Lynda, a 48-year-old mother of three who lives in upstate New York, got a diagnosis of fibromyalgia in 2000. While there were medication medicines for fibromyalgia, she's found one unconventional drug -- marijuana -- that certainly does the trick.

"Iwill use [marijuana] when the burning pains started down my spine or my right arm, and soon after, I found I could continue with housework and In fact get more done," says Lynda.

Fibromyalgia is notoriously challenging to treat and only 35 percent - 40 percent of people with the chronic pain illness get easing from the available medications. Although there are strong opinions surrounding its use, a number of those suffering are trying marijuana -- legally or illegally -- and finding it will help fibromyalgia pain.

"My our patients are asking me all the time about it," says Stuart Silverman, M.D., a rheumatologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. "Historically and anecdotally, marijuana has been used as a painkiller."

Why marijuana helps

Our bodies in a very natural way make pain relievers called endorphins, but they also make other substances that will trigger pain easing in the so-called endocannabinoid system. This system seems to play a critical role in many processes in the body, including modulating How we feel pain. Marijuana contains cannabinoids very similar to those that occur in the body in a very natural way.

Fibromyalgia our patients typically experience bodywide pain, but they must often times take multiple drugs for other manifestations, which will include difficulty sleeping, restless legs syndrome, depression, and anxiety. However, marijuana will treat multiple symptoms, and a great deal of our patients could be seeing results.

It seems valid -- why shouldn't fibromyalgia sufferers try marijuana for their manifestations, if they live in a state where medical marijuana is legal?

But there are two problems with herbal cannabis, Silverman and other critics say: It's a complex natural substance that contains about 60 varying compounds with potentially medicinal effects, a gread deal of of which will combine with one another. The other concern is that the amount of these various compounds can vary by batch, as marijuana is not synthesized but grown.

While Silverman says he has great hopes that synthetic pills and creams based on individual compounds in cannabis may one day help fibromyalgia people (after appropriate randomized controlled clinical trials have been done), he argues that the real thing TODAY is just too inconsistent.

"We think that there's probably a role for that class of compounds, the cannabinoids in general, and it's just a question of working out You may wonder how that's going to be put into practice," says Mark Ware, M.D., an assistant professor in family medicine and anesthesia at McGill University, in Montreal, and the executive director of the Canadian Consortium for the Investigation of Cannabinoids.