How AIDS Patients Are Helped With Medical Marijuana
With AIDS patients, medical marijuana is popular, and it can help with the symptoms including reducing nausea, easing pain, and increasing appetite.
HIV attacks the immune system. It can result in painful nerve damage, anxiety, depression, vomiting, nausea, and significant weight loss.
Recent combination medical therapy has advanced to the point where AIDS patients live longer and the disease is more of a chronic disorder than a rapidly fatal one. This is part of the wonders of modern medicine, although the real wonder will be when the disease is simply eradicated! These medications have two effects: One is that they give patients hope, the second is they make patients sick. Nausea, diarrhea, fatigue, vomiting, and appetite loss turn into a way of life that simply has to be tolerated. Or does it?
Antiviral medications nicely control in most cases HIV progression. They unfortunately produce vomiting and nausea which is quite similar to cancer chemo patients.
Nausea and appetite can lead to cachexia in AIDS patients, which is termed wasting and leads to loss of lean body mass. In 1986 the FDA approved Marinol for weight loss from AIDS along with treating nausea and vomiting from cancer chemotherapy. For individuals with HIV, losing as little as 5% of their lean body mass can be life threatening.
When someone loses more than 10% of their body weight involuntarily, the CDC calls it AIDS wasting syndrome. Also this includes diarrhea and fever persisting for over 30 days. In addition to lean muscle tissue, they may lose tissue from internal organs like the liver.
Traditional medications like Marinol and Megace help with wasting. People on Megace are usually able to increase food intake by 30%. THC as Marinol increases appetite and maintains weight, although side effects include dry mouth and some psychological distress.
Mostly with these reasons, patients with AIDS report better results with smoking marijuana. When smoking, AIDS patients may smoke in just enough to help with symptoms. The help is typically substantial, and appetite stimulation is rapid.
Intake of marijuana has a definite place in treating weight loss and AIDS wasting. This place actually works potentially in conjunction with growth hormone or testosterone to maintain and/or restore lean body tissue.
Along with assisting AIDS patients to be able to intake more food, marijuana can have a beneficial effect on pain. In the course of the disease, patients may suffer from neuropathic types of pain, which is a burning sensation of the skin usually starting in the hands and/or feet. Marijuana has been shown to work well for neuropathic pain.
Along with this, AIDS patients report substantial mood improvement. Giving a psychological lift to AIDS patients, which represents a devastating disease, a psychological lift in addition to the other symptom improvements gives marijuana a definite advantage when compared with solo medications.
Marijuana has a definite treatment place for AIDs patients. By releiving nausea, appetite loss, anxiety, and pain it helps with multiple side effects. Smoking or vaporizing has been shown in small research studies to have a quicker onset and easier dosing than oral medications.
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