Cannabis Extracts for the Primary Treatment of Cancer, Epilepsy, and More

Great Debates
81

The patients aren’t quacks - the authorities you are pushing are quacks, or else have not published anything about cannabis.

That’s where you are mistaken. This is exactly like every other quack remedy, except with cannabis oil instead of snake oil - a whole bunch of sweeping claims and anecdotes wrapped up in a gooey layer of pseudo-scientific bullshit.

You didn’tlookvery hard, did you?

Prove it with some kind of peer-reviewed evidence, especially double-blinded studies done by real clinicians.

If you are going to claim that cannabis cures cancer, then yes, we damn well do. You don’t like that, Mr. Marketing Major? Too fucking bad - people’s lives are at stake here.

Put up, or shut up. Let’s see some real evidence, and no, you don’t get to say it is too urgent to spend time asking questions you can’t answer.

Regards,
Shodan

82

Bingo. The list of people whose chances of survival have been slashed because they opted to take some unproven, untested quack remedy rather than the gold standard is long enough. Medicine is difficult. Human health is really complex. And it’s hard to isolate all the variables. This is why we demand large-scale, double blind clinical trials for drugs. You’re asking for special treatment because of some anecdotes where we lack most of the data? I’d ask what you’re smoking, but I think that’s sort of a dumb question at this point.

83

I’m tempted to as JKander if he’s typing on a Mac.

84

…What’s wrong with Macs?

85

Steve Jobs might still be alive if he’d opted for conventional medical treatment sooner instead of wasting his time trying to cure himself with a restricted diet. Pancreatic cancer is a bitch under any circumstance, but I think Jobs himself realized before the end that he’d made a mistake.

86

It doesn’t make sense at all, but we’re dealing with another believer in the “whole herb” philosophy. It’s a staple of alt med, based on a semi-religious belief that herbs and their medicinal compounds were created to benefit mankind (instead of the plants that produce them), and that “tampering” with Mother Nature by purifying the active compounds (and eliminating useless and/or harmful ones) to create standardized, reliable dosages is a bad thing. The reverse is true.

I haven’t seen this from your limited, mostly cell culture examples.

You’re not going to convince anyone with critical thinking capacity by arguing that a clump of testimonials constitutes evidence. You can easily find a similar volume of testimonials online for snake oil of every conceivable kind (as an example, I’d bet that there are far more believers in apple cider vinegar as a cure-all than for cannabis, and vinegar has a bit more going for it in terms of scientific evidence than cannabis (though not much).

87

To focus solely on the most egregious of your…let’s say “highly questionable”…statements: horseshit. Again, for you to even make such an absurd claim destroys your credibility and makes it glaringly obvious how little about this field you actually understand.

Why do you think we’ve come up with the double blind trial methodology? Guess what? It’s NOT because we like to impose arbitrary expensive, difficult hurdles for these things to overcome. It is because without this data, WE DO NOT KNOW IF A TREATMENT IS EFFECTIVE. Without a double-blind study, I do not know if it works. You do not know if it works. Cancer patients do not know if it works. The anecdotal auntie down the street who took it and had her cancer disappear? SHE DOES NOT KNOW IF THE TREATMENT WORKS. That’s right. If you take a drug and see your incurable cancer disappear, that piece of information is worth very close to nothing, unless it is part of a controlled, properly designed study.

The thing is, humans are very very good at making connections between facts and observations. It’s a survival thing from the days on the savannah. We’re so good at it, in fact, that we are very easily suckered in to making connections that aren’t actually there. With anecdotal evidence, such as you keep providing, the conclusions seem clear: here’s person after person after person who has taken this stuff and gotten better. So why isn’t that valid? Because the data is hugely biased. You are ONLY presenting one side of the story. We are only hearing from people who had positive results. There will ALWAYS be people with some horrible disease who improve for some reason. That’s why we need to work very hard to get unbiased data. How do we do that? With a properly designed double-blind clinical trial. It sucks, because those trials are expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to run. But they are absolutely necessary to find out of this treatment - or ANY treatment - actually does a damn thing. Without that research, NOBODY KNOWS IF IT WORKS. That’s why we do it.

So, I have to ask what your goal is here. If you’re here to rabble-rouse, raise emotions, get people fired up and whatnot, and maybe drive some credit cards to your site, then you’re doing it just right. Appeals to emotion and dramatic stories are great for that sort of thing. Keep it up. I’ll just point out that you’re not terribly likely to have much success here.

If, on the other hand, you are interested in pushing for actual medical experts to take your claims seriously, if you are interested in working toward turning these substances into genuine treatments that genuinely help genuine people, then you need to step back and do some learning. You need to know how science works, and what claims and arguments are reasonable and persuasive. I would go so far as to say that what you have presented is a pretty good case for further research. You’ve got the beginning of a decent grant proposal in the right hands. But if you approach people who can make this happen in the way you’ve done it here, with wild, ridiculous claims and very questionable statistics and methods, then they’re going to dismiss you out of hand, just as many people here have done. If you want to make a genuine difference, you need to learn the language, dial the emotion back about ten notches, and put together a reasonable, fact-based argument. These boards are actually a pretty great place to learn to do that, but you’re going to have to be willing to abandon a lot of what you think you know and be willing to listen. It’s completely up to you.

88

Oh, get wrecked. :smiley:

Bingo. Hey JK, you say you have a marketing degree? Here’s some marketing 101: know your audience. Try to figure out who you’re dealing with beforehand. This forum is populated primarily by rational skeptics, usually with a hard science bend. Some of us are actually trained medical doctors, or at least trained scientists, and many of us know our way around such things on at least a layman level. None of us are going to react kindly to statements like “We don’t have time to do actual clinical studies to make sure this drug worked”. I mean, imagine if a company like Bayer or Pfizier pulled that kind of shit - bringing a revolutionary new drug for a serious disease to the market that had never undergone clinical trials. The alt-med crowd that’s supporting your crap would go ballistic! They’d start screaming about how big pharma has bought out the FDA and how the new drug isn’t safe. I wonder if you’d be among them. I would, for the exact same reason I will not take your “research” seriously. Smeghead’s entire post completely killed it, mind you, and you’d do well to take his advice. Or just try to peddle this crap elsewhere. You don’t seem to understand scientific rigor, and you don’t seem open to learning about it.

89

I’m not making fun of Macs (or Jobs). I was trying to point out that if JKander is using a Mac or an iPad, he is holding an object with a real connection to someone who might be alive if he’d relied on conventional medicine instead of unproven woo similar to “cannabis cures everything!”

90

I dated a weed messiah once. When he was in soapbox mode, it was terribly exhausting just to be in the same room with him.

91

Once again, I return from work to see some excellent responses! This community is exceeding my expectations.

First off, I’m not saying that double-blind clinical trials are ineffective, unnecessary, etc. I understand exactly why they are needed: To control for bias, to control for the myriads of confounding variables, and to ensure a statistically significant correlation between an independent variable and a dependent variable. Despite understandable claims to the contrary, I’m not crazy.

The bottom line is that no double-blind studies exist right now for cannabis and cancer. If they did, we’d have won already, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. When I say that double-blind studies aren’t needed, I don’t mean that studies aren’t needed. Let me paint out the scenario I imagine.

Hypothetically, let’s say 100 people in a hospice center with terminal cancer were treated with cannabis extracts (hopefully a combination of high-CBD oil and juicing). Let’s say that 90 of them went into full remission. The documentation is all there - scans proved they had cancer, doctors said they were going to die, and only palliative medicine was prescribed. If 90 of those 100 people were treated and went into full remission, do you think the world would wait months or years for double-blind clinical trials? Absolutely not. A theoretical 90% success rate with terminal cancer would be overwhelming, and for people with only days to live, they would demand the medicine immediately. And because cannabis is so pervasive, so easy to grow, it wouldn’t be hard for them to get the medicine quickly. This is revolutionary, and what makes it difficult to discuss is the fact it does break all the rules of science.

How can one thing work against so many different types of cancers, when every cancer is so different? Not only that, but how can it work against so many different types of diseases? Even within cancer there is so much variation, but it’s also working for essentially everything else. Someone made a joke about how I’d said it could help even hiccups, which I included in the report as an example of how it does seem to work against everything. I hate to cite this study from the non-medical source (usually I like to use PubMed) but for some reason the full text isn’t coming up, but a case study where just smoking marijuana stopped hiccups where nothing else worked can be found here:
The Cannabis Link - Medical / Healing Information. Here’s the relevant text: “Chlorpromazine controlled the hiccups only during sleep. Oral nifedipine, valproate, lansoprazole, and intravenous lidocaine had no effect. Glabellar acupuncture on day six and nine terminated the hiccups for less than an hour. Removal of a hair from the tympanic membrane on day 8 and irrigation of marcaine into the external auditory canal on day nine gave only brief relief. On day eight the patient, who had not smoked marijuana before, smoked marijuana, and his hiccups stopped. They recurred on day nine and on day ten the patient again smoked marijuana; hiccups stopped immediately and did not recur.”

As I discuss in the report, the reason for why cannabis seems to be so effective is because it works through the endocannabinoid system, which is implicated in maintaining systemic homeostasis in all vertebrates. The ability to regulate postsynaptic feedback would also explain the miraculous effectiveness for autoimmune conditions like fibromyalgia, Crohn’s, lups, and multiple sclerosis. Much of the science is just theory, but if true, it would perfectly explain why these miraculous results are being achieved.

I’m saying things like “can’t be coincidence” and “this is proven” because the evidence clearly indicates that. It’s simply not a coincidence that there are studies showing cannabinoids kill virtually every type of cancer cell in cultures (WITHOUT harming healthy human cells, unlike the case with something like bleach which would also kill cancer cells but harm healthy ones), that even endocannabinoids produced by the body kill cancer cells, and people are using concentrated cannabinoids to eliminate cancers. It’s just that simple.

I’ll give you a specific example. I have a friend Dennis Hill, who worked in cancer research for 10 years. He studied this stuff. When he got prostate cancer, he didn’t want to do chemotherapy or radiation, because in his research he’d learned about the terrible side effects. In fact, everybody knows about the notorious side effects, it’s part of popular culture - the baldness, throwing up, feeling sick. He didn’t want to do it. He found out about cannabis oil through my aunt and then talked to me for more information, and I encouraged him to go ahead with it.

For three months he used cannabis butter, a relatively weak extract, and it reduced the size of his tumors. Then three months of full strength cannabis oil, and it was gone. The medical documentation for this is in my report. The only traditional treatment Dennis used was Lupron, an androgen antagonist which can potentially slow cancer growth, but not stop it and certainly not shrink it.

I mention this case because Dennis did not use chemotherapy, radiation, or surgery, the three hallmarks of cancer treatment. Furthermore, there is especially interesting science surrounding prostate cancer. A 1999 study in FEBS Letters found that THC induced apoptosis in the PC3 line of prostate cancer. Interestingly, a June 2003 study in Prostate found that the endocannabinoid anandamide induced apoptosis in the same PC3 line, along with the lines LNCaP and and DU145. The point is, it works on multiple types of prostate cancer, and this same effectiveness against different subtypes has been shown for other cancers as well.

That’s what I mean when I say the science supports the experiential results. And this is only a small piece. There are so many other cases where scientific studies indicate cannabinoids kill cancer cells, and people are using concentrated cannabinoids with effectiveness for those cancers. And skin cancer is the easiest to see it with. Several studies show cannabinoids kill skin cancer cells, and people have put oil onto skin cancer and seen it disappear.

As for debunking this, someone said I hadn’t looked very hard and referred to [url=Marijuana and cancer – facts and smoke]this threadp/url]. I actually had come across that, but like I said, no one has thoroughly debunked this. All the attempts have been incredibly weak. I remember in 2009 reading Dr. Lester Grinspoon’s “debunking” of cannabis curing cancer. All he did was focus on Rick Simpson and make similar claims as you, that it was just anecdotal, that it was exaggerating, etc. He did nothing to look at the detailed science or the multitudes of other patient cases beyond Rick, and even Rick himself wasn’t properly analyzed. And even at this point in this thread, no one has seriously debunked a single case I’ve included.

Also, it’s important to note the current progress outside of this forum. I made this thread because I wanted something like this - to have an amazing debate about this, to face an onslaught of scientific scrutiny from intelligent people, and you guys have done it. Thank you. And from my conversations with the people who matter - the doctors, the hospice personnel, the medicinal cannabis providers, researchers, government officials - they have not been put off by my claims. There’s no way to get around making dramatic claims, because that’s what’s happening. The data I have is overwhelming. It may be anecdotal, but that doesn’t change anything. There is medical documentation of cancers being eliminated, of people going in remission. There are stunning testimonies of people getting off massive doses of pharmaceuticals and using only cannabis. It’s just too much, and with this much, you can be sure it’s not coincidence, because it’s been replicated over many years by so many people.

I’ll tell you all what inspired me to finally write this paper. I’d had so much material for awhile, but what made me realize this was the time for change was the Sanjay Gupta documentary. The patient he talked about, Charlotte Figi, was having 300 grand mal seizures a week. No pharmaceuticals worked. No dietary changes worked. After the first dose of high-CBD oil, her seizures stop, and she now has less than three minor seizures a month. This single case has prompted FDA-approved trials of CBD for children, and mothers across the country are demanding this medicine for their children, including suing the states. They are not waiting for clinical trials, because what they’ve seen is enough.

And indeed, their hopes are paying off, unlike other treatments. People saw the Charlotte Figi thing and literally uprooted their lives to move to Colorado, to try this treatment. And they are having success - 9 of the 11 patients being followed by Dr. Margaret Gedde experienced 90-100% reductions in seizures from just a short time on the high-CBD oil. Those are miraculous results. And these families took this risk based off of essentially one case! I have a whole report here to convince people to do this, yet people were already taking risks based on so much less. And it’s actually working. It’s continuously being replicated.

And that’s why I say we can’t wait. Just like these families with epilepsy children can’t wait and haven’t waited, people dying of cancer can’t wait. When there is this much evidence showing cannabinoids can eliminate cancer in humans, there’s no reason to let millions of people die as we wait to find out what this movement already knows. The people who have taken the risks with this medicine come out alive. There are many cases I’ve heard from patients where they took the cannabis oil and knew others who used chemotherapy, and then suffered and died. People need to realize that taking chemotherapy is in my cases just as big a risk as trying cannabis oil. Chemotherapy can cause cancers to return, it can cause nerve damage, it can cause organ failure. There is medical documentation in my report of two chemotherapeutic agents, cisplatin and cytabarine, causing acute renal failure and hepatitis in a patient, which is why she had to stop taking chemotherapy. She was then told she was going to die, since she couldn’t continue treatment, and used cannabis oil as a last resort. She then went into full remission. One could say that the chemotherapy finally “kicked in” and cured her, but that is illogical. The chemotherapy was out of her body, the cancer was still active, and doctors gave her a terminal diagnosis. There’s another case in my report of Stan Rutner, who had brain and lung cancer, and was given only weeks to live after failed treatment with chemotherapy and radiation. He used oil, and then immediately began to recover and is now in remission.

I understand where you all are coming from. I understand how absurd this sounds, especially coming from a 22-year old marketing major. And I understand how self-righteous it sounds for me to say this is different, this is special, this breaks all the rules. But I do not say these things because I want to be right or because I want this to work. This is simply the evidence, the objective evidence I have observed over years has indicated these things. I discuss in my conclusion about how the fact this is so different and works so well is actually an impediment, because people immediately disbelieve it. Why even take the time to look into claims that ostensibly sound crazy at the offset? That’s why all you can do is look at the claims, listen to them, and slowly come to realize this is true. This is happening.

92

Oh.

There are already programs that can get drugs to people who are terminally ill and who have no other options. The trials would still be required before anybody could start selling the stuff.

Overwhelming doesn’t really cover it. I’d go with “ludicrous.”

I think this is the snake-oiliest sentence ever written. After this you start to sound more like Kevin Trudeau and that’s actually an improvement.

It really doesn’t. That’s why human trials are necessary.

I don’t think you do.

93

None of what you addressed above was the substance of my most recent post, it was more the philosophical higher-level elements. You’re also wrong about certain things. First, the statement that trials would be required before people could start selling the stuff. This is true to some extent, on the federal level, but in states people are already selling it, in the medicinal cannabis states. It already is being sold and distributed and used, and anybody who doesn’t believe this works can go out and try it for themselves. Indeed, that mindset is what has achieved so much success already.

In any case, I’m not going to offer anything more until people address the substance of my latest post - Dennis Hill and the prostate studies, Stan Rutner, Joanne Crowther (the patient who had acute renal failure and hepatitis caused by chemotherapy), and the parents who based on one case have uprooted their lives to try cannabis oil, and are actually seeing miraculous success. I want to see the challenges to this!

94

BS. “Won’t somebody please think of the children” is not only cliched, it’s an appeal to ignore reason altogether.

Use the example given above.

What if we heard of a miracle cure that wasn’t properly tested? Should we rush it out?

What if we learned it came out of GlaxoSmithKline? Or Bayer? Or any other major pharmaceutical?

Why give one drug a pass? Because of a not-so-hidden agenda?

And? Where’s the controlled experiment? It’s clear you don’t understand the concept of controls and confounding factors.

Again, anecdotes are not data. My friend was mauled by a tiger one day. The next day I gave him a rock. He has never been mauled again.

Coincidence? According to you, it’s not. According to you, we just give the rock to anybody who wants to deal directly with tigers in the jungle and BAM, automatic tiger safety. If they come back alive (whether or not they even see a tiger), it works! On our side, we think maybe the rock should be tested a bit first in a controlled environment.

95

If it’s going to be marketed as a pharmaceutical (Jackmannii explained why that’s necessary), then yes, studies are required. Otherwise it’s just going to get thrown into the bag of crap that is supplement marketing.

The challenge is “we need hard data, not anecdotes.” That doesn’t mean “please post more anecdotes.”

96

The challenge is simply that you have omitted the millions of people who uprooted their lives to to try cannabis extracts, and died of cancer anyway. Your claim there have only been 5 or 6 outright failures is fatuous on the face of it; the fact is, you have no idea how many failures there have been, because no one writes stories about miraculous failures, and they don’t get passed around on the cancer cure sites and the cannabis sites the way coincidental remissions do.

97

You’re right, I don’t know how many failures there are, but several people have written about the failures and they do get reported when they happen. The reason the successes greatly outweigh the failures is because the medicine works in the vast majority of cases. If there were far more failures, my paper would have far less merit. I don’t omit the failures to try and bolster my case. Like I said, I simply cannot find the ones I remember from years ago, like incomplete successes with breast and lung cancer. There was also an epilepsy patient I helped get cannabis oil who experienced amazing improvements but then still had further seizures. They were all still successful cases, the medicine worked better than any pharmaceutical, but it didn’t completely heal the problem. But in so many cases, in far more cases, it has.

So I have not omitted “millions of people” who have tried cannabis extracts and failed. If anything, I’ve omitted thousands of people who have tried cannabis extracts with miraculous success.

We do need to properly test this medicine. There are so many things we need to learn, both on the cellular level of how the mechanisms work, and the practical level of what dosages and cannabinoid concentratoins work best. What I’m saying is the double-blind trials aren’t needed to show it works. It wasn’t double-blind trials that have sparked this epilepsy revolution, and it won’t be double-blind trials that spark the cancer revolution.

You can’t just hide behind the fact these are anecdotes. If you want to debate this properly, you need to address what I’m bringing up. This movement cannot be properly discussed without talking about the patients. So again, what do you all have to say about the specific cases I just brought up? From what I can ascertain from your posts, you say they are valueless merely because of the anecdotal property, but can find no other reason to dismiss them. If that’s your only defense, it’s weak. Point out specific problems or reasons why the anecdotal cases are faulty, and then we’ll have something further to go on.

98

This does seem to be marketing at its finest: a dubious message about a questionable product, delivered with the utmost confidence.

99

It’s called science.

100

Okay. Do you know the difference between that hospice “trial” (assuming there aren’t any massive confounding factors, like the hospice being built on the remains of the tree of life or some shit like that - why a control group is important) and your report? In the hospice trial, if the result was 1/100 instead of 90/100, we would know. If the result was 0/100, we would know. There’s a clearly defined group of people we are examining, and this group is defined before the study starts. That way, we don’t get to do what you do, which is count the hits and ignore the misses. Or maybe you didn’t do that. But how would we know? From what I can tell, your study is selected essentially at your whim - you’re just taking random cancer cases who got treated with cannabis oil and survived. But how many people did that and then didn’t survive? Oh, you don’t have any data on that? You have literally no way to figure that out? Because you didn’t control for it? What a fucking surprise.

Your “study” is completely worthless. Period. There is no useful data in there. It’s a textbook example of confirmation bias, with the same value as the fucking testimonials pages for MMS and The Burzynski Clinic.