When you’re going under the knife, usually you’re going to get anesthesia. Using cannabis does affect the aesthetics, and it ca be something that you should let the anesthesiologist know before you get the medical procedure. Cannabis does have a lot of effects directly on the body as well. Cannabis does love to cling to your fat cells, so it’s important to let the physician know about this as much as they can, so that they know what types of drugs that you’re taking. They don’t want an interaction between anything that you’re given before, during the procedure, or after as well.
Risks Associated
Many people do use cannabis to help with easing medications that they take, but there are some risks that go with using medical cannabis before you get anesthesia, as they can interact. This may cause some complications, including the following:
- Breathing difficulties, especially if you smoke and vape. You’re getting ultrafine particles, and it may possibly affect the anesthesia.
- It does impact the blood pressure, and the heart rate and blood pressure increase may put you at risk for a heart attack., so you may not get medication if you already have a high heart rate
- Heart failure is another, since they do offer vasodilatory effects, and it can actually cause the likeliness of heart failure if you’re getting vasodilators as well.
- The anesthesia may not be effective enough, with some cases reporting that they needed three times as much for proper sedation
- It also makes opioids a lot stronger too, since it may be almost too much, and it can make them highly addictive too
For these reason alone, a n anesthetist needs to know whether or not you’re using cannabis, to make sure that nothing gets amiss.
Should we Use Cannabis Before Surgery?
We can’t tell you whether you should stop using cannabis with regarding anesthesia, but there are a lot of factors at play, including treatment you’re getting anesthetics used, and the type of treatment medications. It’s better to just talk to the doctor to talk about this. Some patients may need to possibly use cannabis to reduce symptoms including chronic cramps, pain, spasms, and seizures, and this can be hard if you just quiet this, so you should definitely talk to your doctor. Overall though, it’s better if you don’t use this for the treatment of your problems, and instead wait till after surgery is over to have this.
Post-Surgery Recovery
Anesthetics aren’t just used during surgery, but afterwards too. Chronic, post-surgery or post operative pain is one of the main areas where cannabis really works, since it does reduce or replace the need for options. A lot of patients will use this, and also may try to reduce this instead of sedatives, antidepressants, or other substances too.
Medical cannabis patients, however, did need more pain numbers, had higher pain scores during recovery, and would have more opioids. This is something that was done on a study of patients that were getting surgery, and not just those with chronic pain either.
Medical cannabis users do have tolerance to cannabinoids that they have and may be able to have cannabis after their surgery compared to the less experience. However, most of the harm happens on the day of the surgery. When reviewing trails, there was evidence that medical cannabis does help with chronic pain treatment, so it may also affect blood pressure too. Overall, we suggest that you stop taking them after you’ve had surgery until you’ve managed to recover and are able to function as well.
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