Can cannabis ease your nerve pain? Researchers increasingly doubtful

Munich (dpa) – In recent decades, around 50 countries have permitted the use of cannabis for medical reasons, following claims of its apparent effectiveness against pain, depression and inflammatory bowel conditions, despite concerns about the drug's much-discussed links to psychological disorders such as psychosis. But according to researchers led by Winfried Häuser of Germany's Technical University of Munich, the jury is still out when it comes to whether cannabis helps ease chronic nerve pain. In a paper published by the Cochrane Review, a medical journal, the team said there is little to no "high-quality evidence that cannabis-based medicines reduce neuropathic pain more than placebo across the three types of medicines." "While some small improvements were reported by patients," the researchers said, such differences "were not large enough to be considered clinically meaningful." "Due to a lack of robust evidence, the benefits and harms of cannabis-based medicines are unclear," the researchers asserted in their paper. "We need larger, well-designed studies with a treatment duration of at least 12 weeks that include people with comorbid physical illnesses and mental health conditions to fully understand the benefits and harms of cannabis-based medicines," said Häuser. Cannabis has been touted as a potential difference-maker for sufferers of such nerve pain as conventional treatments often do not work either. However, people taking cannabis to treat nerve pain instead saw "increases in symptoms such as dizziness and drowsiness," the team reported, citing what recreational smokers of cannabis will recognize as among the typical effects of the drug. The researchers are the latest to question the medical efficacy of cannabis. In December 2025, a University of California Los Angeles team said that "evidence remains either inconclusive or lacking." Another group of scientists led by the University of Oregon's Roger Chou said they found no more than "limited short-term benefit for chronic pain" but "increased risk of adverse effects" from using cannabis as a medicine. The following information is not intended for publication dpa spr coh

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