Medical marijuana, a panacea or scourge.

For 5,000 years cannabis has been used throughout the world for medicinal purposes,

even prescribed by American physicians

early on, a fact that's often used by medical marijuana proponents to justify modern

medical applications.

But the field of old-timey medicine was fraught with patent medicine snake oil nonsense,

not to mention bloodletleadding and other questionable

and harmful remedies, skeptics criticized the medical marijuana movement as the medical excuse

marijuana movement insinuating that epileptic children and the terminally ill are just

being used as props to Trojan horse in the legalization

of recreational use, or to peddle outlandish claims about miracle cancer cures, frustrating

researchers in the field who just want to get at the science.

For example, what about the therapeutic use of cannabis for inflammatory bowel diseases

like Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis?

Conventional therapies mainly work by suppressing the immune system to try to tamp down the inflammation.

Given the limited therapy options and known adverse side effects from these drugs,

often people suffering these diseases

ended up having to get inflamed sections of their bowels removed surgically.

So you can see whether there's so much interest in alternative approaches.

About one in six IBD patients who use marijuana say it helps with their symptoms.

So researchers decided to put it to the test.

Thirteen patients with inflammatory bowel disease

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