Preventive migraine treatments are not painkillers (beta blockers, anti-epileptics, and more, among which the CGRP blocker described in the article).
https://www.ichd-3.org/8-headache-attributed-to-a-substance-...
2. It depends on what is causing your migraines. I have a family member that will smoke occasionally if the migraines get bad enough. But they also have allergies, and sometimes smoking irritates them. That means that she has a small chance of the headache changing forms. One type of pain traded for another.
3. The situation is pretty horrible. I don't have them, but they run in my family. I've had to pick a person up because they got an aura while driving. I've known another that goes literally months with headaches. The pain gets bad enough that folks near "If I overdose, at least the pain stops". It can literally disable folks for hours. Cannabis doesn't always work well enough and doesn't prevent them. Most things that help with the pain still disable folks enough that they can't drive nor do their work.
2. You don't have to smoke it.
3. It doesn't work for all, but that is not an argument to deny it to those that they find it works for them.
2. Of course not. But that takes away from the ease of above: The person in question gets some irritant effects from the smoke, but also tends to get allergic reactions from random stuff... like corn pollen. The same person will try about anything legal.
3. I'm not argueing that at all. I'm actually very pro-legalisation, both for recreational use and for pharma use (not only with pot, but including drugs I wouldn't personally ingest). I generally push there to be separate categories for the uses, in part so we can specialize (I think this will happen). But I also try to push back at cure-all sorts of language, and this was more to demonstrate that even with it legal, migraines are still horrible and it doesn't prevent them. In a best-case scenario with this new medicine, a person would have the prevention available plus a variety of treatments to treat the ones they still get, including cannibus if it happens to be right for them.
I am skeptical of anecdote because half of my family is Mexican and the grandmothers on that side of the family are convinced that being cold causes colds or that homeopathy actually works. But in reality it’s just quite literally old wives tales not backed by any reputable, reproducible studies.
To be clear, I am not disputing that cannabis could have some beneficial effects, but the science should be there before we start suggesting that government is up to some conspiracy to boost pharma profits.
Am marijuana is still illegal in most EU countries — so don’t blame pharma for not manufacturing and testing cannabis medications, blame the democratically elected EU governments for trying to “protect” people from making their own decisions about what to ingest.