> Strelzow suggested doctors could ask patients to give up marijuana for a period of time, as they do with tobacco smokers.

As a former nicotine addict, the idea of any serious nicotine addict avoiding tobacco for "a period of time" is laughably naïve. Unless that period of time is less than a few hours.

One obvious thing I'd be curious about is why those people are heavy users in the first place. E.g., if people with certain conditions are already using more cannabis than the rest of the population to deal with pain management, etc, then a correlation like this wouldn't be that surprising.

Would like to see how the study controls for that, but didn't actually see a direct link.

I wonder if they controlled for Tobacco intake. In my experience most stoners mix their cannabis.

Infection rate increases by 1%. Even if that’s a doubling, I feel like it’s such a small increase that you can hardly claim correlation, much less causation. As for the DVT, that was a tenth of a percent increase. That’s gotta be within the error bars. And even if it isn’t, I think you’d expect more DVT with more infection, so is it directly due to marijuana?

Slightly off topic but I would recommend this podcast from Andrew Huberman on the Effects of Cannabis. I learned a lot from it.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/huberman-lab/id1545953...

This isn't my experience.

I've smoked weed for about 50 years. During that time I had an ACL reconstruction on my left knee. I healed very well, no infection whatsoever, and went on to master double diamond snow skiing. Also while smoking cannabis routinely.

I haven't had a lot medical procedures, but I am in my 60s now and have had a couple of small surgeries.

I've never experienced any infection issues. I would say in general, I heal really well, and have a very healthy lifestyle (ran 6 miles yesterday).

I used tobacco only for a short while in high school and have never had any desire to pick it up again.

The rest of murica is dedicated to alcohol, tobacco and firearms like the little baby jesus intended. While they're generally the ones blowing their own brains out while shit drunk at 4am...

This whole treatment of cannabis like some kind of kryptonite is just plain nonsense...

This shouldn't be a surprising result. The marijuana defense task force doesn't really need to come out on this one. Before basically any surgery every doctor will tell you to discontinue recreational drugs, alcohol, tobacco and a long ass list of supplements and medications before and after the surgery. Knowing more precisely the interactions it has with the body is a good thing and can only help -- even more so as more places legalize it so the number of users increases.

> In the study, the researchers used a national insurance claims database, identifying more than 1.1 million knee patients and nearly 748,000 shoulder patients. Nearly 22,000 of the patients had been diagnosed with marijuana dependence.

The term "marijuana dependence" suggests either bias in the diagnoses, or extremely heavy users. Smoking marijuana is still smoking, and I've always been under the impression that some (though far from all) of the risk from smoking tobacco was just because of inhaling smoke.

Also, as another comment mentions, I can't see anything indicating they controlled for tobacco smoking.

I wonder if it’s related to the marijuana itself or the characteristics of heavy marijuana smokers.

Yeah I mean…it reduces inflammation..

AFIK smoking in general no matter what has increased risk of infection, so has bad health caused by physical and/or mental distress

Most people take Marijuana by smoking it, sometimes in combination with tabaco.

Most people which take marijuana very frequent do so because they had and in many cases still have some form of physical and/or mental distress.

So......

Isn't this a relatively clear cut case of correlation without causation?

Or do I miss something?

those more prone to knee and shoulder injuries smoke marijuana?

Thing correlates with thing, has effect.

Worried well worried, well.

Clicked on the comments section expecting it to be nothing but pothead defending their precious weed. Wasn't disappointed.

Hasn’t it been common knowledge and established science that marijuana suppresses the immune system? This doesn’t come as a surprise to me.