either. Nor is the increased concentrations in the available to use supply, which makes it difficult to figure out long term consequences when the concentration can be atmospheric compared with what was the norm in the '60s and earlier.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday September 03 2025, @06:03PM (2 children)
it's not like there aren't longer terms issues with abuse of cannabis
Examples?
It's worth noting that Reefer Madness is more or less just an example of how adults have tried to educate young people on things they consider to be dangerous
The problem is lying that a relatively safe plant causes rape, murder, and insanity. The entire propaganda was purely self-serving lies. We don't tell our children if they don't wear their bike helmet, Epstein will rape and kill them (unless we're psychopaths like Jimmy Kimmel who laughs at crying children).
As far as pot goes, yes the government lied about it, so did the people pushing the stuff
I can see you have never bought illegal marijuana. Nobody pushes it, you're a victim of the lying propaganda. What are the pro-weed lies you refer to?
In an ideal world, things like pot and alcohol wouldn't be legalized without some degree of research ahead of time.
You would like Russia and hate living in America where we have this (GASP!) horrible freedom to fuck our lives up any way we want. I don't want a nanny state, leave human beings alone and regulate corporations from abusing society and its people.
In an ideal world, they wouldn't have outlawed alcohol OR weed without a great deal of research! Your cart is strangely in front of your horse. Both prohibitions on substances that have been used since before written history were terribly bad for society!
The "patriotic" Defense Secretary Hegseth carries an American flag in his jacket's snot rag pocket.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Wednesday September 03 2025, @06:28PM (1 child)
First off, that's more or less exactly how that used to work, the connections between the consequences and the actions taken in those stories were barely any more believable than that.
Secondly, it was absolute bullshit for people to claim that the stuff isn't addictive and that there aren't any issues that come of smoking the stuff. People who use aren't necessarily any more honest than the prohibitionists are. People absolutely do push the stuff, perhaps not in your circles, but that was definitely the case when I was younger. One of the things that addicts do is that they lie about the things they're doing. The whole basis for legalization in the US was done on the basis that a bunch of people refuse to adhere to the law, so we need to legalize weed, not because there was any particular body of research to point at to suggest that it was wrong, but because of what cartels were doing with the money that people smoking pot were giving them.
Thirdly, when the tax payers and people paying health insurance premiums are no longer required to cover the cost when untested and unregulated drugs do harm, then people can exercise their personal freedom in that regard.
In an ideal world, they absolutely would have. The only reason why that wasn't the way that worked is because the necessary science to make those decisions didn't develop until much later. Before that point, you were stuck trying to eat random things to see what happened. It was far from ideal, but without advanced technology and testing equipment, your options largely come down to trial and error and a bunch of luck that what the animals are eating aren't toxic to humans. The whole notion that we can just not default to banning unknown substances is a privilege that comes with modern medical treatments.
And it's more than a little bit bullshit to say that prohibitions on both substances were terrible for society. That has varied a lot, the Saudis and most other Muslim countries seem to be doing just fine having alcohol banned and I must have missed the drug wars that broke out in places like Singapore and Indonesia where there remain strict rules on such things.
The whole business of the cart and the horse are absolutely bizarrely being misrepresented here, we're talking about substances that are not essential for human life here, nobody has ever died from not drinking or smoking pot.
This sort of thing is what I'm talking about, the people promoting the stuff are every bit as ignorant as the people that push prohibition.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday September 07 2025, @04:13PM
it was absolute bullshit for people to claim that the stuff isn't addictive
The definition of "addiction" has changed over the decades. There used to be two terms, addiction and habituation. Addiction was a physical change, like a heroin user's cold turkey, an alcoholic's DTs, a coffee drinker's headache. Habituation is an undesirable strong want for something you miss because you're used to. Gambling is one. You can be habituated to orange juice. They were merged when it was found that there were chemical changes when the gambler didn't make his bet. I that sense, it is addictive; if you smoke it every day you'll miss it when you can't. But you won't kill for it, as tobacco addicts have done, or prostitute yourself, steal, or otherwise degrade yourself for it. It simply doesn't happen.
The whole basis for legalization in the US was done on the basis that a bunch of people refuse to adhere to the law, so we need to legalize weed, not because there was any particular body of research to point at
There was plenty of research. I didn't start smoking it until I'd read a dozen books about it, all written by researchers. Legalization was done because there was no reason to outlaw something that had been in use likely since before Homo Sapiens existed as a separate species. Outlawing it was especially stupid considering all the harm the nation had endured under alcohol prohibition.
And it's more than a little bit bullshit to say that prohibitions on both substances were terrible for society.
They were terrible for American society, but other societies welcome an authoritarian nanny state like President Pinocchio and the Heritage Foundation want America to be.
This sort of thing is what I'm talking about, the people promoting the stuff are every bit as ignorant as the people that push prohibition.
The people promoting the stuff aren't trying to force you to use it, all I've seen is an attempt to unmask the lies that have been told for a century.
The whole notion that we can just not default to banning unknown substances is a privilege that comes with modern medical treatments.
I'm a believer in personal responsibility and freedom. I'm not a child and don't need to be banned by society from doing anything that doesn't hurt others. Especially something as benign as smoking weed!
The "patriotic" Defense Secretary Hegseth carries an American flag in his jacket's snot rag pocket.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 01 2025, @09:32PM (1 child)
If you're going to bring Hearst into the conversation, you also need to get DuPont in there too. For all of the US history, farmers actually had to meet quotas for hemp. America's ships needed sails and cordage to stay at sea, and it was almost all made of hemp. Then DuPont stumbled over nylon, which wasn't competing very well against hemp. So, of course DuPont jumped on the bandwagon to demonize hemp, despite the fact you had to smoke a bale of industrial hemp to get high.
Alternative für Deutschland
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday September 03 2025, @06:09PM
True, but afaik DuPont never villianized hemp, only came up with a cheaper substitute for rope.
The "patriotic" Defense Secretary Hegseth carries an American flag in his jacket's snot rag pocket.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday September 01 2025, @11:43PM
It's also worth noting that Nixon said, in private, that the reason he cooked up the "War on Drugs" because he saw it as an excuse to lock up black people and hippies. It was never about the dangers or lack thereof of the drugs.
And exactly zero of the dire warnings that were offered for why pot had to be illegal came true in places where it was legalized.
As for weed, my impression is that it really does work for some people, but doesn't for everybody. It's also plainly massively safer to try than other treatments for similar symptoms, so at least worth a shot.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday September 01 2025, @10:18PM
The age split between people who discontinued and people who kept going is ALSO the age split between people who likely called it "the devil's cabbage" in their younger years and people who probably at least tried it a few times.