Doctors back cannabis treatments for elderly people suffering pain

ELDERLY people with chronic pain including back and joint injuries should be prescribed cannabis instead of normal painkillers, doctors have said, as polling shows that three out of four over-55s would consider taking it.

Doctors said cannabis-based medicines should be used instead of opioid medications. Draft medical guidance published last month suggested prescription guidelines for patients with chronic pain will soon move away from drugs like paracetamol and opioid medications such as codeine.

The guidance suggests more than a million UK patients should instead be prescribed group exercise programmes or acupuncture.

But doctors have suggested that patients with back pain could benefit from taking cannabis oil, which was legalised for some conditions in 2018. Although it is not widely available on the NHS, some private clinics prescribe it.

A new poll by campaign group Open Cannabis suggests almost three-quarters of people over the age of 55 would consider cannabis medication, compared with two-thirds of the population as a whole.

The proportion of people over 75 with chronic pain in the UK could be as high as 60 per cent.

Dr Steve Hajioff, a former chair of the British Medical Association, said: “Cannabis-derived medicines can help fill the gap in helping people with chronic pain. Patients need to be made aware of the legal routes to access these treatments, so they are not exposed to the illegal market.” There is no reliable data on how many people in the UK use cannabis illegally for pain relief, but it could be in the millions.

Cannabis was legalised for medicinal purposes in 2018 following a campaign by children with treatment-resistant epilepsy.

Patients can now legally be prescribed medicine containing THC, the chemical compound in cannabis that makes recreational users “high” and which is otherwise banned.

Products that only contain CBD, another chemical in cannabis, are widely sold in high-street shops. But few if any prescriptions have been issued on the NHS, after doctors were warned off handing the oil to patients before full medical trials have taken place.

There have been no randomised controlled trials in the UK for medicinal cannabis, and none are expected until at least 2021.

A spokesman for Open Cannabis said: “Our aim is to show that medical cannabis is safe and effective.”