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If you’re not currently receiving any treatment for insomnia, or if your current treatment isn’t enhancing the duration and quality of your sleep, you may want to give cannabis a try.

Cannabis is legal in some form in 34 U.S. states, with five more pending legalization. Of those states, most have legalized all forms of cannabis for medicinal purposes, though a handful have only legalized CBD oil.

Despite increased legalization, there remains a major void in the medical cannabis market: health insurance. 

The reason major health insurance carriers won’t cover cannabis is they require their drug formulary approved by the FDA before it can be covered in their medical plans. With cannabis still classified as a Schedule I drug at the federal level, no such drug has been approved with exception of Epidiolex, an FDA-approved CBD-based epilepsy medication developed by GW Pharmaceuticals. 

There are a handful of health insurers that do provide coverage for cannabis, but they don't advertise their coverage, leaving patients instead to rely on word of mouth. But with cannabis and cannabis-based products growing more and more popular, so too is the need for cannabis-based health insurance. 

Introducing a Cannabis Health Plan

There have been a number of studies surrounding immunity, the flu and how the body responds to infection. These studies have also looked at how CBD and other cannabinoids could impact that response. Could CBD help people to feel better more naturally and possibly not feel as sick when they get sick.

Cannabinoids Suppress the Production of Cytokines in the Body

Cytokines are interleukin tumor necrosis factor. These are the chemicals that affect you when you get sick with a virus. Cytokines create body aches, nausea, headache, loss of appetite, all of the symptoms that make you feel terrible.

In one study involving mice, mice were either pretreated with CBD or they were left without any treatment with cannabinoids. Mice that were pretreated with CBD were then exposed to the flu virus. They had reductions in certain immune responses by up to 87 percent. The number of cytokines were significantly reduced. The mice didn’t feel as sick as their counterpart mice who weren’t pretreated with CBD.

It looked as though treatment with CBD in this model reduced the response to the viral infection. This allowed the mouse to continue to operate through his usual activities instead of becoming terribly sick with the flu virus.

This May Have Significant Implications in How We Might Manage Ourselves During Cold and Flu Seasons

With a few larger studies, we can look at human models and see how we could compare in a randomized trial. We could look at humans that are treated with CBD or other cannabinoids, and some that aren’t. Then analyze their response to colds or other infections. In the future, we may place CBD in the medicine cabinet right next to the probiotics. We could try to control our immune response to the diseases that affect our community in the fall and winter months.

Access to legal cannabis stores was linked with fewer opioid deaths in the U.S., a new analysis suggested.

The number of marijuana dispensaries in a county was negatively related to log-transformed opioid mortality rate, adjusted for age (β -0.17, 95% CI -0.23 to -0.11), reported Balázs Kovács, PhD, of Yale University School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut, and Greta Hsu, PhD, of University of California Davis Graduate School of Management.

This means that increasing the number of storefront dispensaries from one to two was tied to a 17% reduction in death rates of all opioid types, and an increase from two to three stores was associated with a further 8.5% reduction in mortality, Kovács and Hsu noted.

The relationship was stronger -- leading to an estimated 21% drop in mortality -- when only deaths from synthetic non-methadone opioids like fentanyl were considered (β -0.21, 95% CI -0.27 to -0.14), they wrote in The BMJ.

"We find this relationship holds for both medical dispensaries, which serve only patients who have a state-approved medical card or doctor's recommendation, as well as for recreational dispensaries, which sell to adults 21 years and older," Kovács said.

Two Ozarks communities, both with roughly 15,000 people living in them, are getting medical marijuana dispensaries.

Lebanon's first licensed dispensary opened Friday morning, and one in Carthage is expected to open Saturday.

Blue Sage Cannabis Company, located at 1210 Deadra Drive on the east side of Lebanon, attracted "several hundred" people for its grand opening, the owner of both stores told the News-Leader on Monday.

LeAnne Dickerson is an independent pharmacist based in Garden City and licensed in Missouri since 1997, according to state records.

"It went awesome," Dickerson said of the grand opening in Lebanon. Patients who came to the dispensary last weekend provided "really good feedback" for the patient-counseling staff.

One exciting development that the United States could see this year in terms of marijuana is a less restrictive attitude toward medicinal use. As part of the party’s campaign platform in the 2020 election, the Democrats, which are set to control the majority in Congress, revealed that “we will support legalization of medical marijuana.”

Although the statement is vague and could mean many things, the federal government is expected to make moves this year to further medical cannabis. Only we wouldn’t hold our breath on Americans being able to consume it by smoking.

Smoking is, by far, the most common consumption method for a lot of cannabis users. Rolling a joint or packing a bowl is just how medicating was done before legalization began to take hold across the country and bring to life a wealth of new products. Still, even with the advent of edibles, drinks and capsules, many people still enjoy smoking. And most don’t think it poses a significant health risk either. They believe that smoking marijuana is far safer than smoking cigarettes because it doesn’t contain all of the harsh chemicals used by the tobacco companies. However, recent studies show this claim is more myth than fact. Marijuana smoke may be just as harmful.

Researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston recently determined that marijuana smokers are putting themselves at just as much risk as those who use tobacco. Their study, published in the journal EClinicalMedicine, shows cannabis smokers have higher concentrations of dangerous toxins like naphthalene, acrylamide and acrylonitrile in their system than non-smokers. These chemicals have been linked to anemia, liver and neurological issues, not to mention cancer.  

The results are alarming considering that cancer patients often use marijuana to treat their symptoms.

Ireland’s Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly TD, has announced provision for the delivery and funding of the country’s Medicinal Cannabis Access Programme.

Ireland’s then-Minister for Health Simon Harris signed legislation to kick off a formal medical cannabis program in Ireland in July last year and it was expected the program would be up and running (funded) by the end of 2020. But better late than never.

Ireland’s Budget in October 2020 saw an extra €4 billion added to the Health Budget, and thanks to this extra funding the Medicinal Cannabis Access Programme has been added to the HSE (Health Service Executive) Service Plan for 2021.

“The purpose of this Programme is to facilitate compassionate access to cannabis for medical reasons, where conventional treatment has failed,” said Minister Donnelly. “It follows the clear pathway laid out by the Health Products Regulatory Authority in their expert report ‘Cannabis for Medical Use – A Scientific Review’.”

Work on establishing the program began back in March 2017 after the report was tabled; prepared at the request of Ireland’s Minister for Health – so it’s been a  long road to get to this point.

There’s been a lot of talk about how, and whether, cannabis can be used in place of antibiotics. Centuries of natural medicine traditions tell us ‘yes’ already, but now the Western medicine world is finally catching up. New research highlights how cannabis antibiotics are a likely and reasonable answer to the issue of disease-resistant bacteria.

If you haven’t tried delta-8 THC yet, then you’re using cannabis the old-fashioned way. Delta-8 provides a new way to use cannabis with less anxiety, and less psychoactive effects. This makes it the optimal form of THC for many people. Check it out to see for yourself. We’ve got all the best Delta-8 THC deals for you to get acquainted with this new form of cannabis medicine.

Let’s go back in time first

There are tons of natural medicine traditions that have existed on the planet through the history of man. Two of the more well-known, which are still in existence today, are Ayurvedic medicine out of India, and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) out of China. In Ayurveda, medical cannabis was used since 1000 b.c., with one of the reasons being as an antibiotic. This included topical use for skin infections, as well as for ailments like tuberculosis. Imagine that, information was figured out 1000 years before Jesus was supposed to have walked the earth, and researchers of today are only now catching up? Perhaps we should look at history more often.

When it comes to Traditional Chinese Medicine and cannabis, there’s a striking lack of information published, and not because it doesn’t exist. While most sites cite the lack of translation to Western languages for the void in information, this explanation sounds suspect. This is a popular topic, it goes against logic to assume that no one has bothered to translate for the English speaking world.

My guess is that as the pre-eminent natural medicine tradition, it bodes better for Western medicine practitioners to keep this information out as it tends to threaten the pharmaceutical industry (highlighted by this very article and the use of a natural medicine to combat bacterial infections). It is understood that cannabis has been written on within the medical tradition for at least 1800 years, and that all parts of the plant were used. Some publications say that hemp has been cultivated in China for as many as 4000 years. Again, there seems to be a block in getting this information to the Western world. You can draw your own conclusions as to why.