Cannabinoids in the Treatment of Neurological Disorders.

Abstract

The force of the recent explosion of largely unproven and unregulated cannabis-based preparations on medical therapeutics may have its greatest impact in the field of neurology. Paradoxically, for 10 millennia this plant has been an integral part of human cultivation, where it was used for its fibers long before its pharmacological properties. With regard to the latter, cannabis was well known to healers from China and India thousands of years ago; Greek and Roman doctors during classic times; Arab doctors during the Middle Ages; Victorian and Continental physicians in the nineteenth century; American doctors during the early twentieth century; and English doctors until 1971 when a variety of nonevidence-based remedies were removed from the British Pharmaceutical Codex. However, cannabis-based or cannabis-derived medicines have been almost entirely absent from American medicine and barely present in European and Asian pharmacopeias during the twenty-first century [1].