As brain injuries and concussions continue to be a primary focus for in contact and collision sports, a new (yet familiar) drug may be a solution for the future: Medical marijuana.
Interestingly, recent studies (including an excerpt from the recent CNN program “Weed 3”) have shown medical marijuana to have a positive impact on a number of neurological conditions, including neurological damage following ischemic insults (including stroke or trauma), or the treatment of neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and HIV dementia. Of course, much more research needs to be compleed to validate these findings, but early reports do appear promising.
Medical marijuana and sports head injuries
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in athletes with a history of repetitive head trauma. Increasingly more NFL players have been diagnosed with CTE in recent years, prompting a more through investigation into on-field playing rules, safety equipment, and medicinal approaches to prevent/respond to the symptoms of CTE. Herein is where medical marijuana may help, according to some researchers.
“We’ve found in some clinical research that cannabidiol, CBD, acts as a neuroprotectant, so in the parlance of pharmaceutical sciences, we could be using that as a prophylaxis against repetitive concussive injury,” reports Dean Petkanas, CEO of KannaLife Sciences.
Will medicinal marijuana be used in the future to help athletes with brain injuries? If so, will this be a watershed moment that prompts a recalibration of how all drugs are viewed within the context of American sports? To date, there are many conflicting messages, including the banning of medical marijuana (which may prove to be useful in brain injuries), yet the acceptance of various psychotropic and pain medications (including opiates and ADHD psychostimulants) that have well established and serious side effects and addiction rates. What is good, bad, right, or wrong when it comes to drugs in sports needs an up-to-date, comprehensive overhaul it appears when you take these points into consideration.
The future
Without question there are still social and political layers impacting views on medicinal marijuana, but for scientists it’s a search for the truth — and this is where critical thinking, objectivity, and empirical science are the primary concerns. And for the thousands for former NFL players suffering from neurological damage, the prospect of using medical marijuana is seen as a potential drug to preserve the quality of life, not something to use simply to get high. In fact, there are already strains of marijuana that do not include THC (the substance responsible for the high marijuana gives), which may allow future users to gain the benefits of marijuana without changing cognition or mood states.
As a researcher, I don’t have a “horse in the race,” so to speak, as my only interest is in learning about the most effective means to minimize future head injury risks, as well as successfully treat athletes who have been traumatized from on-field collisions. Will medical marijuana play a role in helping athletes in the future? That remains to be seen, but there appears to be interest by scientists in learning more about the effects marijuana might have on athletic contact brain injuries.
www.drstankovich.com
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