Medical cannabis
marijuana used medicinally
Medical cannabis, medicinal cannabis or medical marijuana (MMJ) includes cannabis products and cannabinoid molecules that are prescribed by physicians for their patients. The use of cannabis as medicine has a long history, but has not been as rigorously tested as other medicinal plants due to legal and governmental restrictions, resulting in limited research to define the safety and efficacy of using cannabis to treat diseases.
There is mixed and inconclusive evidence on the benefits of cannabis-based medicines, frequent mild adverse effects, and generally low-to-moderate quality of evidence. Cannabis-based medicines may offer modest relief for chronic, especially neuropathic, pain and slight improvements in function and sleep in chronic pain patients, but evidence is limited and inconsistent; mild harms may outweigh the benefit and placebo effects may influence trial outcomes. Recent clinical reviews have concluded that evidence remains insufficient to support the use of cannabis or cannabinoids for most medical indications, emphasizing that modest potential benefits must be weighed against established risks.
Short-term use increases the risk of minor and major adverse effects. Common side effects include dizziness, feeling tired, vomiting, and hallucinations. Long-term effects of cannabis are not clear. Concerns include memory and cognition problems, risk of addiction, schizophrenia in young people, and the risk of children taking it by accident.
Many cultures have used cannabis for therapeutic purposes for thousands of years.
The public source identifies “Medical cannabis” as marijuana used medicinally. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Medical, cannabis and marijuana.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1033379. The Library of Congress control number is sh99010191. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Medical cannabis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.