Here’s a fun topic. Medical marijuana.
MMA referee to the stars Big John McCarthy’s wife uses medical marijuana for Lupus and he isn’t shy about his opinions on it. McCarthy recently spoke to Vegas Cannabis and even touched on marijuana in MMA.
The understanding of concussions and their severity is one of the big hurdles facing all combat or contact sports. We must do everything we can to educate the fighters about taking care of themselves not only in the cage, but in training as well. We need to do more to keep the fighters from getting dehydrated and carrying that condition into competition. We need to learn from studies concerning alternative medications that are less harmful to the fighters overall health and ones that actually help regenerate cell activity instead of impede it. Thanks to researchers like Professor Yosef Sarne of Tel Aviv University, we’ve discovered that cannabis may help prevent long term brain damage by administering THC before or shortly after the injury. In fact, Israel Defense Force (IDF) practitioners administer CBD or low-dose THC as a first-line of treatment to IDF soldiers. Is that something that could possibly help a fighter who has developed Traumatic Brain Injury or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy? I don’t know for sure, but why in the world would we not explore the possibility.
Big John wants to make it clear that he has never ingested cannabis, and has no personal experience with it but is of the opinion it’s not a performance enhancer in the cage. He does feel it could reduce your reaction time in a fight though and could make things more dangerous for the athlete.
Big John also talked about his wife using medical marijuana for her lupus with good results.
She started using cannabis to help her lupus in 2016, so it has not been a long time, but we can really see how it makes a difference with her headaches and her fatigue.
I want to be very clear, my wife doesn’t use cannabis in a recreational form. She has a serious disease and uses cannabis as a medicine to assist her in living as normal a life as possible. That is the thing that is crazy about this. When you tell people that you use marijuana to treat your illness, right away they get this look like, ‘Oh, you just like to get high.’ That is the last thing people like my wife are doing. All they are doing is trying to live a normal life and thank God there is something out there that actually helps them do that.
He has a lot more to say too. Check out the full interview over at Vegas Cannabis.