That’s not to say cannabis can’t help with chronic pain, nausea, appetite and more—it’s just that we don’t yet have the research to know for sure. Here’s what we’ve learned in the last few years about cannabis.

Even though pain management is one of the most common reasons people report for using medical cannabis in the United States, studies show it actually has mixed results for reducing pain in the general population, wrote Meryl Davids Landau in a story published in January 2023.

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Reputable studies so far have not found that cannabinoids sufficiently reduce pain, which led the International Association for the Study of Pain, a leading authority in pain research, to decline to endorse these drugs in 2021.

One complication is that certain types of pain are especially susceptible to the placebo response. Research showed a substance designed to mimic cannabis provides similar pain relief to the real thing—meaning cannabis does seem to relieve pain, but part of that relief may come from the placebo effect.

“It’s not enough to know that something is working. We need to know why it is working to best help patients,” says Karin Jensen, a researcher in the pain neuroimaging lab at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, told Landau. Without understanding of how cannabis helps with pain, it’s impossible to know if it’s the best remedy for the patient, she explains.