Treating Migraines with Marijuana

If you’ve ever experienced a migraine, it’s one of the most debilitating lasting pain one can ever experience. Currently, Migraine suffers treat current pain with over-the-counter medications, prescribed medications and additional natural therapies such as a cold shower to decrease the pressure of the blood vessels that’s causing the migraine to persist. Medical marijuana has been a proven medication that has helped numerous diseases and disorders, now we know, taking medical marijuana while experiencing a migraine decreases the swelling blood vessels in the brain that cause painful migraines.

Vasoconstriction and Migraine, causes blood vessels to shrink

Migraines are something that doctors have been slow to come up with a universal solution for. As a result, those that suffer from them have come up with many home-remedy type tricks that get their headaches to cease. One of the most unpleasant but effective of these migraine treatments is taking a cold shower. The rapid lowering of your body temperature causes your blood vessels to constrict, something known in medical science as vasoconstriction. This constriction brings relief from the intense pain and aura that can come with migraines. While that is all well and good, you may be wondering what that has to do with medical marijuana.

Vasodilation and Migraine, increases pressure in brain

Generations of research have made a connection between vasodilation and migraine. This has been demonstrated on numerous Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans of migraineurs in the past several decades. The exact relationship between the swelling of the blood vessels and the pain associated with a migraine are not clear, but treating one often causes the other to cease. It has been suggested that the dilation causes pressure to build up in the brain, but this does not explicitly account for the tendency for migraines only to be on a single side of the head. This is one of the great conundrums of modern migraine science. Nonetheless, when a migraineur is able to reduce or reverse the dilation in their blood vessels, the pain tends to stop.

Marijuana and Vasoconstriction, helps shrink the blood vessels pressure

It turns out that marijuana is one of the quickest acting cerebral vasoconstrictors available and has the ability to treat migraines. Those that can get migraine relief from it often notice a benefit within three minutes of smoking or vaping. Therefore, if you happen to be someone that has benefited from cold showers in the past, marijuana may just be a more pleasant option. The dosage required tends to be high compared to dosages for other common cannabis applications, though. It is generally best to use hash or hash oil, since it does not require an extended medicating session for large enough doses. The expectorant qualities of the drug tend to induce painful coughing, and using a concentrate reduces the number of times coughing is induced.

Choosing a Delivery Method

In those states with dispensaries, locating a concentrate like honey oil or hash is easy enough. However, if you live in a state without a distribution system in place, you may consider doing an extraction yourself. In these cases, bubble hash or ethyl alcohol reductions tend to be the safest. You should avoid Butane extractions or any others that use combustible gases unless you have a lab and chemistry training due to the danger of explosions. Additionally, any concentrate you use should be free of any chemical odor, since it may indicate the presence of residual solvent in the product. The last thing a migraineur needs is a potential trigger in their medicine.

In Conclusion

If you are a migraineur, you are likely familiar with the drug experimentation that comes from consultation with a neurologist. Drugs like butalbital, topiramate, and hydrocodone are effective for wide swaths of the populace, but dealing with constant debilitating intoxication, the fear of blindness, or lifelong physical addiction can drive people to look for other solutions. For those in states that allow for medical marijuana, it represents a medication that comes with far fewer risks than those offered by the pharmaceutical industry. Whether you finally find relief from medical marijuana or not, at least you can check another medicine off your list of those that might have worked.