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Marijuana helped shrink one of the most aggressive brain cancers
- eip 12y agoWorks really well on skin cancer too. Vaporize then condense the resins. Apply resin to skin cancer spots sparingly.
- Beltiras 12y agoMy mother died of an agressive blastoma multiforme last spring. I tried to get her cannabis but she declined in spite of the evidence I presented (at the time the principal papers were written in Spain). Marijuana use has been greatly stigmatized in my country and that played a big role in her rejection. I am both glad and angry at the same time.
- wavefunction 12y agoSorry to hear about your mother. I have talked my father into investigating therapeutic use of cannabis for his Parkinson's. He indulged as a young man but the war on drugs and raising a family put a kibosh on recreational use for him years ago. The drug war propaganda has been so effective that he was reluctant to try it despite recent legalization in our home state. In a very unscientific experiment this summer, I watched his symptoms disappear after imbibing a small amount. If only we can get the word out to more people.
- narrowrail 12y agoMy father is in the same situation, except MJ is not even available medicinally. Could you tell me what form your father ingested? Was it high-CBD edibles, or what?
- deskamess 12y agoWill there be a time when a majority look at how we have stigmatized and prevented marijuana use so vocally and with such dire criminal consequences when it could have been used to help in the proper channels? I strongly believe a lot of science is not done on marijuana because of the vocal critics or the fear of vocal critics. Just in the US, certain people can be pretty vindictive when it comes to their causes.
- atom-morgan 12y agoOf course. It will be no different than the way we look at the idea of the Earth being flat today.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago>I strongly believe a lot of science is not done on marijuana because of the vocal critics or the fear of vocal critics. That appears to be changing for the better. The most important thing is to somehow make sure that non-physicians and non-scientists such as the DEA are removed from the decision making process (of what gets studied, and of drug scheduling). >Just in the US, certain people can be pretty vindictive when it comes to their causes. I hope that it isn't vindictiveness. I've always assumed that it is either an inability to sympathize, or an indifference to other peoples' suffering; also, ignorance.
- omilu 12y agoTerence McKenna smoked marijuana for 35 years heavily. He died of brain cancer. McKenna was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. For the next several months he underwent various treatments, including experimental gamma knife radiation treatment. According to Wired magazine, McKenna was worried that his tumor was caused by his 35 years of smoking cannabis, although his doctors assured him there was no causal relation. -Wikipedia
- eidyia 12y ago"smoking" is an important factor here, smoking anything is bad for you. I imagine any other sort of ingesting it (marijuana) would be much less harmful
- ryanklee 12y agoPutting aside the anecdotal nature of your comment, it raises the question of whether, because McKenna was "worried" about a causal relation between his brain cancer and prior cannabis use, he ceased smoking post-diagnosis. If so, that would certainly complicate what I'm assuming you're implying, that McKenna's case runs counter to the [edit: findings communicated in the] HuffPo article... Edit: Also, it's significant that the treatment in the study was a "combination of radiation and two different marijuana compounds", not simply a correlation to historical cannabis use.
- nkozyra 12y agoI'm confused as to the relevance of this post - I'm not sure that the study indicates that smoking marijuana would, you know, prevent death via all glioma type cancers. The variables are different from top to bottom. Is this post meant to dispute the validity of pure form THC-BDS + irradiation as a effective treatment for brain tumors? If so, yeesh.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- researcher88 12y agoThey aren't smoking it but ingesting it in a highly concentrated form. And in 1:1 ratios of THC and CBDs. There are an endless variety of strains and a lot is unknown. I recently got cancer and smoking marijuana was indispensable for dealing with treatment. And now I am using hash oil as my doctors say there is nothing I can do, no diet to eat, no exercise nor anything else I can do to reduce my chance of having the cancer come back. Nothing.
- tokenadult 12y agoTwo parts of the Huffington post submission here clarify the issue: "In a paper published Friday in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapies, a team of researchers from St. George's University of London outlined the "dramatic reductions" they observed in high-grade glioma masses, a deadly form of brain cancer, when treated with a combination of radiation and two different marijuana compounds, also known as cannabinoids. In many cases, those tumors shrunk to as low as one-tenth the sizes of those in the control group." So the tumors are being treated with radiation in the current study, as well as with cannabinoids. "Liu and his colleagues examined mice that had been infected with glioma and subsequently treated with radiation alone or in combination with varying levels of two cannabis compounds: THC, the psychoactive compound associated with the "high" sensation, and CBD, which doesn't produce psychoactive side effects." So far this is a study in a mouse model organism, which may or may not generalize to human patients. This is worth looking at further, but the trade-offs of safety and effectiveness for drug treatments of all kinds can often differ between human beings and mice.
- dekhn 12y agoNearly all cancer studies use combination treatments. Among other reasons, the cancer cells will adapt to single treatments rapidly (for example, the treatment will kill all but a small population, which is immune to the treatment, and that population will expand).
- awesor 12y agoExactly. Patients will still have to undergo radiation therapy - aka misery. While there are definitely improvements to all of that (laser knife, etc), it still sucks.
- jobu 12y agoThis struck me as the most important part of the article: Liu pointed out that while research surrounding marijuana's cancer-fighting properties is nothing new, his team is the first to document its effect on the disease when used alongside radiation. "The results showed that the final effect was superior to the sum of the parts," he said. "Hopefully, these results will support calls for formal trials in humans to test these combinations."
- unicornporn 12y agoOK. But it isn't marijuana "itself" that does this. It is one or more chemical components that we can isolate, right? We've done so many times before and created more potent medicines. But just because these components are present in marijuana I can almost bet that it will be reduced to an argument in the fight for legalization of smoking weed. I'm not saying it shouldn't be legalized (perhaps it should, perhaps it shouldn't), but that it's an entirely different question.
- dreamweapon 12y agoBut just because these components are present in marijuana I can almost bet that it will be reduced to an argument in the fight for legalization of smoking weed. Correct -- has no bearing on the issue of recreational use. Rather, and more importantly: another gentle reminder that we (as a society) need to turn our backs on the unrelenting tide of fear, misinformation, and outright deception that has characterized most discussion on the medicinal (and recreational) use of controlled substances in the public sphere for the past several decades (nearly a full century, actually) -- and back to basic science.
- WorldWideWayne 12y agoMarijuana should not have been made illegal in the first place (IMO). It's a wrong that many people want righted, which is why any discussion of Marijuana usually turns into a discussion about the corrupt legal system that we live with. So, the question I ask is: Should it be illegal? And the resounding answer is 'No' because I don't believe in taking away people's freedom to do what they wish with their own bodies.
- eidyia 12y agothe plant should be legalized, what you do with it its up to you, personally I dislike any sort of smoking so am planning to drink a lot of teas if the day ever comes. but indeed a different discussion ^^
- jerf 12y agoRead The Fine Article a bit more closely. It contains the answer to your question.
- driverdan 12y agoI'm surprised Huffington Post isn't blocked from HN. It's nothing but blogspam and cranks. How about we list the original content, either the study[1] or the op-ed that most of the content was taken from[2]. 1: http://mct.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2014/11/12/1535-7163.MCT-14-0402.abstract http://mct.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2014/11/12/1535-71... 2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/18/how-pot-helped-shrink-one-of-the-most-aggressive-brain-cancers/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/18/h...
- dreamweapon 12y agoAs with social overuse of MJ itself: I'd prefer that Huffington Post citations be moderated by the force of social opprobrium (preferably in the form of a consistent lack of upvoting), rather than by coercion (in this context, outright blocking).
- jostmey 12y agoI popped open the original study --- I cannot find where they mention how many mice were used in the study. If it was a small number, the results are meaningless. And as far as testing marijuana on cell lines, that can be problematic too. Just because something kills cancer cells doesn't mean it is a useful therapy. Alcohol would kill cancer cells but that doesn't mean it is the cure to cancer. You also have to show that it leaves healthy cells alone.
- dang 12y ago> I'm surprised Huffington Post isn't blocked from HN. It used to be, but somebody pleaded the case that they occasionally have solid articles, so we moved it from banned outright to lightweight, which means the articles get penalized by default but various conditions can override the penalty. A lot of big media sites are in this category. It's not a perfect solution, but it works better than the alternative. In the case of specialized technical papers that aren't in the local sweet spots such as computing, HN tends to prefer the best popular article on the subject, with the paper linked to in comments. It's not a fixed rule but it works well. For that reason, we wouldn't replace the Huffpo url with [1]. However, [2] is clearly a more original source, so we'll swap Huffpo out. Thanks! (Submitted url was http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/18/marijuana-brain-cancer_n_6181060.html. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/18/marijuana-brain-can...)
- driverdan 12y agoAnyone have a source that explains the mechanism of action behind cannabinoids disrupting cancers?
- cbd1984 12y agoNow maybe we can extract the active ingredients and make a better, more effective therapy with fewer side effects, instead of making people damage their lungs smoking a weed to get this into them, or making them eat fatty foods and damaging the rest of their bodies.