Cannabis Use in Individuals with Spinal Cord Injury or Moderate to Severe Traumatic Brain Injury in Colorado

In Summary:

Spinal cord injury patients report that medical cannabis helped them alleviate many symptoms of their injury including spasticity, pain, sleep disruptions, stress, and anxiety. Traumatic brain injury patients list their reason for use as reducing stress/anxiety and improving sleep. Both groups of patients reported recreational use prior to and following injury for a variety of reasons.

Dr. Caplan and the #MDTake:

Healing from traumatic injuries is never solely a matter of local tissue changes. The injured tissues, and the experience of being injured create ripple effects which can disrupt multiple other organ systems, and the entire experience of normalcy. A chemical stress response is one of the most common (and often adaptive) responses to an injury, but the burden of stress, adapting to a new illness, and associated loss of normalcy and sleep can be disastrous to the process of healing. As anxiety and sleeplessness snowball into daily problems themselves, a kernel of injury sometimes amplifies to become a life-altering change.

View this review (yellow link) or download:

This paper is also stored here:   http://bit.ly/2IXaXzP      inside the CED Foundation Archive

To explore related information, click the keywords below: