Close-up of a cannabis plant with dense, crystal-covered buds and large green and purple leaves.

Latonya deserves to live pain-free


By Rena McCain

Happy Weedsday to all of you awesome people out there!

How many of you beautiful people know what trigeminal neuralgia is?

Well, I do. I don’t have it, thankfully, but my very good friend Latonya Whittington does. She has explained to me how excruciating the pain is in your face from it and the effects it has on the body.

I had never heard of if until I met Latonya. I can’t honestly imagine going through my day feeling that pain and the fatigue that surely must come along with it. How does one even cope?

How is it even fair to someone like Latonya Whittington, Alexis Bortell, Rick Simpson and others in society that the option to treat yourself with man’s oldest medicine is banned in this country. Not even is it just banned, but because it is banned, it stunts any real progress in researching exactly how much cannabis could help out a person such as Latonya.

So here it is, in a kind of nutshell along with the opinion that cannabinoids can be helpful in treating trigeminal neuralgia:

Trigeminal neuralgia is a disorder of paroxysmal and severely disabling facial pain and continues to be a real therapeutic challenge to the clinicians. While the exact cause and pathology of this disorder is uncertain, it is thought that trigeminal neuralgia caused by irritation of the trigeminal nerve. This irritation results from damage due to the change in the blood vessels, the presence of a tumor or other lesions that cause the compression of the trigeminal root.

The pain of trigeminal neuralgia is characterized by unilateral pain attacks that start abruptly and last for varying periods of time from minutes to hours. The quality of pain is usually sharp, stabbing, lancinating, and burning.

The attacks are initiated by mild stimuli such as light touch of the skin, eating, chewing, washing the face, brushing the teeth, and exposure to wind.

Although anti-epileptic drug therapy may be beneficial in the treatment of trigeminal neuralgia, up to one-half of the patients become refractory or intolerant to these medications. At present there are few other effective drugs. In cases of lacking effect after pharmacotherapy, surgical options may be considered.

Currently, there is a growing amount of evidence to suggest that the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis and individual cannabinoids may be effective in alleviating neuropathic pain and hyperalgesia. Evidence suggests that cannabinoids may prove useful in pain modulation by inhibiting neuronal transmission in pain pathways. Considering the pronounced antinociceptive effects produced by cannabinoids, they may be a promising therapeutic approach for the clinical management of trigeminal neuralgia. (Liang YC1, Huang CC, Hsu KS, Department of Pharmacology, College of Medicine, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan).

There are a lot of nerves in your face! And to think of them hurting all at once? That makes my face hurt and I don’t even have it!

It also makes me think of how hard one’s life must be to carry on normally with that much pain all the time. It also makes me think of how much it must suck to have pain pills or other medications that do not help alleviate the pain, either.

Now, for me, this is something worth fighting for! People deserve access to medicine that works for them, be it cannabis, or aloe — or ’shrooms. #illegallyhealed

Rena McCain is a co-founder of the Cannabis Open Carry Walks. Find her on Facebook at Rena McCain, or via Twitter @sassikatt24 and Instagram at ganja_grrl420.

 

 

 

 

 

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