If it’s possible to find the right balance, and if the patient has the temperament for it, there is more evidence out of University of California, San Fransisco campus pointing to drugs controlling chronic pain. According to this Huffpost article:
The study, published this month in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, found that patients who use cannabinoids inhaled through a vaporizer, combined with long-acting morphine or long-acting oxycodone, experienced a greater reduction of pain than those who used opiates alone.
The study suggests patients with chronic pain may experience greater relief if their doctors add cannabinoids – the main ingredient in cannabis or medical marijuana – to an opiates-only treatment. The findings, from a small-scale study, also suggest that a combined therapy could result in reduced opiate dosages.
…
[The team] studied 21 chronic pain patients in the inpatient Clinical and Transitional Science Institute’s Clinical Research Center at SFGH: 10 on sustained-release morphine and 11 on oxycodone. After obtaining opiate levels from patients at the start of the study, researchers exposed them to vaporized cannabis for four consecutive days. On the fifth day, they looked again at the level of opiate in the bloodstream. Because the level of morphine was slightly lower in the patients, and the level of oxycodone was virtually unchanged, “one would expect they would have less relief of pain and what we found that was interesting was that instead of having less pain relief, patients had more pain relief,” Abrams said. “So that was a little surprising.”
The morphine group came in with a pain score of about 35, and on the fifth day, it decreased to 24 – a 33 percent reduction. The oxycodone group came in with an average pain score of about 44, and it reduced to 34 – a drop of 20 percent. Overall, patients showed a significant decrease in their pain.
“This preliminary study seems to imply that people may be able to get away perhaps taking lower doses of the opiates for longer periods of time if taken in conjunction with cannabis,” Abrams said.