Hello Christina,
The short answer: it does both.
It's not a cure though, as an auto-immune disease is the result of a mutation that messed up the programming of your immune system and there's no drug that can fix that mutation. However MMJ has been shown to induce remission in clinical trials. And it has for a few people on this board, myself included.
Cannabis will reduce inflammation locally, regulate peristalsis (the contraction movements your bowel does to move matter through all that tubing) and it also modulates the immune response where we have CB1 and CB2 receptors (coincidentally and ideally for us, the bulk of these receptors are in the bowel and the brain).
That being said, the delivery method will change according to what you intend to do.
To treat symptoms (insomnia, cramps, pain, lack of appetite, nausea):
You want to inhale the cannabis, ideally with vaporizer. Inhalation will deliver the cannabinoids in your blood almost instantly, and the relief is also felt almost immediately. A joint is literally the worse way to consume cannabis because the gains are offset by all the tar you're putting in your lung. If you want to try it once or twice that way to see how it affects you that's fine, but for chronic/daily use, I would get a vaporizer. You can add further filtration if you want by adding a glass apparatus to the whole setup.
To treat the disease:
Ideal delivery is ingestion. You first extract the cannabinoids from the plant into a fat, usually butter or oil, then either ingest that oil directly (like you would cough syrup), or dip bread in it, or you can use that oil to cook whatever you want with it (brownies, cookies, smoothies, etc.). You can google "Rick Simpson oil" for a recipe. It's a somewhat simple process, and you can use a crockpot to make it 100% dummy proof.
Hope this helps.
