The discovery and the use of the cannabis as a medical properties is undoubtedly linked to humankind's earliest utilisation of cannabis: eating the seeds of the plant.
Cannabis seeds develop inside pollinated female flowers. The female cannabis flower is also the richest source of the plant's medicinally valuable and psychoactive cannabinoids (THC among them). Thus, it is likely that following the nutritional benefits, the therapeutic benefits of cannabis were the next properties of the plant to be discovered by humans.
Even from uncultivated cannabis, both of these important properties of the plant were available to early humans. From this point on, cannabis became one of the most widely used medicinal ingredients in the world.
This continued up until the 1930s when the newly illegal status of cannabis led to a fifty year hiatus of its use as a medicine. In recent decades the natural advantages of cannabis as a treatment for a wide range of diseases and disorders have been rediscovered.
Modern research continues to uncover yet more applications and the recently found receptors for cannabinoids in the human brain and spleen imply a world of new possibilities in treatment to be explored.
Legislation in many countries has been revised to allow for this although there is still a long way to go before full advantage can be taken of the healing properties of this herb.
