Botox and Medical Cannabis

Sorry, did mean to make a crack at ADHD drugs.

I have an friend who has been on Ritalin since he was a kid and is now a married man, highly educated with a couple of kids and a very demanding job. A very successful person. He does great on it and says the only side-effect is he has to chew a lot of gum because it gives him dry mouth. So I know at least one fantastic success story.

What I meant is that few drugs have been as studied as cannabis and few have had ALL their side effects studied to death like cannabis.

As with all drugs, a parent does not lightly ( I hope) put their child on any drug unless there is a clear need and the benefits seem to out weigh the detriments, as best they know.

At least with cannabis we can be pretty sure nearly all consequences are known can we can make a very informed decision.

As I said, this topic WAS about Botox, a deadly poison that paralyzes your muscles. Yet if I had a child with intractable, painful muscle spasms, I'd certainly consider this drug, just like I'd consider Ritalin if my child had very bad ADHD.

I'm so happy Ritalin has worked for your child and I hope everybody here finds a drug, a lifestyle or a higher being that helps them with their migraines!

I don't mean to branch too far off the topic, but are there many studies involving long term use of Ritalin? EG 15-20 years? That's one thing that makes me nervous about many of the pharmaceutical drugs.

As far as I know, only primate studies have been done at this point and they seem to indicate it is safe. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120718103140.htm

The big one seems to be slower growth which MIGHT leave a child smaller when they grow up or might just delay them reaching their full size. I haven't checked the most recent studies. One guy I know is in his 20s and has been on it since he was 12 or so. He WAS smaller than normal in middle-school and high school but now is 6 foot 3 or so, so if it reduced his final height that might have been a good thing :-)

You have to make that trade-off as a parent. You could end up with your child a drop out, out of work, even in jail or worst, or you can use an ADHD drug that might have risks but appears to be safe and effective.

But that IS my point about cannabis. It has been studied EXTENSIVELY looking for negative effects in long-term use. For the last 40 years in "modern" studies - since the formation of the NIDA and DEA. That's why I was skeptical about a new longitudinal study that somehow found a new negative effect in cannabis use by adolescents. Contrary to what a poster said, older studies don't become obsoleted if they were done properly. The scientific method doesn't somehow age and require studies be repeated over and over to see if you get different results, assuming they were done correctly int he first place.

I would feel safer with cannabis use by an adolescent, IF it was medically necessary, than for many pharmaceuticals. Just because it HAS been studied more than any drug in the history of mankind and few, if any, long-term negative effects have held up to study. If after 40 years nothing has really held up, I think we are pretty safe, even when a new study seems to indicate something missed.

charmed quark wrote:As far as I know, only primate studies have been done at this point and they seem to indicate it is safe. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120718103140.htm

The big one seems to be slower growth which MIGHT leave a child smaller when they grow up or might just delay them reaching their full size. I haven't checked the most recent studies. One guy I know is in his 20s and has been on it since he was 12 or so. He WAS smaller than normal in middle-school and high school but now is 6 foot 3 or so, so if it reduced his final height that might have been a good thing :-)

You have to make that trade-off as a parent. You could end up with your child a drop out, out of work, even in jail or worst, or you can use an ADHD drug that might have risks but appears to be safe and effective.

But that IS my point about cannabis. It has been studied EXTENSIVELY looking for negative effects in long-term use. For the last 40 years in "modern" studies - since the formation of the NIDA and DEA. That's why I was skeptical about a new longitudinal study that somehow found a new negative effect in cannabis use by adolescents. Contrary to what a poster said, older studies don't become obsoleted if they were done properly. The scientific method doesn't somehow age and require studies be repeated over and over to see if you get different results, assuming they were done correctly int he first place.

I would feel safer with cannabis use by an adolescent, IF it was medically necessary, than for many pharmaceuticals. Just because it HAS been studied more than any drug in the history of mankind and few, if any, long-term negative effects have held up to study. If after 40 years nothing has really held up, I think we are pretty safe, even when a new study seems to indicate something missed.

Ya, I am definitely not questioning someone's decision as far as giving the drugs to their child. Quite frankly, I may have benefited from those drugs myself when I was in highschool. It's just always scary to me when someone can be told to be on a drug for 15+ years, when it's unknown what being on that drug for 15+ years could do. Prolonged use of Botox is concerning to me as well.

tdu it seems that everything and everybody concerns you except your own problems. You feel free to judge everybody else and frankly this is getting tiresome.
I am not sure that anyone can trust your opinions after decadess of using cannbis becasue it is just possible that the constant use of marijuna might be clouding your judgemnt.

Who are you to judge such parental choice by questioning Charmed Quark about the difficult decisions that had to be made. I am sure such decision is never taken lightly.
You don't know the full situation, you are being simply cruel.

Mini wrote:tdu it seems that everything and everybody concerns you except your own problems. You feel free to judge everybody else and frankly this is getting tiresome.
I am not sure that anyone can trust your opinions after decadess of using cannbis becasue it is just possible that the constant use of marijuna might be clouding your judgemnt.

Who are you to judge such parental choice by questioning Charmed Quark about the difficult decisions that had to be made. I am sure such decision is never taken lightly.
You don't know the full situation, you are being simply cruel.

Where do you get this ridiculous nonsense from? Where in my post did I judge Quark in anyway? We are carrying out a discussion and I am asking him questions since he is knowledgable. Ask him if I have asked him anything that offends him. Or ask anyone else in the thread if I anything I posted insults their medication choices.

That post is completely ridiculous. YOU are the only one who has a problem with the discussion in this thread. Everyone else is enjoying an educational conversation. And, everyone else is carrying out a rational conversation.

READ my last post. I say that I could have benefited from those drugs myself in that post. Where do you see any sort of attack on anyone's decisions or anything cruel??? This falls into the category as your references to anyone here saying that Cannabis is a 'cure' for migraines. It never happened.

Lastly, do not attack me for what I choose to put in my body. Yes I use Cannabis. I also use various migraine medications, I have used anti-anxiety medication, and I have used drugs like Topamax which are WAY more concerning when it comes to possible effects they may have had on my body. But I do what I have to do to treat my condition. Are you going to comment on those choices as well? Are you going to go into other threads and comment on other people's medication choices as well? You are WAY out of line with that post. For you to post something like that on a forum dedicated to migraines and migraine treatments is completely insulting. It's sad that something like that is considered ok on this forum.

I don't mean to branch too far off the topic, but are there many studies involving long term use of Ritalin? EG 15-20 years? That's one thing that makes me nervous about many of the pharmaceutical drugs.

Yes, there have been long term studies on the use Ritalin in children. Some short term side effects are less appetite and trouble sleeping. I found however that neither was much different than what my daughter was like with out it. She always a picky eater and never slept.

Longer term side effects have centered on less growth, perhaps due to the picky eating. Doctors often recommend "breaks" during which they seem to catch up. In my daughters case she ended up over 5' 9", so I don't think it was much of a problem.

The most noted long term effects are mostly positive. Far less problems with incarceration and drug abuse than ADHD kids who went untreated for example.

A great resource on this topic is CHADD. www.chadd.org.
If you have friends or family struggling with this disease, CHADD has a lot of good information on it, the research, and various approaches for treating it. It does not push any particular approach, but serves as an information resource and support mechanism for families and for both children and adults with ADHD. I highly recommend it.

Long-term cannabis use and cognitive decline

I was thinking about this topic when I ran across a Scripps Institute saying THC inhibits the formation of amyloid plaque, the primary pathological marker for Alzheimer's disease. In fact, the study said, THC is "a considerably superior inhibitor of [amyloid plaque] aggregation" to several currently approved drugs for treating the disease

Of course, many drugs that work in the test tube never make it to working in actual people. So we'll have to see where this goes.

But this got me wondering if any large longitudinal studies have been done on the effect of marijuana on people's cognitive functioning. I was wondering if dementia is less in long-term users. Most studies that I have seen follow a small group of people, which is really not a reliable method ( they, for the most part, found no non-reversible effects).

Then I ran across this study from American Epidemiology: http://www.ukcia.org/research/CannabisUseAndCognitiveDecline.php

A large group of people followed for 12 years. They concluded there was no association of cognitive decline whether people were non-users, light, moderate or heavy users.

But when you look at the data breakdown you note that there is actually LESS decline in heavy users and in fact there is an obvious linear inverse relationship between use levels and cognitive decline. Linear relationships between dose and effect are what you look for to see if a drug really works. It doesn't have to be linear, some drugs work on a "threshold" modality, but it is reassuring when you see this.

The authors also noticed it but stated that it is not statistically significant, which is true. To quote: "Both light and heavy users of cannabis evidenced less cognitive decline than nonusers, although this finding was not statistically significant at the conventional level of p < 0.05 (model 1)." But it IS interesting. The author then spend several paragraphs talking about how cannabis COULD have caused decline and their study missed it (Since they probably received anti-drug funding, it is a bad result when you can't find harm).

There could, of course, be confounders that explain this - perhaps people who use cannabis are more educated ( there is an inverse relationship between early cognitive decline and education). Then researchers seem to have addressed this, but there are always socio-economic factors that can actually explain the data. That's the problem with longitudinal studies. They're great for unearthing interesting correlations but they don't really address the "why" of the correlation.

But this reminds me of the research looking for a correlation between smoking marijuana and lung cancer. Most of the well-done studies simply couldn't find a link and in fact there was a slight decline in lung cancer among the heavy users, just above the statistical noise. Researchers dismissed this as likely due to a confounder they hadn't figured out.

It wasn't until the discovery of cannabinoid receptors in the human body that they started looking at this again and discovered that THC has a slight anti-cancer effect. It actually was reducing the amount of lung cancer.

So who knows, maybe THC will keep you smarter instead of acting like a dumb stoner.