The Plant, the Whole Plant and nothing but the Plant
Although not the first such study, researchers in Milano, Italy, recently presented a study on whole plant extracts of Cannabis formulations to treat neuropathic pain. If you’d like to read the study, please see the reference at the end of this blog.
After reading the results, researchers learned that extracting a single active ingredient from cannabis does not produce the ends desired. This is one more well designed, although “rat-based”, study encouraging us to realize that including all genetic variations of the whole plant in medications will probably produce better and safer drugs than extracting one cannabinoid at a time.
Researchers might not be achieving the effects they desire, but this might be the result of ignorance in the knowledge of manipulating cannabinoids, or it might be that the whole plant is in fact “the medicine”. Certainly the ratio of the various cannabinoids in different strains will greatly vary, but at the very least we can say that overall, cannabis is an extremely safe medication.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18618522
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