OTC painkillers are almost useless for significant pain levels. Think levels of pain where coherent speach is basicly impossible without medication. Unfortunatly that's only about an 8 on the 1-10 pain scale.
For real pain there are several drugs that rather than just blocking the sensation tone down the importance of pain. Pot, falls into this group and relative to the benifit has few side effects.
Considering that pot doesn't help (me) with common pains such as headache, back pain, tooth pain, I'm led to believe it doesn't help either with extremely severe pain. Where there any scientific studies that tackle those questions?
I'm all in favour of legalisation, but the medical trend sounds like a big hypocrisy to me. I'm certain some patients benefit somehow from the effects of THC or CDB, but pretty much all cannabis users are recreational.
I used to vape for pain from nerve compression after I went through a couple of unsatisfying treatment options - and no otc painkillers even touch it so that's that. There's some studies and anecdata showing that pot is potentially helpful for neuropathic pain, which is a different and very hairy beast.
From my experience, it only tones down the sensation of pain at best, maybe just a placebo. More often I would just get high as a kite to stop caring about pain and/or to be able to sleep easily. Not that that's a bad thing but... in the end I tried another prescription option and get most of the same toning down/drowsiness effect without bad side effects for far cheaper, so that was the end of that.
No doubt many users just want to use it recreationally, but enough people are motivated to study medicinal uses, so that's good. I think there is some potential here for that.
For real pain there are several drugs that rather than just blocking the sensation tone down the importance of pain. Pot, falls into this group and relative to the benifit has few side effects.