It was Ondra's post that gave me the idea actually. Not convinced w.r.t. recovery, but there are some papers out there on inflammation, e.g.:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2828614/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7463000/Unfortunately they get complex quickly (certainly beyond my biology/chemistry) and often involve rats so I thought I'd defer to anecdote from ukb The bit about "CBD possesses anti-arthritic activity and might ameliorate arthritis via targeting synovial fibroblasts under inflammatory conditions." - caught my eye. I think Volker wrote my finger down as capsulitis rather than synovitis, but it's not clear to me how much cross over there is in diagnosis and likely impact of something like this..
too many Florida thrill rides
The meta-analyses give CBD for pain cautious support for a small effect, with a caveat that there are lots of small, low quality, low-power studies. This is very likely to exaggerate effectiveness. You could make a comparison with the status of glucosamine for joint pain c.10 years ago: vaguely plausible biochemical pathway, lots of breathless anecdote, a few small scale industry supported studies showing positive effects. Once the larger, independent, well-conducted studies were done it was clearly no better than placebo.
Presumably this is pharmacology basics, but strikes me both could be right. I.e. how do studies control for the strength of the placebo effect? I take a few supplements (on and off) on the basis that they may well be no better than placebo, but coupled with me knowing there is a vaguely plausible biochemical pathway the placebo effect is likely to be stronger?
"have you tried acupuncture".....All very odd as we both don't really "believe" in acupuncture. I have wondered since if maybe it's something to do with conductivity and muscle motors, something that can maybe break an overly sensitive motor unit?
Does the placebo effect still work when you don't expect / believe there will be a benefit?