I feel obliged to quote the UK Cancer Society, because they have an awesome page on this issue:
Emphasis mine.
I’ll address a few things here. First, that each of these cases “just cooked up their own version which happened to work so well.” Indeed, that’s how it works. Not all cannabis medicine works optimally, but even rudimentary oil is effective. Shona Banda for instance just vaporized cannabis in a globe vaporizer and took out the resin on the glass with a spatula, and in put her Crohn’s into remission. That’s not scientific or accurate by any means, but it still works. People don’t need to understand everything - the general observation has been that any cannabis extract medicine made with a proper process and proper cannabis works. Even with Shona, the vaporization oil that resulted proved to actually work, which certainly was surprising considering it varied so greatly from any other extraction technique.
You keep mentioning Burzynski, but this situation is so different. That was one man treating people. This is hundreds of people treating themselves, using many different extracts and processes. Doctors, corporations, dispensaries, teams, and individuals. And they are all reporting the same miraculous transformations achieved with cannabis oil.
Emotion is undeniably a part of this. The emotion that I’ve felt from talking and connecting with real patients is valuable evidence. I am testifying to you that in my experience, the majority of people are seeing success. As for “dead people don’t talk”, that’s not true - their families can report the failures. That’s how I know of the terminal cancer patients who didn’t make it, because others report it. But even in those cases, the families report remarkable improvements and strongly believe that without the cannabis oil, the deaths would have been far harsher.
The scientific literature, the experiential results, and my own experience over many years are why I know this is true. You all have complained that I don’t have an open mind, why should I expect you guys to if I don’t? Because I know this is true! It’s like someone complaining that someone doesn’t have an open mind because they don’t believe the sky is red. I know this is true ultimately because of my experience, and there is no arguing with that. If you’d had my experience, I guarantee you would have the same beliefs as me.
Also the UK Cancer Society repeats the same problems you have, and I agree with this skeptical nature. What kind of cancer, what stage, what other treatments, etc. In most cases, the patients do indicate their actual diagnoses and what medical treatments they had before. The people who are criticizing this aren’t looking deep enough, they assume what people are reporting will be discredited when more information comes out. No. When more information comes out, it will only confirm what these people are saying. Just like with Corrie Yelland and Joanne Crowther, two people who did indeed back up their videos with medical records, which unequivocally proved the details of everything people complain about. When people actually speak with patients and look into this, rather than only relying on the videos and stories, it becomes apparent this is true.
[My bold]
I agree that there are more papers showing benefits from cannabinoids than not. But that’s not the point. You keep pleading for people to read your 100-page report and the “scientific” review in it. The point is that you don’t include anything that doesn’t support your pro-cannabis view.
Why not? That’s not how legitimate scientific reviews are written and one reason (of many) why people aren’t going to take your report seriously.
I’m pretty sure you’ve claimed upthread that the oil can cure virtually any type of cancer (and pretty much everything else). Are you including cancer arising from cells that do not express cannabinoid receptors? It’s possible that telling these types of patients to forgo chemo and take the oil may not yield results you would brag about.
What if THC does have deleterious effects on some cancers? It’s convenient that when studies show THC has a positive effect it is used as evidence, but waved away when it doesn’t. In vitro work is OK when it supports your view but not relevant when it does not?
Oh, there are different formulations of the oil! And how do you propose to test which formulation works best for each type of cancer? By a method that suspiciously requires controls to see what is effective? Like a trial? That can’t be right.
How is the proper formulation to use determined? What if the most most effective treatment needs weeks to be demonstrated. Will it have been discarded for a non-effective formulation just because it didn’t work fast enough?
This is what you’re not understanding. For the most part, the response you’re receiving isn’t “Further evidence will prove this false.” Rather, the response is, in so many words, “Further evidence is needed before this is shown true.” (Or: “Without further evidence, there’s basically no real evidence that what you say is true.”)
For the most part, no one here is saying “You’re wrong about cannabis.” Rather, they’re saying “You haven’t said anything that gives us a good reason to believe you about Cannabis.”
Do you understand the distinction I’m making here? Can you tell it back to me in your own words? I ask because I (and others) have pointed it out several times, and so far you seem to be ignoring the point.
Okay, so what is it you want? What do you want to be happening, that is not presently happening?
Notice that in the case where actual careful documentation was provided, the most angrily skeptical person in this thread said there’s enough there to justify further investigation.
So like, I don’t know what you exactly want here. That would seem to be exactly what you’re looking for–someone to say “yes, there may indeed be something here, we ought to be studying it in more detail.” That’s not enough for you? Why not? What is your recommendation, if not “get this studied in more detail”?
That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out throughout this entire thread.
He wants us all to praise him for his insight and laud his paper for being groundbreaking and exposing the truth. “Truth” is relative here.
In short he wants to be a hero and we’re not giving him that.
I think he said he came to this website because he initially thought The Straight Dope was pro-cannabis. Now he’s nonplussed he ran into a bunch of skeptics who don’t buy his truth. “Evidence? But I’ve got stories. If you just wouldn’t be so closed-minded.”
I’m sure he believes he’s part of a heroic movement, but would say the true heroes are the patients and handful of doctors treating people despite no clinical proof yet it’s effective.
They’re the early adopters and we just can’t see it. It’s different from every other miracle cure that has followed the exact same pattern of advocacy. Why? Because it’s real and he knows this in his heart.
No. it’s not. Just the opposite, in fact - your emotions are causing you to see what you want, and fail to see what you don’t want.
That’s why objective evidence is necessary. It clears away the confusion that occurs, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes not, when people desperately want to convince others of what they very much want to be true.
All of us here would really, really like it if some miracle cure for cancer appeared. But it would be irresponsible, not to say stupid, to assume it has appeared when there is no good evidence that it has. As has been explained many times over, cherry-picking anecdotes is not good evidence.
And when people who are not desperately invested in wanting this all to be true look at what has been studied to date, they do not see anything resembling your claims that virtually every terminal cancer patient who uses this stuff is miraculously cured. At best, they see something that merits further study. And “further study” does not mean telling every cancer patient in sight that she ought to be boiling up a concoction of cannabis oil and slathering on herself because she will cured in a few days. It means finding out if it is really happening.
If it were the cure-all you claim it is, you wouldn’t need to try the approach you seem to be choosing. And quite frankly, the fact that you want to skip over the part where we find out if the results are a fluke, or whether it does more harm than good, or some good plus a little harm, or nothing at all - that’s not reassuring.
You’re claiming the stuff cures everything from cancer to a broken heart. But all you got is - well, what you got so far. And it is very, very far from enough.
Very, very.
Regards,
Shodan
There have been so many times I’ve been misinterpreted in this thread, I can’t believe a community of such intelligent people could continue making these mistakes. First off, in regards to my finding this forum, I was looking for a large forum to discuss this with. This was a large forum under the “General” category with many users, so I clicked onto it. At first, I thought it might be cannabis related, but I actually didn’t want that. I’ve already started a thread on a pro-cannabis website, I didn’t want another. I was actually happy when I found out it wasn’t like that. All of you in your minds thought almost certainly for sure I had come to this website thinking and hoping it was for cannabis… but were absolutely wrong. A perfect example of how experience is the ultimate source of truth.
There’s also been such overwhelming dismissals of the evidence I’ve provided, and to oversimplify this with a statement like “Evidence? But I’ve got stories” is ridiculous. These aren’t just stories. These are doctors like Sanjay Gupta reporting miraculous transformations by children, top neurologists calling for immediate access to high-CBD medicine, stunning testimonials from patients of dispensaries like River Rock and Realm of Caring, dozens of experiences from real people who consistently report remission of diseases with cannabis extracts, etc. The disregard for the science is also unfortunate. Even if I had included the contradictory studies in the report, it would have no effect on the conclusion - that the science overwhelmingly supports the therapeutic application of cannabis and supports the experiential results being seen. There’s not enough negativity to overcome the positivity.
Frylock, you want to know what I want? My ultimate goal is to secure hospice trials with this medicine, give it for free to terminal cancer patients who have nothing to lose, and document how many go into remission. The patients would have clinically firmed diagnoses of terminal cancer, and if they go into remission, it would be backed up with documentation. The evidence I’ve collected in my report demands such a trial - there is no excuse for not doing it.
In fact, I would like to address this now. Ultimately, the only purpose of my report was to stimulate this trial. That’s why I only focused on the positives. Focusing on the negatives would only waste time and also doesn’t affect the overall truth. In the majority of cases, cannabis extracts eliminate cancer and control serious diseases. So why shouldn’t we do a hospice trial? That would prove it.
And in regards to this thread, I wanted to take on the strongest individuals with the strongest minds and see how they interpreted this. It has been an amazing experience and I’ve learned a lot from this.
But in any case, I should’ve reiterated further what my ultimate purpose was. I thought I had and I make it clear in my report, but again nobody has really read it. But that’s what I really want to focus on now - why would you not want a hospice trial to be carried out as soon as possible? With so many terminal cancer patients reporting remission, and absolutely no risk to patients who would be part of the trial, why not do it?
Which has it’s own problems. Burning stuff down.
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/santacruz/ci_24277270/police-second-santa-cruz-fire-started-hash-oil
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?id=9314852
But focusing on the negatives is what proper trials are all about. Yes’ it’s great to crow about the 20 or 30 who lived. What about the 500 or 1000 who didn’t? They don’t count? you tell someone you have a sure fire cure when it only works a small fraction of the time?
Cash was a failure of cannabis no matter how you dress it up or deny it or twist it to claim a victory.
Same with Brian Scott. It didn’t work. And he put of a known therapy to try something he was led to believe would help.
You even claimed him as a success without knowing the latest.
Is what you’re suggesting already legal? Okay then–Who here is an agent for a hospice?
Is what you’re suggesting not presently legal? Okay then–Who here is an agent for a lobbying firm?
If you’re not looking to talk to actual hospice workers or people who work in politics (whichever is appropriate here) then who are you looking to talk to, and what does the SDMB have to offer you in that regard?
My bold.
And yet the gold standard of evidence is the clinical trial. And you have not provided that evidence.
Sanjay Gupta talking on CNN.
Calls for access.
Stunning testimonials.
Reports of remissions.
Etc.
Since they’re not just stories, maybe you can provide the PubMed IDs of these so we won’t disregard the science.
And again, how exactly do you propose finding which formulations of the cannabis oil to use?
Was it this?
Use hospice patients as guinea pigs?
So which is it, “all” or “the majority of cases” that supposedly benefit?
Looks like your claims are getting less grandiose with time.
Progress of a kind. :dubious:
Given that there are boatloads of “alternative” remedies for cancer and other maladies out there, plus a great number of promising but untested mainstream treatments just entering more rigorous evaluation, why is it that cannabis oil should be jumped to the head of the line and used to experiment on hospice patients? Proponents of lots of these therapies are just as convinced as you that they will “revolutionize” medicine and have as many or more anecdotes and better-documented case histories compared to you.
I’M ANGRY! THIS IS MY OUTSIDE VOICE! 
I keep on mentioning Burzynski because each and every time I examine the evidence you provide, it all is perfectly analogous to the evidence he offers for his clinic. No scientific studies, but loads of anecdotes. Individual patients trotted out. Bits of pre-clinical evidence held up as definitive proof.
Then you’re doing it wrong. Emotion has no place in scientific research. It’s the thing we need to cut out and leave behind in order to have anything approaching objectivity.
Why? Why would the emotions of those involved say anything about the treatment? Buddy, the list of objective statements about the treatment you can derive from “the patient emotionally feels that this will work” is:
- This will have a viable placebo reaction regardless of anything else
…That’s it. That’s the whole list. It’s absolutely fucking worthless evidence!
Assuming they have families. Assuming those families are going to report it to begin with. Assuming that this is likely to get a lot of traction on pro-pot sites. Look, I’m sorry, if you’re going to claim that there’s no self-selection bias in such reporting, then you’re simply wrong. Full stop. Not saying it never happens, but it allows for massive skewing.
This is just incredibly tiresome. You don’t know that it’s true. You believe very strongly. You believe the same way that George W. Bush believes in Jesus. He’d say he “knows” too. But that doesn’t make it so.
Then give me those.
Once more, with feeling:
No We Don’t!
We do not assume that this will be discredited when more information comes out. We simply state that the given evidence does not fulfill the burden of proof it has, and that more evidence is required. You need to wrap your head around this. It’s not that complicated.
Who do you plan on having fund this free THC treatment for an entire hospice of end-stage cancer patients?
Why hospice trials? Give me one reason why those would be better than large-scale double-blind controlled clinical trials for any purpose.
Well then, what the fuck are you doing here? Why aren’t you getting this trial set up? Why aren’t you trying to contact people who could set up a damn well should know by now is not going to convince anyone here?
Well, you failed. Any rational scientific authority who looks at your report will inevitably come away with a far more negative opinion of your movement than they had beforehand. You need to clean your shit up, and reduce it to the best examples you have. Because nobody wants to wade through 100 pages of bullshit.
Un-fuckin’-believable. This guy is great. He doesn’t even know that the general term for focusing on the positives and ignoring the negatives is called “cherry-picking” and is not very far below straight-up academic fraud in term of the effect it has on evidence’s veracity. I mean… Um… Points for honesty, I guess?
Obviously you haven’t.
And I figure I should reiterate what I’ve been saying throughout the thread: if you think your report will make anyone in any position of power change their minds, then you’re nuts. It’s a terrible report, and anyone who understand evidence- or science-based medicine will come away from it thinking that you’re a quack trying to sell them crap. The reasons for this I’ve been over several times - poorly-constructed, spread incredibly thin, wastes a lot of time on pointless things like Rick Simpson (which would be COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT even if Simpson wasn’t several bats short of a belfry), and lends too much credence to anecdotes while offering no supporting evidence for them. If your goal is genuinely to get that sort of study done, and you intend to do this in part with your report, then you direly need to revise it. You need to trim it down, cut out the chaff, and start looking at this from the position of someone who doesn’t assume that cannabis oil is the greatest thing since penicillin. For someone who doesn’t start from that assumption, would this anecdote be convincing? In the vast majority of cases, the answer is a clear “no”.
Look, I want these trials just as much as you (although for different reasons - I’d like to see if this works to begin with). If you want help revising your report, I’d be glad to help you in whatever capacity I can, even if that’s just as a sounding board as to which anecdotes seem reasonable. For example, Corrie’s? Definitely keep that one in. The dude with skin cancer but zero verifiable evidence? Not so much.
I continuously keep getting misinterpreted on many issues. I never said it works all the time for every case. I said it works the majority of times for the majority of cases. I make that statement based on the testimonies I’ve seen and read, the patients and caregivers I’ve talked with, the overwhelming nature of the science, and my general experience.
One of the biggest problems you all have with this, which is understandable, is thinking the cases are not representative. That I only picked the best cases and am leaving out many failures, so the apparent high success rate of the medicine is obscured. I’m countering that directly by saying it’s not the case. From my experience and the work of caregivers treating patients, I can tell you that this medicine is working in nearly all cases. I’ve never said there aren’t failures, but it’s clear that this works better than absolutely any other medicine on the planet and even if it’s not perfect, it must be used immediately.
As for Cash Hyde, his story is doubtless a testament to the effectiveness of cannabis extract medicine. First off, he was already on the verge of death - without cannabis oil, he would almost have certainly died from his first bout with cancer. To say he probably would have survived is in direct contradiction to both the doctor’s prognoses and the physical state of Cash. But immediately after Mike Hyde began giving Cash cannabis oil, his condition immediately reversed, and he went into remission soon after. Does anybody honestly believe the cannabis oil had nothing to do with the immediate reversal? And the experience is consistent with other reports - of people being able to come back from even the worst of it. And the reason Cash died was apparently because he couldn’t get enough cannabis oil. The first two times he beat the cancer, their supply was cut off, and the cancer came back. In aggressive cancers like that, experience has shown it is important to keep ingesting cannabinoids to prevent recurrence. Cash was unable to do that, and the third time he got cancer, it was too much. Also, his parents continue to advocate for cannabis oil treatment because they saw how well it worked. I’ve spoken with Mike on many occasions and his feelings for this are the same as mine.
And as for the different formulations, the two main categories are high-THC and high-CBD. In general, the most popular type has been high-THC, because that’s what has been available. Even that has shown to be extremely effective, as most of the non-River Rock/Realm of Caring testimonials are achieved through such oil. There is significant crossover between high-THC and high-CBD effectiveness, but evidence suggests that high-CBD oils in general are even better than high-THC. For one, such oils are non-psychoactive, and scientific studies suggest that CBD has more applications. Also, the CBD cases I’ve read about seem to respond to the therapy even faster than THC cases. Both work, CBD just seems to be better, but there is obviously so much research to be done as to what formulations benefit which diseases best. Like I said, that’s where the double-blind, full-scale clinical trials come in. That’s where we need it, to determine what’s best. But we already know it works, that issue can be proven through a hospice trial, and then we can get to the real work that needs to be done.
As for funding, I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to come together yet, but there are potential paths forming that I’m hopeful about. I’m going to continue along my current course until something breaks through.