Anna Lembke

Really interesting.

She came back four weeks later and she said, Dr. Lemke, you wouldn't believe it.

And this is what's so funny.

Patients will always say, you wouldn't believe it as if I'm going to be shocked.

I said, tell me.

She goes, well, first of all, stopping pot made me realize that I had been addicted to pot, something I really didn't realize before.

And I said, well, how did you realize that?

And she said, well, first of all, the first week I was vomiting violently.

So remember that withdrawal is the opposite, both psychologically and physiologically, from whatever the drug was doing for us.

And we know that cannabis can be an anti-emetic or an anti-nausea kind of effect.

So when she stopped using it, she started vomiting.

And that was the signal to her that her body had been changed by her chronic heavy use.

More even in her case than the temporarily increased anxiety and insomnia, which I had warned her about.

And then she said, and you wouldn't believe it, but I feel so much better now after four weeks of stopping than I have in a really long time.

I feel less anxious.

I feel better.

less depressed i'm more able to enjoy things i i can breathe better you know i feel physically better i'm sleeping better and this happens again and again and again we see this so often in clinical care and people are so surprised because they when we're in it we don't see the harm right all we know is that oh god smoking this joint makes me feel better after a long hard day we can't see the ways in which the cumulative effects actually are making us feel worse

Yeah, so this is a famous study by Brown and Shuckett where they took a group of adult men who met clinical criteria for alcoholism and also met clinical criteria for major depressive episodes.

They put them in the hospital for four weeks, during which time they had no access to alcohol.

You know, they made sure they didn't have life threatening withdrawal.