I have tried a number of Eastern, Western and Alternative therapies. I have a strong Western bias and while it has been many years since my stroke, I am still making progress. I went from not eating at all by mouth to eating food ground in a blender to eating soft solids. I can’t always see day to day progress, but Angela, who sees me less frequently, points it out to me. What has worked best for me is traditional therapies: PT, OT, Speech and exercise. I am always on the look out for new ideas.
NEW: COVID-19 UPDATE: To reduce any possible damage to my lungs, I went back from smoking to edibles to deal with pain. To try again to find the compound that I conjecture is in marijuana, and may help with brain injury (see below), I’ve been looking into tinctures, which have a sublingual (under the tongue) mode of absorption.
To answer my own question, I’ve been having some luck lately with smoking marijuana. Why smoke? Two reasons. First, when you eat, the compound must reach you by first going through the stomach, and then a bunch of organs, most noticeably the liver, in a process known as first-pass metabolism. Smoking bypasses all this by letting the compounds get into the blood directly through the lungs. Second, you have more choice of strains with smoking. Modern strains overproduce either THC or CBD. To try other compounds you need to start with an original strain. I called around and was given OG KUSH. It seemed to do the trick for me. And with only 3-6 puffs a day, I figured my lung cancer risk was minimal. I didn’t get results right away. It took a few months to see the initial results. I’m continuing on it so hopefully more to say soon! The results are only modest so far, but that’s better than I had before which was zero. zilch, nada.
For pain, see my comments in Dealing with pain
Living with Brain Injury 