A woman in the Netherlands has become the first reported medical case of someone developing spontaneous orgasms after smoking cannabis, a study has found.
According to a case study published in the Journal of Sex and Martial Therapy the 40-year-old woman known as Mrs A had engaged in five hours of 'hard pounding sexual activity' after smoking weed and then started having spontaneous orgasms for five weeks.
The woman’s doctor Marcel Waldinger said that the orgasms were so intense that Mrs A developed anxiety because they were disturbing her sleep and causing her worry throughout the day.
The orgasms were triggered when the woman was lying down but receiving no sexual pleasure and lasted several hours. Mrs A believed there was a connection between the orgasms and smoking weed.
Waldinger told the International Business Times UK: ‘She said she continued to use cannabis alone and without having sex. Even after several weeks, only a small amount of cannabis induced spontaneous orgasm. When she took higher doses, she got spontaneous orgasms that she “couldn't handle” any more.’
Waldinger, a neuropsychiatrist, ruled out a number of other conditions before arriving at a diagnosis of spontaneous orgasms. Mrs A believed that she might be suffering from Restless Genital Syndrome, a debilitating condition that causes sufferers to experience excessive and persistent sensations of genital and clitoral arousal.
However her doctors ruled this out as RGS is usually triggered in a sitting position and accompanied by other symptoms which Mrs A didn’t display. Waldinger and his team also ruled out neuromas, a benign tumour in the nerve tissue near the clitoris.
'It was concluded that her spontaneous orgasms were the result of the use of Cannabis combined with long duration of previous sexual activity,' Waldinger wrote in the study.
He believed that a nerve may have become overactive, leading to the intense orgasms.
Waldinger told the IBTimes: ‘We need to know whether there are more incidents like this. So I'm interested in patients who will contact me if they've had the same sort of experiences. That is important, to find out whether this is a very rare phenomenon or whether it occurs more often.’
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.