The actual studies

A follow-up to the Naftali trial covered above: this is a meta-analysis pooling randomized controlled trials of cannabis in Crohn's disease, pre-registered with PROSPERO and following PRISMA 2020 reporting standards, so the process itself is more rigorous than a typical roundup of studies.

This is the update to the Devinsky Dravet trial covered above: instead of one syndrome and one trial, it pools seven randomized, placebo-controlled trials covering 1,154 patients with drug-resistant epilepsy across multiple syndromes, including Dravet, Lennox-Gastaut, and tuberous sclerosis complex.

The CANOA trial is one of the few properly blinded, placebo-controlled trials to test cannabidiol specifically for knee osteoarthritis, and it is worth including here precisely because it did not find what most CBD marketing promises. Researchers randomized osteoarthritis patients to a CBD-rich full-spectrum cannabis oil (45 mg of CBD daily) or a matched placebo, then tracked pain and function for 60 days using the WOMAC index, the standard tool for osteoarthritis trials.

The first randomized trial of inhaled cannabis for Crohn's disease, and the paper that mirrors the actual patient experience I've been living with since I was diagnosed in 1999.

The trial that put CBD in the medical mainstream. Devinsky and a multi-center team ran a 14-week placebo-controlled study of pharmaceutical-grade cannabidiol in 120 children and young adults with Dravet syndrome, a rare and brutal form of childhood epilepsy that's typically refractory to standard anticonvulsants.

This is the meta-analysis everyone cites when someone asks whether cannabis actually works for medical conditions. Whiting and colleagues pooled 79 randomized trials covering 6,462 patients across every major indication studied at the time: chronic pain, MS spasticity, chemotherapy nausea, appetite, anxiety, sleep, Tourette syndrome, glaucoma, and psychosis.