Page 21 - Delaware Medical Journal - January/February 2021
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TREATMENT
FIGURE 2
Distribution of percentage change in MME after medical cannabis certification (n = 63)
DISCUSSION
The results of this observational cohort study indicate that medical cannabis use may aid a pain management physician in their goal to reduce opioid use among chronic pain patients. Since the underlying pathology and the source of pain in the individuals examined, medical cannabis use could have played a large role
in allowing the individuals to decrease their opioid use. While
not quantitatively recorded, a large percentage of these patients displayed positive THC in urine drug screens during physician’s in some form. Together, these results suggest that medical cannabis may be useful as an adjunct treatment to help chronic pain patients reduce their dependence on prescription opioids for pain relief.
Although these facts are suggestive, this cohort’s observational design limits inference from our data, because the use of cannabis individuals examined in the data set. Additionally, our results may not be representative of the general population, as only a subset of patients receiving chronic pain treatment from a pain Finally, with the recent attention to opioid overuse and overdose, and pain management treatment consciously attempted to reduce the opioid use of patients, which occurred concurrently with
our study. As reported by the Delaware Department of Health
and Social Services, Delaware has displayed an approximately 10% annual decrease in prescription rates for long-acting and extended-release opioids and an annual decrease of about 20%
in the prescribing rates for high-dose opioids between 2017 and 2018.8 this factor. However, assuming that the physician(s) responsible for the opioid prescriptions followed the general trends in the
state of Delaware, it is unlikely that the reduction in opioid use observed in this study was exclusively due to the physician’s attempt to reduce the opioid use. Although it is not known if the statewide trends apply to this study, the observed decreased opioid use is larger than these trends in the state of Delaware, suggesting that it may be due to other factors, namely the use of cannabis.
FIGURE 3
Age of individual and change in MME after medical cannabis certification (n = 63)
Del Med J | January/February 2021 | Vol. 93 | No. 1
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