Use of Medicinal Cannabis for Palliative Care Patients: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Background: Medical cannabis is a rapidly growing area of medicine. In this sense, due to the numerous benefits associated with its use, it has been increasingly proposed for patients in palliative care, in which the improvement of debilitating symptoms is directly associated with better quality of life. However, due to the complexity of treatments for these individuals, further studies are needed to determine the best possible prescription for them. Objective: Understand the endocannabinoid system and evaluate the feasibility of using medical cannabis in palliative care patients. Methods: Systematic literature review, addressing the following topics: "cancer, cannabis, and palliative care". The search was carried out using the Virtual Health Library: Lilacs, SciELO, Medline, PubMed, and Cochrane, with articles between 2013 and 2022. Results and discussion: A total of 116 articles were found with the descriptors. After reading the abstracts, 22 showed greater association with the theme and were chosen for the preparation of this review. Conclusion: It is concluded that medical cannabis is an excellent treatment option for most of the symptoms present in patients in palliative care. In this way, the adoption of this drug by the public becomes logical. However, it is the physician's role to seek to understand the particularities of these individuals and this new possibility of treatment, which, it seems, will significantly improve the end of life of these patients-this being the main role of the medical teams.