Recently I spoke to Brian Schmidt, a researcher at NYU’s Capstone facility whose life is dedicated to oral cancer. He’s trying to find medications that help his patients avoid the pain of their illness. For reasons that remain unclear, oral cancer is the most painful cancer. It is also difficult to treat the painful symptoms, so when Dr.Schmidt found out about the analgesic effects of cannabis at a pain conference he was prompted to put together his own study.
Schmidt got a team together and went about testing the effects of cannabinoids as an analgesic on rats. However over the course of his study he realized that not only were cannabinoids helping to decrease pain, they also arrested the development of tumors. While great news, this meant that Dr. Schmidt had to do another study to answer the question that arose out of his first study: “Do cannabinoids ease pain because they decrease tumor size, or do cannabinoids ease pain because of an explicit analgesic effect?
