Tag: marijuana card

It’s been shown in numerous studies that marijuana or cannabis can be useful as a therapeutic treatment for patients who live with HIV/AIDS. One study that they did at Columbia, they had AIDS patients in a hospital, inpatient hospital, and they found out that if they used marijuana, that they got from a government source, they were able to eat more calories and gain more weight at the end of the study, compared to people who were using a placebo marijuana. And that’s very important for people who have AIDS. They often suffer from wasting syndromes.

Secondly, AIDS patients have to take varied medicines that upset the stomach quite a bit, and highly active antiretrovirals, or heart medicines. There was a study at Stanford, by Dr. Israelsky’s group, that showed that if you used cannabis or marijuana, you had a much higher adherence rate to those antiretroviral drugs. Two to four times higher rate to keep taking those drugs on a routine basis. Which is very important if you are trying to suppress a virus which is really prone to become resistant and adapt. So you have to keep the regiment on. So that’s very useful.

Dr. Donald Abrams in U.C. San Francisco has shown that AIDS patients, HIV/AIDS patients developed this painful nerve, burning sensation in their legs, called HIV Sensory Neuropathy. It’s like a burning sensation. And we don’t have any good drugs to treat it. It turns out the drug that we have the best evidence for in medicine to treat it with is marijuana, hands down. And it’s a growing problem as more and more people are living with longer lives. Because the drugs are becoming more available and HIV/AIDS turns into a chronic disease.

So treatment of burning pain sensations, boosting your appetite, and helping gain weight, helping maintain your adherence to your antiretroviral drugs are all benefits that marijuana can afford to the HIV/AIDS patient. And Dr. Abrams, the cancer and AIDS specialist at San Francisco, says that it also helps with their mood. Living with a terminal in some cases or chronic illness can be something that causes quite a bit of adjustment and depression problems. And marijuana has been shown to be helpful with boosting moods.

So that’s the story behind marijuana and AIDS. Without AIDS activists medical marijuana wouldn’t have really been a reality. Because they really pushed in California in the 1990’s to help get laws passed that allowed patients with conditions like AIDS to use it for compassionate purposes. And the federal government actually stopped their program supplying marijuana to patients on a case by case basis when they were flooded with AIDS applications. So that’s why part of why we have medical marijuana today.

There’s a lot of excitement in the world of cancer research about the compounds that naturally occur in marijuana as a treatment for various tumors. There’s a research group out of Spain, led by a Dr. Guzman. And his group actually did one of the first human studies that documented in a group of really severe, late stage brain tumor patients that if you injected their brain tumors directly with a solution that contains THC, one of the compounds in cannabis, that you can actually observe through scans a reduction in the size of those brain tumors. That was in a group of less than 15 patients. But it was a pilot study and it was a very exciting result, that in the majority of those patients tumors shrunk. But they kind of expected that as their hypothesis because they had seen so much data from their petri dishes and their animal studies that these tumors can shrink. Especially these tumors of the brain called glioblastomas, a very debilitating tumor in the brain, that has a very low survival rate.

So the more we study, we find out that breast cancers, prostate cancers, lung cancers, a whole range of tumors in the body have been shown in animal studies and petri dish studies to be reduced and attacked by chemicals in marijuana. Usually the chemicals in marijuana do this by making those cancer cells kill themselves, reducing the blood supply to those cancers, and reducing the amount of, how those cancers spread in other parts of the body. So there are cancer groups calling for the inclusion of the chemicals of marijuana in chemotherapy regimens as a treatment for cancer. That’s very interesting and exciting future there.

And I think there are a lot of natural compounds that have anticancer properties. And I think cannabis is going to go right in there as one of those ones that can potentially be useful for a lot of different cancers.

More research needs to be done. But the research that has done is extremely promising. And even the National Cancer Institute, which is an NIH branch, has information on their website for doctors documenting all of these anticancer properties that I’ve described.

The oldest book that we have of pharmacopeia, which is a collection of drugs and their uses, is from China. In that book, they have shown, they’ve discuss the use of marijuana for the treatment of rheumatism, menstrual cramps, even forgetfulness. And there’s even like another book called the Ebers Papyrus from Egypt. And some people say that’s even older. And that also mentions marijuana. But if you go back, if you go to the modern times, like western medicine that we have today, it really wasn’t until the 1830s, 1840s that marijuana or cannabis, as it was called at the time, made its entrance.

There was a western doctor named O’Shaughnessy, Dr. O’Shaughnessy who was an Irish physician who actually as a medical student discovered the treatment for cholera by giving people intravenous fluids, hydration, which saved a lot of lives. And then he went to India and laid down telegraph lines across the country and was knighted. But in the meantime and in the midst of all that he learned from local healers about this cannabis medicine and was able to show that it could be used for tetanus and epilepsy, even rabies he was experimenting with. And he published his results and brought cannabis back with him to England and to the United Kingdom. And really it picked up like wildfire. A lot of doctors were using it in their medicines. Even Queen Victoria’s doctor, Dr. Reynolds, prescribed it to Queen Victoria for her menstrual cramps.

In the United States from the 1830s to the 1940s, for 100 years, it was in our pharmacopeia, our official United States book of approved drugs. Lots of companies like Merck and Eli Lilly that you’ve heard of today and companies that don’t exist today had cannabis or marijuana based medicines that they produced and they put on pharmacy shelves. So at that time they used it for the treatment of cramps and pain, some of the things that we still use are things are know marijuana is useful for today. But, because of the politics and reefer madness and all of the issues around, and also other newer drugs coming on the scene, marijuana kind of fell out of favor and is really now experiencing a resurgence.

Marijuana can’t kill you no matter how much humans have consumed. And people have tried to consume large quantities, either through inhaling the smoke of lots and lots of collected flowers, which is where the active ingredients are found, or they’ve tried to extract the active ingredients from the flowers into solvents like butter or alcohol. Well, too much alcohol can kill you, certainly, but the, it’s the compounds in marijuana even if you ingest a high concentrated variety of it, can’t stop your breathing, can’t cause you to have a seizure, as far as we know, possibly in some cases for people who are predisposed, these things can happen. But generally speaking, there’s been no recorded deaths just related to the use of the drug itself in no matter what quantity you’ve consumed.

Now, you can use too much of something if you were expecting a certain effect. Now, if you wanted to have a stress relieving affect with marijuana but still wanted to be functional and, you know, active you could use so much to the point where you become sedated and maybe a little bit agitated and that phenomenon can cause problems for people. And that’s what we’ve called an overdose, in quotes. It’s not an overdose to the point where you have now, you need to go to the emergency room and you need to be pumped, out of your stomach, or the substance, that kind of phenomenon is not what I’m describing.

Also, you might end up having a paranoid or psychotic reaction with a high use of something that has psychologically activating properties. People call that an acute cannabis psychosis, and that’s been described. Often times that does not lead to any chronic, long term change in your psychological status, like where you’re permanently this way, it clears over the course of a day or less. We’re talking extremely large doses, some of these affects.

Everyone has a different pharmacology, different chemistry, different reaction to drugs so the important thing is that people, when they’re using a psychologically activating substance is that they pace themselves, that they know how much they’re using, and wait before taking more. And that very commonly happens when you take marijuana orally, like in foods or dissolved things, there’s a large delay in the onset, sometimes can be up to an hour, hour and a half. And by that time, if you are waiting for an effect and have used more and more, you can have a kind of, an unpleasant surprise, a high amount sedation or, as I was mentioning, agitation.

With smoking or inhalation and vaporization, the onset is more immediate so you’re really able to just gauge in within a minute or two whether this is the right amount, whether you’re trying to relieve a symptoms or you’re trying to achieve a certain psychological state. And that’s important when you’re in a social setting and using marijuana or you’re sharing with other people, people will have different set points and that’s, I think, the key thing to remember.

Marijuana is used to relieve symptoms associated with gastrointestinal distress or disease, has been studied in clinical trials and has been used, found to be a useful treatment by doctors who are experimenting with it with their patients and patients themselves who happen to discover it on their own.

I remember the case of one young man in his twenties I interviewed who had ulcerative colitis. Severe, bloody, inflammatory disease caused him a lot of pain and cramping. He was going towards the route of needing surgery and he told me that once he was at a friend’s house and they said you should try smoking marijuana when he was having one of these really severe exacerbation and he said, “Are you kidding? Really? What’s this gonna do?”

And he didn’t believe it but then he described to me and I took very detailed notes of this interview and recorded it. He described how all of a sudden when he used this marijuana that he had an immediate relief of all the cramping and pain in his gut and he was able to actually sit down comfortably and going to the emergency room and since that time he continued to integrate this into his treatment to the point where his GI doctor, his gastroenterologist had written an authorization letter to allow him to use it for the treatment of his ulcerative colitis. It’s a fantastic thing for a patient like that at a young age who finds a relief from a plant medicine because they’re not, maybe
they will not have to go on to develop a need for surgery or develop all the other problems that come with really worsening ulcerative colitis.

The same thing people report with Crohn’s disease which is kind of another type of inflammatory GI disorder but potentially less severe, in some cases more severe depending on how bad you have it. But basically there was a study out of Israel where they looked at a lot of patients who were using cannabis for crone’s relief and they found a whole range of quality of life indicators got better in those patients. Why is this all working? Because it turns out the GI track is full of cannabinoid receptors which are those chemical locks, the keys that are made in cannabis kind of lock into. And the GI system is full of it’s own nervous system and it’s full of its own lymph tissue, it’s own immune tissue. And in these inflammatory disorders both of those are out of whack or disregulated, and using cannabis, cannabinoids, which are basically a homeostatic system, can help to reduce the inflammation and potentially relieve the pain and cramping that you get through the interaction with the gut’s nervous system.

So it’s a very interesting application and there are studies that are showing it’s a lot of promise and I’m sure if you do a Google search, you’ll find a lot of reports of this and who knows, in the future we might be able to potentially reduce the progression of GI disorders like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis if we’re integrating cannabis and cannabis-based medicines.

Marijuana has been shown in studies to relieve the symptoms associated with multiple sclerosis. Symptoms like spasticity and severe central pain. In some studies, there are indications that marijuana might be useful to slow the progression of multiple sclerosis which is a very promising idea given that multiple sclerosis often becomes very degenerating and neurodegenerative disorder where patients lose the ability to walk and other essential functions.

So the studies that I’m talking out, the biggest ones were done with a marijuana-based extract that was made in an undisclosed greenhouse in England somewhere in the countryside. A company has grown marijuana and extracted it into a solvent of liquid carbon dioxide. Using that solvent, using preparation, they’ve given that preparation to large numbers of multiple sclerosis patients in clinical studies. And they give it to them over time and they compare it with a placebo. And they try to see if they get improvements in their spasticity and their pain. Spasticity is a painful, kind of, muscle spasm or tightness.

And it turns out that marijuana can, this marijuana spray was able to relieve the symptoms of these patients so well, so effectively, that the national governments in England and in Canada have given that government, or sorry, given that pharmaceutical company the right to sell this marijuana spray as a treatment for multiple sclerosis related symptoms. It is stocked in the pharmacies and you can have your doctor prescribe it. And actually, the number of countries that have approved this is growing. And it turns out that in those studies that have been used with the marijuana spray in multiple sclerosis patients that over a long period of time they were able to increase their does if they wanted to or needed to to relieve the symptoms and over a year or more they never increased the dose of the medicine, which indicates that their symptoms were stable and their disease wasn’t, possibly you could say that the disease wasn’t worsening.

So you can imagine that if a spray works like that, it’s certainly possible that an inhalation of the actual herbal material that the company has been using to make their product could also be beneficial for these patients. And that has been shown in a study in California by a group led by Dr. Cory Bloom. They recently published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal that painful spasms can be relieved with using the smoke of marijuana as a treatment. That was a government funded study as well.

So there’s extremely exciting treatments that are on the horizon for MS patients and we already know that it can be useful in their, with patients who have that condition in really gold standard studies. So it’s really a matter of finding out if we can slow the disease progression and what kind of preparations will make the best difference for what types of MS syndromes.

Chronic pain’s a big problem in our country, in the United States and around the world. It can lead to loss of functional work opportunities. It can lead to depression. It can, people take long acting, long term medicines that can potentially cause lethality if used in a high dose, could cause constipation, that cause itching, that cause hypogonadism. All of these problems are from the use of opioids which are derived from the opium poppy which are mainstays in the treatment of chronic pain.

The problems with chronic pain are that it’s disabling and also that the treatments for it can also come with a whole host of very difficult severe to mild side effects. But it turns out that marijuana also is effective in numerous chronic pain syndromes, has been shown in actual clinical studies, controlled trials, especially nerve-type chronic pain syndromes where you have damage to a nerve or some type of situation going on where a nerve-type pain is going out of control and going on for more than three months. And it turns out that if you smoke cannabis, in clinical studies, compared to a placebo cannabis, you can get greater than 30 to 40 percent reduction of pain in a large percentage of those subjects compared to placebo. That’s been shown over and over.

And then in the basic studies where they use animals and try to, like, develop models for pain, every model that you develop for pain in those models, cannabis or cannabinoids relieves pain. So it’s really a natural or well-established pain relieving compound. In some cases, you might be able to reduce. If you use cannabis or marijuana in your pain treatment you can reduce the risk of other treatments that may be more toxic. In some cases you can go off of all other treatments. I’ve seen patients like that.

I’ve written up some review articles like in the Clinical Journal of Pain called Cannabinergic Pain Medicine as a whole field of subfield in pain itself relies on the system in the body that’s called the cannabinoid system that actually helps to send pain signals up and down in the body and actually helps our natural pain, one of our natural pain suppressing systems. And also, these different compounds called cannabinoids in cannabis that have been shown to relieve pain. It’s itself a whole field in pain.

So in clinical journals of pain it turns out that there is actually articles about the use of cannabinoids, which are the chemicals in cannabis, as its own treatment system for pain because the system in the body that the cannabinoids interact with is itself involved in our pain pathways.

So there is a huge interest in literature in the world of pain treatment which relies on all the science that we have accumulated with how cannabis works in the body.

The use of marijuana to mitigate the effects of chemotherapy has been
around for almost 30 years or more in the United States. In fact, the very
first wave of medical marijuana laws were in the 70’s and early 80’s and
they were geared toward patients using marijuana in studies who were
receiving cancer chemotherapy. The amazing thing is the marijuana has a
dramatic effect on relieving nausea and vomiting associated with
chemotherapy.

Turns out there are receptors or meaning little locks, molecular locks in
the part of your brain stem that are involved in the vomiting circuit, the
nausea circuit. Those locks are actually the keys, the chemical keys that help to
change those locks situation is found in marijuana and so like lock fits a
key or a key fits into a lock, marijuana can directly chemically change
your state of nausea and vomiting.

So that has a huge impact. It’s been studied in clinical studies and been show
to relieve chemotherapy related nausea and vomiting. Also the government helped
to back studies to make certain chemicals, single molecule pills derived
from marijuana compounds and those have been approved by the FDA for the
relief of nausea and vomiting in chemotherapy. Without this discovery, we
really wouldn’t have moved medical marijuana as far forward as we have
today.

Oncologists are surveyed even in prestigious medical centers, even as far as
in the early 90’s were reporting a large percentage that they would be
recommending marijuana to their patients to tolerate the effects of
chemotherapy. It turns out nowadays, we even know that marijuana has anti-
cancer chemicals in it that we’ve been able to show that some compounds in
marijuana can kill cancer cells in Petri dishes and animals and in one human
study.

So some groups have called for the use of marijuana compounds in chemotherapy
regimen themselves, so that’s a very exciting development and can
potentially help to relieve not just the effects of cancer related
chemotherapy, but cancer itself. So marijuana has a lot of promise in this
area.

If you are in one of the states, I recommend is a checklist to figure out if you’re in one of these states, how you can become a legal medical cannabis patient.

The first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to look in the law and see if the condition that you suffer from is included. This is a little ridiculous. Again, a lot of it is because of the politics. All of the medical cannabis laws, except for California, actually specify what a doctor can and cannot write a recommendation for medical cannabis for. This is very unlike pharmaceuticals where a doctor can write off-label and write it for anything he decides he wants to.

For cannabis, depending on what state you’re in, that list is going to be very different. The first thing you do is look at that list if you’re qualified and you can move on. If you don’t have a qualifying condition, you can write a letter to the Department of Public Health of your state and ask them to include your condition. That’s also something that’s a ballgame because each of these state laws are adding conditions, so just because you’re not eligible today doesn’t mean you’re not tomorrow.

If you do have a qualifying condition, the next thing you want to do is see if there is some special paperwork that your doctor has to fill out. Again, every state is different. Once you have the paperwork for your doctor, you may also want to look at other resources on our website about the condition that you want to talk to your doctor about. Chances are your doctor may be a little skeptical. It may take a couple of visits for him or her to understand that this is something that you want to use in your therapy. If your doctor is completely hesitant and just does not want to write a recommendation for you, he may say that the firm that he’s a part of won’t let him, she may say that it’s the private practice she’s a part of. A lot of this is just excuses and it isn’t true. If you still want to move forward to try to get your recommendation, there are cannabis specialists in almost every medical cannabis state that are willing to see patients whose general practitioners are a little fearful of the issue.

If you’re going to go to a cannabis specialist, it’s our advice that you find out who the physician is that’s on site. Ask them if that physician is going to see you, personally. And then, look up and make sure that that doctor is still in good standing. If it’s a good clinic, they’re going to want copies of your medical records. To save yourself a couple of visits, you may want to have those papers in hand when you go to that visit.

Once you have your doctor’s recommendation, then you need to submit that to the state. You’re still not quite a legal patient in those states. Most states require an authorization from the Department of Public Health. Once you get the letter from your doctor and you send in the fee for the identification card, the Department of Public Health will decide whether or not you qualify. They’ll either send you a rejection letter or they’ll send you a card or some type of identification saying that you are now a legal medical cannabis patient. Depending on what state you’re in, that card is going to mean different things for you. Again, as a medical cannabis patient, it’s important to know the laws and stay up to date on what’s happening in the courts and in the legislature.