Abstract

Chronic pain affects millions of people, and many turn to medical cannabis for relief. However, scientists debate whether cannabis truly reduces pain or if patients feel better simply because they expect it to work (placebo effect). In this study, we looked at 329 people who used medical cannabis and analyzed the chemical makeup of their treatments. Using machine learning, we tested whether the specific chemicals in cannabis could predict who would get pain relief. We found that patients’ pain improvement could be predicted from the chemical content of their cannabis, even though patients didn’t know what chemicals they were receiving. This suggests that cannabis provides real pain relief beyond just patient expectations. These findings show that medical cannabis has genuine therapeutic effects for pain management.