cannabis as an Alternative medicine

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Mead [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Not all patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder are on lithium, or one specific medication to treat it. There are also plenty of medications with off label uses. You're out of your league here bud.

Oh totally, I never meant to suggest that they were, I just used Lithium as an example because it's the most common drug associated with Bipolar.

But that doesn't change my point: pot will not let a manic person get sleep, unless they smoke so much that they pass out (at which point they won't get good sleep). It won't make your speech slow down, or make you not want to max out your credit cards, or remove the fiery fiery passion that accompanies bipolar mania (or even hypomania).

It similarly won't cure depression either. Again, I'm not saying it can't help with bipolar symptoms ... though I'm not saying it can either. What I've seen suggests it can help, but I defer to science and there's not enough published research on the topic to say one way or the other.

I'm just saying if you can drop all your meds and live symptom-free just by smoking pot, you probably (again, I'm not a psychiatrist) didn't have bipolar. It seems much more likely to me that the guy's girlfriend got a bad diagnosis, since there's ample evidence that happens fairly often. The brain is a hard thing to diagnose, and there are plenty of other conditions with overlapping symptoms: even ADHD can be misdiagnosed as bipolar (or vice versa).