Posted on 02/16/2007 3:23:59 PM PST by cryptical
The cannabis plant has been used as a medicine for thousands of years. In the United States, doctors could prescribe marijuana cigarettes to patients for a variety of conditions until the 1940s, when it was banned. Marijuana's status as an illegal drug has removed it from the official medical arsenal, but its therapeutic power is still attracting attention, especially its pain-killing properties.
About 30 percent of HIV patients develop painful nerves during the course of their illness, and this neuropathy is extremely difficult to treat with standard pain medications. Dr. Donald Abrams, of the University of California at San Francisco, studied the use of marijuana for relief of their discomfort. "We've known for along time that cannabinoids, the active ingredients in marijuana, can be involved in modulation of pain and the response to pain," he explains, adding that the body has its own cannabinoid system. "We make natural substances called endo-cannabinoids and it's felt that one of the main roles of these endo-cannabinoids is in our processing of painful stimuli." Abrams studied 50 patients who had suffered nerve pain for an average of 7 years. He gave half actual marijuana cigarettes to smoke three times a day, the other half smoked placebo cigarettes. He found the patients smoking the marijuana had significantly greater pain relief, and it was almost immediate. "After smoking the first cigarette on the first day," he recalls, "we asked patients what had happened to their pain. Those smoking the actual marijuana cigarette, their pain reduced 75 percent; where those smoking the placebo, their pain reduced less than 20 percent." These results were consistent throughout the study.
Abrams says there is a pill on the market containing the most active ingredient of marijuana, called tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. But he says smoking the actual plant works better than taking the pill, because THC is only one of the components present in the plant. "The plant has over 400 chemical compounds, many of which also have medicinal value. Many of those compounds in the plant also offer a balance to the side effects of the THC alone. So when you take a pill that's just THC, some people have more adverse effects than actually smoking THC as part of marijuana."
The research appears in the February 13th issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Hoban also served as a medical project coordinator for the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières program in Indonesia.
Hoban said she is interested in policy trends and public health — not just the disease of the week.
Backing off?
Nope.
Fake quote. Inventive lie.
I'm still here, Roscoe. If you're going to accuse me of advocating drug use, then you should report it.
"I don't smoke marijuana. No secret there. But even I could tell the difference between marijuana and a placebo just by the smell alone. The "study" is a joke."
Don't know if someone else already responded to this without reading through them all, but you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the real marijuana and placebo by smell because they both smell the same. The placebo is still marijuana but with the THC engineered out of it.
And, purely hypothetically, if the two did smell different, I imagine someone within the study design process, or implementation process, or peer review process, would have caught what would have been a hugely obvious flaw in the study--that flaw being the lack of a valid control. In that case it likely would have never even gotten off the ground, or by chance if it did, it would have had a pretty hard time getting published, in which case we would likely never have read about it here.
"Yeah, doing a study using Marinol (the THC pill) and a placebo wouldn't be fair, now would it?"
Those studies have already been conducted--that's how you got the drug called "Marinol" in the first place.
I'd like to see a study of smoked marijuana versus Marinol and their comparative abilities to alleviate nerve pain.
Do they claim to be pure?
"On the inhaled situation, you said clearly that inhaled medicines were a harmful delivery system. Glad to see you backtrack from your original statement and narrow it down to being strictly about smoke."
I clearly said what? Smoked and inhaled, jagoff. Learn to read and stop misquoting me. That a good way to find yourself on the outside lookin' in.
"This shows a wavering in how sure you really are about the information you propagate."
No wavering at all. Smoked marijuana is not medicine and will never be recognized as medicine. I don't want my tax dollars wasted on research in this area. Too bad.
"want as much information as possible to put on the scales of decision making."
You are so full of it. Scales, my a$$. You couldn't care less about the risks -- you simply want it legal. And you're too dishonest to admit it.
"Let's say I have a cancer. You would define my need as radiation and/or chemo therepy."
Baloney. Our medical institutions offer those treatments as acceptable options. If you don't want them, that's YOUR choice. If you want to use healing crystals instead, be my guest. If there's a drug in Mexico you want, go. If you want to smoke marijuana, fine.
But don't expect me to vote to validate your behavior. Don't expect me to carte blanche legalize any and all treatment that you desire or that may work for you.
"If a legit study shows that smoking MJ has medicinal values"
That IS your wet dream, isn't it? Ain't gonna happen, buck-o.
"You may question chemicals RP, but that fact does not translate into a fact that I must question them as well."
Well, so much for your statement that you support honest and open research. Like I said, you couldn't care less about the risks and you don't want to know about them. The rest of us do.
"Please do explain to me how I 'use the sick and dying as pawns' when I offered you my own personal experience."
Gee, I thought you wanted marijuana available to the sick and dying. You don't? You only want it legal for YOU? Then I retract my statement.
"Drug interactions you say? That would be something to study further huh? Oh wait, you deny such studies are warranted."
Stop misquoting me. That's twice now in one post.
"If you know of interactions today, please state them. Good luck with that RP."
Ask Psycho_Bunny yourself about buproprion.
"A good steward of their own garden would recognize things like fungus."
Yeah, be sure to ask the drug dealer if he's "a good steward". You're pretty funny.
"As for bacteria, would you mean like bacteria transfered to your pill bottle by the pharmacist handling it?"
Do you have any documentation whatsoever that bacteria killed immunosuppressed patients when they took the pills? Then STFU and don't waste my time with your ignorant and inane analogies.
"If something benefits me positively, and my responsible use of said something has no direct or indirect negative affect on you"
I forgot. This is all about you, isn't it? What's good for you and screw the rest of society. Your rights over the rights of others.
What a petty and selfish person you are. You'll never understand any argument I make, so why should I bother?
And what if someone says they're hurting like hell?
The reason I ask is that a survey of California doctors showed that two-thirds of "patients" requesting a recommendation for marijuana wanted it for "pain". Not glaucoma, not AIDS, not nausea, not cancer, not MS ... pain. The survey also showed that 99% of all patients requesting a recommendation for marijuana were already smoking it prior to their first doctor visit.
Doesn't seem to me that a doctor is recommending it at all. He's simply validating it.
Why not, therefore, conduct this trial using THC in pill form (Marinol) and a placebo in pill form?
Why not? Because this "researcher" and others like him have an agenda -- smoked marijuana as medicine.
Nerve pain in HIV patients? They couldn't care less.
"but I can't believe you remembered the bupropion comment"
his name is robertpaulsen.
Get ready for all sorts of knee-jerk bloviation by the anti-drug crowd.
Where's fun in that?
You're repeating yourself, Bob. Long term loss of short term memory?
Simple question, no answer.
According the link Therapeutic Uses of Cannabis, 1997 ironically given to me by RobertPaulsen, both the British Medical Association and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain.
Forgot to ping you above, sunshine. Still haven't had my coffee
Forgive me for suspecting you're lying, but please provide a quote.
One act is completely illicit, regardless of if you're in your home or a bar. The other act is only illicit in a bar. If you can't see the difference there, I don't know what to tell you. It's rather huge.
"In 1997 the BMA’s Annual Representative Meeting resolved That this Representative Body believes that certain additional cannabinoids should be legalized for wider medicinal [emphasis mine] use. . . " The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain also believes that action is needed."
No mention of smoking there.
My suspicion that you're lying deepens. Produce the quote.
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