We all know the mainstream media doesn’t like to talk about cannabis too much. After all, they have to keep the peace with their advertisers, like alcohol brands and pharmaceutical companies. Their silence on the issue is particularly deafening given how much airtime they do devote to some serious problems cannabis can help with. Inspired by the Waking Times, here is a look at four science-backed cannabis health benefits that should have made mainstream news headlines.
1. Cannabis can protect people who drink alcohol from liver disease
Alcohol’s effects on the liver are well-documented, and now researchers have found something that reduces a drinker’s odds of developing common liver problems like fatty liver, cirrhosis, and liver cancer: Cannabis. According to researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, those alcohol users who use cannabis as well have a significantly lower chance of developing any of the aforementioned problems. Moreover, dependent users had much lower odds than non-dependent users of developing liver disease.
2. Cannabis can serve as an alternative to opioids
For as much as the mainstream media likes to talk about the opioid crisis, they are clearly not that concerned with helping to turn the situation around. They are doing a great disservice by ignoring the fact that cannabis could be used as a safer means of pain relief that does not carry the risk of opioids. For example, an Israeli study of cannabis use in the elderly revealed that 93.7 percent of participants noted improvements in pain, with a fifth of them able to quit or reduce their use of opioid analgesics after six months. The researchers concluded that cannabis is a safe and effective pain remedy in the elderly. With the National Institute on Drug Abuse reporting that more than 115 Americans are dying every day of opioid overdoses, a lot of lives could potentially be saved.
3. Cannabis can help in the fight against dementia
You’ll hear stories about the prevalence of dementia on the big news networks from time to time, with nearly 50 million people around the world believed to be living with the disease, but you won’t hear any mention of how THC has been shown in studies to reverse the aging process of the brain and improve mental processes, making it a great candidate for dementia treatment.
4. Cannabis can help those with cancer, tumors
We’ve heard lots of anecdotal evidence of people slowing or reversing cancer with the help of cannabis, and this has prompted researchers to study the matter. Not surprisingly, many of these studies have confirmed that cannabis can indeed kill cancer cells. In one study out of Complutense University of Madrid, brain cancer cells essentially committed suicide after being treated with THC, while healthy cells were unaffected, making it a far superior approach to chemotherapy.
Because cannabis has been so widely stigmatized, thanks in large part to federal drug laws, it has only recently started gaining more acceptance. More research is needed to find out what else it is capable of doing for our health, but it’s safe to say that helping alleviate the opioid crisis, preventing dementia, and fighting against cancer are a pretty good start.
That is not to say that using cannabis doesn’t have its potential downsides, such as causing effects like dizziness in some people, but there are quite a lot of benefits that are being completely ignored by the mainstream media, and people who rely solely on these outlets for their information could be missing out on a valuable tool for good health and well-being as a result.
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