Weed has crippled me!

Thank you Rose, much appreciated I'll look into acupuncture, though I'm such a ruddy sceptic. My friend is a Reiki master, and she just can't do anything for me. And I've seen what she can do to animals - it's awesome. My partner's very into alternative therapies and such - she teases me for being a Luddite. I guess I am.

 

Thanks Ed.. I think! Lesser of two evils for me, I'm afraid. No walky versus no sleepie. As I said, I've been six or seven years now, on and off, experimenting. Pretty conclusive.

 

More than ten years with the 'summer lung'

 

Telling someone to 'nut up' based on a guess is pretty harsh.

 

The risk of paralysis having a nerve removed is too great. There's fusing of the vertebrae or whatever, but that tends to shift the problem up or down. Yeah, Tramadol is pretty heavy stuff. It's been almost two years since I've needed it, and I'm fast being reminded of what a bodyblow it is!

Hi Renegade - my use massively pre-dates my back condition, but not the insomnia (for which weed seems the best cure) or the breathing problems, which have also returned after two years worth of trouble-free summers on the fags.

It seems to me that suggesting 24-7-365 weed use is going to have no negative side effects is simply naive, to the extent of suggesting there's no other life in the universe, or climate change denial. It just seems hugely unlikely. Any medical condition, pre-existing or otherwise, is going to be affected by a stoned brain, and there's no way it's all positive. A physical condition, for example, probably won't be helped by you losing your balance, so probably best to confine use to more sedentary activity.

And surely there are variables in production which could make a difference. If you were to pump a crop full of magnesium, for example, and then consume it, would that have absolutely no effect on a nervous system that relies on the correct balance of electro-chemicals to function normally? That's not a rhetorical question - I just don't know. But if someone else is gonna say that that's rubbish, I say 'can we have some proper medical research please?'. Because the number of people reporting similar side effects is startling.

 

Just found this. Think it might be useful to anyone else suffering as I have...

I am a nurse and a medical marijuana advocate. Many of my patients use Marijuana for pain control, however a number of people do actually have the opposite response in that their pain is increased and amplified. A great number of people actually have NO pain at all but when they smoke marijuana a number of pain receptors are awakened in the body creating pains in the back, chest, hands, feet etc. Some people report an icy cold sensation in their feet, hands and face. There is a reason and a cause for this.

This is called a paradoxical reaction and can occur without warning. You can be a long time smoker and suddenly have these symptoms. Usually once they start they do not go away. There may be times you can smoke without the pain occurring but more often then not, the pain occurs after getting high. One theory is that when Marijuana hits the Gabba receptors in the brain that control the body's autonomic response to anxiety. It triggers the brain to believe that you are in immediate danger much like the fight or flight response or panic attack. Since there is obviously nothing going on outside your body for you to focus your attention on, your mind begins to scan it's internal environment looking for threats. This causes pain receptors to misunderstand the "normal unnoticed body sensations" and turn them into or exaggerate them into a painful experience.

There is also a second theory based on clinical research of children with ADD and ADHD. As children with hyperactivity are given medications such as ritalin to control their unfocused mind. This drug calms them down, however if you give the same drug to an adult, it works like speed. These opposite reactions have been documented in MANY cases during clinical trials. The theory is that Marijuana users in the beginning can have a happy positive response to smoking but at some point the body begins to reject the drug because it determines that there is no longer a need for it. So in other words, the receptors in the brain that react to THC become burned out and begin rejecting the stimulation it provides and producing a response of pain or anxiety in order to alert the user that this drug is no longer needed by the body.

All in all this does occur, however many people that this happens to, simply stop smoking pot all together and become anti-marijuana activists. Chalking it up to growing up and becoming more responsible. So you don't hear all that much about it.

 

For anyone else who has suffered an adverse reaction, I'm continuing to dig up numerous threads online, with numerous complainants telling their stories of spasms and pain from smoking. I didn't raise the subject until I knew for sure there was a connection - I didn't even research it until then, stupidly - and I raised it here because I read several other threads here from people suffering like me, and numerous responses from friends of humanity like Mr Fooey (an apt name) there, who are lucky enough not to suffer, and therefore have no basis for opinion. I know it's a thing, they know it's a thing, and perhaps others who aren't making the connection between their symptoms and their use (and who may, as I have, made the problem worse by medicating with the very thing that is causing the problem in the first place) deserve to know it's a thing too. Best of luck everybody.