Research on the medical effects of marijuana use have been a mixed bag over the last few years; it doesn’t seem to be terrible for you, but it’s not without health — or social — concerns, either.

But now we’ve got some dope news from the world of medicinal pot smokers, suggesting that taking cannabis on the doctor’s orders significantly improves the symptoms of multiple ailments, including anxiety, insomnia, and chronic pain, while providing an overall boon to your quality of life.

That’s according to a new study published in the journal PLOS One, which found that medical cannabis patients in Australia maintained a bevy health of improvements over the course of a full year.

“This is promising news for patients who are not responding to conventional medicines for these conditions,” the authors said in a statement. 

The patients were all adults with various chronic conditions who were recruited as part of a previous study that tracked how they responded to a prescribed cannabis oil. To build on that work, the authors of this latest study followed up with most of these same patients — 2,353 of the original 2,744 returned — for another twelve months, gauging their progress with questionnaires.

What they found was encouraging: the patients’ initial three-month boost to their health-related quality of life (HRQL), a metric for assessing how someone’s health affects their daily life, persisted for an entire year. That included abating the symptoms of anxiety, depression, insomnia, and chronic musculoskeletal pain. While the data is self-reported, the improvements were clinically meaningful, the authors wrote.

In short, the findings suggest that medicinal weed’s benefits stretch to the long term. A big caveat, though, is that the study had no control group, meaning that the benefits can’t confidently be attributed to the green stuff.

Another recent piece of observational research, however, echoes some of the findings here. In a survey of 1,000 people, 70 percent of respondents said that taking medical cannabis helped them sleep better than actual prescription sleep aids, as spotted by Forbes. An even higher 91 percent said that cannabis was more effective than over-the-counter sleep solutions. 

But this work, too, calls for a major disclaimer: it was conducted by a Germany-based medical cannabis company, Bloomwell Group — so make of that what you will. Nonetheless, the company claims it’s the largest survey in Europe to explore medical cannabis as a sleep aid to date.  

“This survey goes a long way in both legitimizing the severity of sleep disorders and the toll these conditions take on people’s lives, as well as providing real-world patient evidence that medical cannabis is a highly effective treatment,” Julian Wichmann, managing director of Bloomwell, told Forbes in a statement.

With all that said, it’s too early to hail weed, medicinal or not, as a bedtime cure-all. The literature is mixed: some randomized control trials have found that weed does improve sleep in adults with insomnia, but other research suggests that regularly relying on the substance to get shuteye actually leads to worse sleep. It’s usefulness as a way of making the burden of countless chronic medical conditions more tolerable, though, is hard to deny.

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