Marijuana linked to ‘unbearable’ sickness across US as use grows following legalisation
‘The pain was unbearable, like somebody was wringing out my stomach like a washcloth’
- Roni Caryn Rabin 9/4/18
By the time Thomas Hodorowski made the connection between his marijuana habit and the bouts of pain and vomiting that left him incapacitated every few weeks, he had been to the emergency room dozens of times, tried anti-nausea drugs, anti-anxiety medications and antidepressants, endured an upper endoscopy procedure and two colonoscopies, seen a psychiatrist and had his appendix and gallbladder removed.
The only way to get relief for the nausea and pain was to take a hot shower.
He often stayed in the shower for hours at a time. When the hot water ran out, “the pain was unbearable, like somebody was wringing my stomach out like a washcloth”, said Hodorowski, 28, a production and shipping assistant who lives outside Chicago.
It was nearly 10 years before a doctor finally convinced him that the diagnosis was cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, a condition that causes cyclic vomiting in heavy marijuana users and can be cured by quitting marijuana.
Until recently the syndrome was thought to be uncommon or even rare. But as marijuana use has increased, emergency room physicians say they have seen a steady flow of patients with the telltale symptoms, especially in states where marijuana has been decriminalised and patients are more likely to divulge their drug use to physicians.
“After marijuana was legalised in Colorado, we had a doubling in the number of cases of cyclic vomiting syndrome we saw,” many probably related to marijuana use, said Dr Cecilia J Sorensen, an emergency room doctor at University of Colorado Hospital at the Anschutz medical campus in Aurora, who has studied the syndrome.
Dr Eric Lavonas, director of emergency medicine at Denver Health and a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, said, “CHS went from being something we didn’t know about and never talked about to a very common problem over the last five years.”
Now a new study, based on interviews with 2,127 adult emergency room patients under 50 at Bellevue, a large public hospital in New York City, found that of the 155 patients who said they smoked marijuana at least 20 days a month, 51 heavy users said they had during the past six months experienced nausea and vomiting that were specifically relieved by hot showers.
Extrapolating from those findings, the authors estimated that up to 2.7 million of the 8.3 million Americans known to smoke marijuana daily or near daily may suffer from at least occasional bouts of CHS.
For complete article https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/marijuana-us-sickness-nausea-stomach-pain-symptoms-hot-shower-colorado-chicago-medicine-health-a8295491.html