Medical marijuana as a treatment option for severe epilepsy has received a lot of media attention in recent years amid anecdotal reports of the drug’s effectiveness.

But as Orrin Devinsky, MD, director of NYU Langone’s Comprehensive Epilepsy Center points out, there has never before been solid scientific evidence in the gold standard of medical research—known as a randomized controlled trial—of the drug’s effectiveness.

Dr. Devinsky’s study, the first-large scale randomized trial of cannabidiol for epilepsy, was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine and found significant seizure reductions in patients with an especially severe form of treatment-resistant epilepsy called Dravet syndrome. CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jonathan LaPook spoke with Dr. Devinsky and a family whose life was impacted by this research.

"After so much time, literally 4,000 years of anecdote and belief, we now have scientific rigor," says Dr. Devinsky.

Read more and watch the segment from the CBS Evening News.