Cannabis Is No Better For Pain Relief Than A Placebo, Claims New Study

Living with any kind of pain is tough. It changes a person. They can no longer act like their normal self because they are not feeling normal. They are affected by the pain.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, more and more people are suffering from chronic pain. According to 2016 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the U.S. alone some 20.4% of adult Americans, 50 million people, suffer from pain. Every year, more and more of them are turning to medical marijuana to ease their aches. Is it working?

The question remains – does cannabis help treat pain?

A new meta-study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association claims that cannabis is no better at relieving pain than a placebo.

Meta Study Highlights

Researchers analyzed the results of randomized controlled trials in which marijuana was compared with a placebo effect for the treatment of clinical pain. The 20 studies that were included focused on comparing changes in pain intensity before and after the treatment.

A plethora of different pain conditions were covered, including neuropathic pain. Also, various types of cannabis products were assessed, including THC, CBD and synthetic cannabis. Methods of administration also varied from smoking and oils to pills.

The majority of participants were female (62%) aged between 33 and 62. While most of the studies were conducted in the U.S., U.K. or Canada, there were analyses from Brazil, Germany, France, the Netherlands, etc.

“The findings of this systematic review and meta-analysis suggest that placebo responses contribute significantly to pain reduction in cannabinoid clinical trials,” the authors wrote.

The results confirmed the findings of last year’s meta-analysis, revealing that some placebo-controlled cannabis trials fail to ensure correct blinding, which can lead to an overestimation of the effectiveness of medical marijuana. What’s more, the research also showed that many participants were able to distinguish a placebo from active marijuana, making their assessments of the effectiveness biased.

Media Coverage – An Important Contributor

The study also analyzed the way the media usually cover similar research results, because it has been shown that media coverage can impact the expectation that a person has of a treatment.

Researchers measured media presence via Altmetric, which is a method of evaluating mentions of a study in the media, blogs and social media.

They discovered that the overwhelming majority of news items reported that marijuana had positive results as a treatment for pain. This indicates that media coverage of marijuana tends to be positive, regardless of real study results.

“We cannot say with 100 percent certainty that media coverage is responsible for the high placebo response observed in our review,” wrote Filip Gedin, a postdoctoral pain researcher at the Karolinska Institutet. “But given placebos were shown to be just as good as cannabis for managing pain, our results show just how important it is to think about the placebo effect and how it can be influenced by external factors – such as media coverage."

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