What is going on? An analysis of the discourses around medicinal cannabis and chronic pain

There is no universal treatment that is effective for all people who experience chronic pain. Associated with the multitude of factors that influence the individual’s perception and occurrence of chronic pain, the management of such pain is extremely complicated. As the experience of chronic pain is individual and the reported rates of people experiencing chronic pain continues to rise, there has been an increasing amount of discussion internationally, with a diverse range of views on the use of medical cannabis in the management of chronic pain. While cannabis remains illegal in New Zealand, and as the associated health risks and perceived benefits of cannabis remain uncertain, nurses and other health professionals face challenges when considering its use in supporting their clients’ management of chronic pain. Nurses are accountable under a number of legislations to the health consumer. Therefore nurses and other health professionals face difficult questions regarding the legal, political and ethical variables associated with their possible support for clients seeking to use cannabis in the New Zealand context. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) offers the potential to explore the widespread perspective of language, and to discover how conceptions can be imperceptibly manipulated to persuade the reader about particular health issues. CDA has been used in this thesis to examine a number of contemporary pieces of New Zealand public and professional literature for the discourses that underpin the debates around the medicinal use of cannabis for the treatment of chronic pain. The implications of these discourses for the nursing profession are also considered in this thesis.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Nursing

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Grantor

Eastern Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Williams, Keren

• New Zealand
• nurses
• medicinal cannabis
• chronic pain
• pain management
• debate
• discourse analysis

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10652/6408

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:null:10652/6408