Doctors and researchers are still squinting through the smoke when it comes to understanding how cannabis actually works as a medical treatment. But a new National Cannabis Study might finally bring some clarity—by tracking around 10,000 patients and their responses to cannabis-based therapies.
This study is part of a larger Cannabis and Health Research Initiative, which is mixing and matching data from observational studies and electronic medical records to compare cannabis users with non-users. The goal? To separate fact from fiction and get a clearer picture of how (and if) cannabis is really helping patients.
“We have cannabis available as a therapeutic, but we don’t have the gold-standard data we do for other medicines,” says Ryan Vandrey, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University and one of the brains behind the initiative.
“Our mission is to decode the health impacts of therapeutic cannabis,” Vandrey adds. “We want to pinpoint which products actually work, which ones don’t, and which might be risky for certain people or conditions.”
And let’s not forget, cannabis isn’t just one thing. “There are hundreds of different cannabis products out there, each with unique properties,” Vandrey explains. “We’re aiming to cut through the noise, identify the real game-changers, and focus the science where it matters most.”
It looks like the era of guesswork in medical cannabis might finally be going up in smoke.
New Research Tools Could Clear Some of the Smoke Around Medical Cannabis | Johns Hopkins Medicine
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