Or they might think it’s something else, since repeated throwing up is a sign of many health problems. You may need to see a gastroenterologist, a doctor who specializes in the digestive tract, for a proper diagnosis. It’s a serious medical problem that can cause major health issues if you leave it untreated. If you have any symptoms of severe dehydration, like dizziness, confusion and a rapid heartbeat, call 911 right away. The patient still uses a moderate cannabis dose for sleep and pain, a careful balance of THC and cannabidiol. But he is opiate-free, married with two children, and runs a business with 10 employees.
Encoding study reveals how the brain uses past experiences to predict the unfolding of similar events over time
Note that the counts do not add up to 2,683 because some of the posts were classified as N/A (not available). Figure 3 presents the distribution of themes and posts in cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome subreddits over time. The figure shows that there were notable increases in posts about cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome in the first half of 2020 and substantial spikes in 2022. The recent spikes illustrate the growing interest and awareness of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome among the members of the online forum. A total of 9,691 posts were collected from the chosen subreddits via the Application Programming Interface. Four thousand seven hundred sixty-three posts matched the search expressions indicating cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome.
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If you have cannabis use disorder and need help quitting, professional treatment is available. While marijuana seems to bring on nausea in the stomach, in the brain it usually has opposite effect. When cannabinoids bind with brain receptors, they tend to prevent nausea and vomiting. Experts think that when you first smoke weed, your brain signals are more important, but after repeated use of the drug, the brain receptors may no longer Sober living house respond to marijuana in the same way, causing more nausea and vomiting. Marijuana has a lot of active chemical compounds called cannabinoids.
1 Diagnostic and psychometric testing toward a better understanding of CHS
Miriam, for example, got her prescription from a doctor she had never previously met, located in a cannabis medical clinic in the same building as the dispensary. They ask you a few questions, and then they write you a prescription and you walk out the door,” Miriam said. McIff is an outspoken advocate of supervised medical cannabis, but also an outspoken opponent of recreational legalization. In his view, the very respect he has for the drug’s potency pushes back against its unsupervised casual use for entertainment or self-medication. But Hurd is not only framing problems; she is also looking for solutions.
- Heat exposure from hot showers may stimulate the transient receptor potential vanilloid type-1 (TRPV1) receptors on sensory nerve endings in the skin.
- Symptoms of CHS typically come on several years after the start of chronic marijuana use.
- In one small study of eight patients hospitalized with CHS, four of the five who stopped using weed recovered from CHS.
- Consistent with past works on similar thematic analyses, the experts first reviewed the posts and identified topics.
Accordingly, they have been reported as one of the therapeutic modalities for the management of the CHS. Further, these behaviors could also be noted in CVS, preadolescents, and adolescents with no prior exposure to cannabis 8. These changes from hot bathing are probably not specific to CHS but can be seen across all functional nausea and vomiting disorders, including CVS, and are probably aggravated by cannabis use 9. Thus, hot shower bathing may be more closely related to CHS, but is neither specific nor sensitive in its diagnosis. This is probably the reason for its non-inclusion in the Rome IV diagnostic criteria for CHS.
- Feeling nauseated also kills your appetite, and it’s easy to become dehydrated.
- Cannabinoids are found in the cannabis plant and bind to cannabinoid receptors found in our brains, gastrointestinal tracts and immune cells.
- Further analysis of the timing theme data requires the use of more advanced natural language processing methods and methods to extract and was not feasible for this study but should be explored in future work.
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Future work will be needed to provide more detailed content evaluations to further understand cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome. Reddit posts for cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome provide a rich source of community discussion and individual reports of people experiencing cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome. Mental health and alcohol chs symptoms and signs were frequently reported triggers within the posts but are not often identified in the literature. While many of the therapies mentioned have been well documented, behavioral responses such as meditation and yoga have not been explored by the scientific literature.
- Instead, they could go for a long period with stomach discomfort and morning nausea without fully realizing what’s going on.
- During this period, you can vomit as often as five times in a single hour.
- He says more research is needed to understand why some people suffer from the condition after prolonged cannabis exposure and others do not.
- They start to feel better when they stop using marijuana but can feel bad if they use it again.
Over days or sometimes months, the vomiting decreases, your nausea eases, and you can start eating normally again. You begin to regain lost weight and find that hot showers are no longer necessary for comfort. But science hasn’t pinned down an exact formula that says, “X amount of cannabis over Y years always leads to CHS.” Instead, it’s more like a storm of factors that eventually converge. Unfortunately, until doctors uncovered CHS, many patients felt baffled by their symptoms. Now that this condition is better recognized, sharing a full history of marijuana use with medical providers is vital.
- People have landed in the hospital with acute kidney failure or needed intensive care after extended vomiting spells.
- This mechanism implies that the analgesic and sensory effects of TRPV1 receptor activation might contribute to the relief experienced during hot showers for CHS patients.
- While few experts now advocate a full return to prohibition, many do worry that the accelerating pace of easy access and heightened potency are outstripping scientific evidence on the safety of long-term marijuana use — and, when used as medicine, its efficacy.
- However, it is likely that the base of people using Reddit has expanded since that report.
- Most resources and recommendations come from case studies and expert opinions.
Current findings suggest that the body’s naturally stored cannabinoids might eventually overwhelm receptors in the gut or other systems, flipping the usual script where cannabis often helps with nausea. If you are experiencing severe vomiting or other concerning symptoms, contact your health care provider. As many other health problems could lead to repeated vomiting, it’s important to discuss your complete health history, including your cannabis use, with any provider you see for your symptoms. We were not able to access demographics or geography of individuals who posted on Reddit. The user base of social media platforms such as Reddit may not be representative of the population suffering from cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome. For example, prior reports have documented that people who use Reddit are majority male, younger, and non-Hispanic white 25.
Associated Data
CHS is unique in presentation, because of the cannabis’s biphasic effect as anti-emetic at low doses and pro-emetic at higher doses, and the association with pathological hot water bathing. Treatment data on cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome is largely limited to acute symptom management in healthcare settings. Treatment content on Reddit reflected the medical literature, including mentions of hot water bathing, topical capsaicin cream, and dopamine antagonists as frequent treatment approaches for acute episodes 22–24.