Tag: weed

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.