Cure for cancer and more?

[DennisK]

Wow, McQ!  For not being upset or hurt, you sure have been consistently belligerent and arrogant.

I continue to tell you that I've never made a claim about Rick Simpson's treatment or any claims about any treatments.  You continue to assume I am making false claims about your field of study, which I never have.  You are very knowledgeable about your own field.  Bravo!  It felt good, I'm sure, for you to get on your high horse and show this forum your vast knowledge of your own field.  I just hope someone offends me and my field of graphic design so I can do the same. I can't wait!  Please understand that by me saying "graphic design", I'm not making any claims about your profession. Nor was "graphic design" meant as an attack.

Also, stop putting words in my mouth.  You continue having me say words that aren't there.  Those voices in your brain are not mine and don't pretend you can simulate what I may be thinking.  Even someone of your vast intellect is incapable of doing this even though I possess such a small brain.

It may not seem like it, but I've struggled to take the high road and believe, up until now, I have.  I never called you delusional or naive.  I only said that if you believe the drug companies are always looking out for your best interests, you are both naive and delusional.  So, by your accusation of me attacking you, you must be admitting you are the drug companies' bitch and I therefore retract my apology.  I've been tormented by resisting the urge to attack you and even threw you some compliments you clearly yearn.  I made the mistake of thinking it might calm you down a bit.

Again, no claims except acknowledging your superior wisdom. :hmm:

Peace.

[McQ]

Wow, McQ!  For not being upset or hurt, you sure have been consistently belligerent and arrogant.

I continue to tell you that I've never made a claim about Rick Simpson's treatment or any claims about any treatments.  You continue to assume I am making false claims about your field of study, which I never have.  You are very knowledgeable about your own field.  Bravo!  It felt good, I'm sure, for you to get on your high horse and show this forum your vast knowledge of your own field.  I just hope someone offends me and my field of graphic design so I can do the same. I can't wait!  Please understand that by me saying "graphic design", I'm not making any claims about your profession. Nor was "graphic design" meant as an attack.

Also, stop putting words in my mouth.  You continue having me say words that aren't there.  Those voices in your brain are not mine and don't pretend you can simulate what I may be thinking.  Even someone of your vast intellect is incapable of doing this even though I possess such a small brain.

It may not seem like it, but I've struggled to take the high road and believe, up until now, I have.  I never called you delusional or naive.  I only said that if you believe the drug companies are always looking out for your best interests, you are both naive and delusional.  So, by your accusation of me attacking you, you must be admitting you are the drug companies' bitch and I therefore retract my apology.  I've been tormented by resisting the urge to attack you and even threw you some compliments you clearly yearn.  I made the mistake of thinking it might calm you down a bit.

Again, no claims except acknowledging your superior wisdom. :hmm:

Peace.

Dennis, I just re-read my last post to you and find exactly what I thought I'd find. I tried to address each of the points you brought up. That's all. I wasn't being arrogant or belligerent. If I put words in your mouth, please point it out so that I may make amends for doing so. I tried to see where I did that, but couldn't find it. However, you posted this thread, and put forth Rick Sampson as someone who claims he can cure cancer. Are you saying you don't believe his claims?

Your words here:
This guy is trying to have his government and others research hemp oil. He's no snake oil salesman. He's giving it away. People with terminally ill cancer seemingly have been cured. At the very least, it needs to be investigated by the medical community.

This and other comments led me to believe that you are in support of him and his claims. If you are not, then you could have clearly stated so up front. I have consistently only taken issue with your arguments and claims regarding the suppression by an entire industry against millions of sick people.

I'm sorry that my last post made you so upset. Apparently I've hurt your feelings. My fight is with the rationale you put forth, not with you as the person. I did not attack you in my last post, but instead addressed your points. In fact, I did what I could to react in kind to what seemed like an olive branch from you. You apologized for seeming to hurt my feelings, although they were not hurt. I said I appreciated that you reached out. I don't know why this sudden raging, sarcastic post has come, but you apparently misunderstood my intention to stick to addressing the questions you put out there. It is what you asked for in the OP. Your bilious attitude doesn't move this discussion forward, but sets it back a bit. I have no ill will against you. I have tried to let you know it. I have also never overstated my expertise in oncology. It's just the way it is. Good at one thing, lousy at others.

I'm sorry that you felt the need to offer up such a bilious post. Really I am. I thought that out last two messages had made progress. If someone were to tell me I don't know jack about graphic design, I wouldn't argue the point or try to tell that person his business. I don't know jack about it. And that's ok.

I claimed only greater knowledge and experience in oncology because it is true. That's not arrogance, just truth. Again, I'm sorry this has come to such a raw level for you. I did say that I didn't believe you to stupid. In other words, I felt that you were capable of understanding this topic, but simply had not yet studied it. If that's not the truth, correct me.

You post was full of sarcasm, attacks and hyperbole that leads us nowhere good. I was trying to work with you to change the tone of this, and was quite surprised at the response. I still think it can be worked out, but it'll take a boatload less sarcasm and emotion and the same amount of empathy. I mean that.

[DennisK]

Yes, I took personal offense at being called ignorant repetitively.  I never made a scientific claim and yet you presume I am.  I conceded I know little about oncology, but it didn't stop you from trying to belittle me further.  Look, there's a reason I didn't put this in the Science forum.  You then took at referring to me in 3rd person (a debating tactic perhaps?) and comparing me to fundamentalist christians (if that's not a personal attack, I don't know what is).  That all being said, I am not proud that I let you get to me.  I had a little diarrhea of the mouth from the collection of your posts.  I do apologize for the outburst (although it's understandable if you see no merit in it).

Are you saying you don't believe his claims?

I'm saying I don't know if they are true, but they deserve some investigation.  If his claims are wrong, then let's see someone clinically prove this or at least give him or others (preferably universities) the tools to do so.  You seem to be dismissing his claim solely on your experience and that's fine.  But it doesn't mean you are right.

You have admitted the potential for corruption when there is a lot of money involved and yet you seem to think your industry is exempt.  From your experience, you see the benefit of drug companies finding cures trumping treatment in regards to profit.  I see it differently.  It doesn't make you right, nor does it make me right and it is an economic assessment.

All I wanted to do was create awareness of the potential for medicinal hemp oil, the stigma attached to hemp, the governments policy on hemp and the potential for corruption when big money is involved.  I really had no intention of debating once I posted.  I am not a good debater nor am I great communicator of my thoughts.

You post was full of sarcasm, attacks and hyperbole that leads us nowhere good.

My attacks were based on the potential for corruption with big business.  As far as sarcasm and hyperbole, again, this was not posted in the Science forum.  My intention was for awareness and maybe add a different topic for discussion.  I made many generalizations, but I don't know that it would frustrate you if I did the same about any other industry.

[McQ]

Dennis, see my PM to you. The thread needs to get back on track.

[DennisK]

Back on course...

Although there is no known cure for cancer, in general, it doesn't mean that one doesn't exist in the natural world.  Hemp oil, on the surface, seems to be promising.  To assume that it is being thoroughly researched  by pharma companies is a mistake.  There are many variables that may have effected this.  Political motivated abolishment of hemp in the 1930's painted a huge stigma on the cultivation of hemp.  This may be a contributing factor in the fear of most people to consider it as viable including drug companies.  I've proposed that the pharma industry makes more money treating illnesses vs. curing them, especially if a cure were already in the form of a plant.  This is speculation on my part, but not a hard leap to make in logic.  All drug companies have agendas (whether we would view them as corrupt or not) and they want to make money and certainly do make a lot of it.  

Pharma evaluations
The following is quoted from a motherjones.com interview.  Here is the link: http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/09/09_401.html

Dr. Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine contends that the industry has become a marketing machine that produces few innovative drugs and is dependent on monopoly rights and public-sponsored research.
...Angell, who is a doctor and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, wants to see the industry reformed.
...doctors are too willing to provide drugs for very minor conditions.

Drug Companies Pay "Opinion Leaders" to Push Pills During Influential Meetings, Seminars http://www.naturalnews.com/024809.html

pharmaceutical companies have been successful in purchasing the decision-making power of physicians.

by Thomas AM Kramer, MD
here's the article http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/433017

This info was done after one search and all in the top 10 hits of the search.  I'm sure anyone could acquire countless damning information on drug companies if they wanted.

History of Hemp
Here is a great link that paints the picture of a history of hemp sociologically. http://www.jackherer.com/chapter10.html

Cannabis Medicines Forbidden
While embracing wine as a sacrament, and tolerating beer and hard liquor, the Inquisition outlawed cannabis ingestion in Spain in the 12th century, and France in the 13th. Many other natural remedies were simultaneously banned. Anyone using hemp to communicate, heal, etc. was labeled “witch.”
...Virtually every president from the mid- 19th century up until prohibition routinely used cannabis medicines

Cannibis Research

Researchers at the Medical College of Virginia discovered that cannabis is an incredibly successful herb for reducing many types of tumors, both benign and malignant (cancerous).

The DEA and other federal agencies had ordered these tumor studies done after hearing erroneous reports of possible immunicological problems associated with cannabis smoke. But, in 1975, instead of health problems, an apparent medical breakthrough occurred and successful tumor reductions were recorded!

Following this remarkably positive discovery by the Medical College of Virginia, orders were immediately handed down by the DEA and the National Institutes of Health to defund all further cannabis/tumor research and reporting! Millions of Americans who might be alive today are dead because of these and other DEA orders regarding marijuana.

In 1996 and 2006, the Medical College of Virginia again applied to receive grants for cannabis research and again were turned down by the DEA.

[DennisK]

Sorry, last post on this subject.  The following was taken from an interview of Dr Lester Grinspoon (professor at Harvard Medical School in 1996) by Jana Ray:

JR: Do you think pharmaceutical drug companies have anything to do with the government's prohibitive stand against medicinal cannabis use?

Dr G: Absolutely. The Partnership for a Drug Free America has a budget of about a million dollars a day. A lot of that money comes from drug companies and distilleries. You see, these companies and distilleries have something to lose- the distilleries for obvious reasons. The drug companies are not interested in marijuana as a medicine because the plant cannot be patented. If you can't patent it, you can't make money on it. Their only interest is a negative one. It will eventually displace some of their pharmaceutical products.

Imagine a patient who requires cancer chemotherapy. Now he can take the best of the anti-nausea drugs, which would be ondansetron. He would pay about US$35 or $40 per 8-milligram pill and would then take three or four of them for a treatment. Normally, he would take it orally, but people with that kind of nausea often can't, so he would take it intravenously. The cost of one treatment for that begins at US$600 because he will need a hospital bed, etc. Or he can smoke perhaps half of a marijuana cigarette and receive relief from the nausea.

Currently, marijuana on the streets is very expensive. One can pay from US$200 to $600 an ounce. This is what I call the prohibition tariff. When marijuana is available as a medicine, the cost would be significantly less than other medications; it would cost about US$20 to $30 an ounce. You can't tax it in the US because it is a medicine. So that would translate out to maybe about 30 cents for a marijuana cigarette.

So our chemotherapy patient could get, many people believe, better relief from the marijuana cigarette for 30 cents. This, in comparison to the ondansetron which would cost at the very least US$160 a day and, if he had to take it intravenously, more than US$600 per treatment.

Well, if you multiply that by all of the symptoms and syndromes we discuss in the book, Marihuana, The Forbidden Medicine, then you can see that the drug companies will have something to lose here.

[Faithless]

Slight hijack here regarding medical marijuana.

A friend died a few years ago of lung cancer.  She had several surgeries, all to no avail.  But she was doing okay until they started her on chemo.  After seeing what chemo did to her, I will probably never get it if I get cancer.  I have never seen anyone as sick as she was and still live.  It was horrible.  She did get the expensive nausea pills to go with the chemo, but she couldn't keep them down.  Within a week she had lost 20 pounds, and she was always a thin woman.

So I got her some marijuana.  She couldn't smoke it, of course, so I made some tea out of it, and she was able to take small sips and keep it down.  It was amazing.  After a few hours she was feeling so much better.  She was able to eat again, in small amounts.  She did get a little buzz from it, too, which didn't hurt.

Short story is that the marijuana made the last days of her life much more comfortable and bearable.  If for no other reason than this, marijuana needs to seriously be considered as a viable pain/nausea management option.  In California we do have medical marijuana laws, but they conflict with federal laws, so it's a pretty interesting situation at times.

I don't know if hemp oil is really a viable treatment for cancer, but if it has any positive properties at all, even if it can't cure cancer but can be beneficial in some other way, then yes, it should be investigated.  I'd really like to take some of those holy-roller Senators who continually vote to keep this harmless weed illegal into a terminal cancer ward sometime, and then ask them to reiterate why pot is such a danger to society.

/end hijack

[McQ]

Slight hijack here regarding medical marijuana.

A friend died a few years ago of lung cancer.  She had several surgeries, all to no avail.  But she was doing okay until they started her on chemo.  After seeing what chemo did to her, I will probably never get it if I get cancer.  I have never seen anyone as sick as she was and still live.  It was horrible.  She did get the expensive nausea pills to go with the chemo, but she couldn't keep them down.  Within a week she had lost 20 pounds, and she was always a thin woman.

So I got her some marijuana.  She couldn't smoke it, of course, so I made some tea out of it, and she was able to take small sips and keep it down.  It was amazing.  After a few hours she was feeling so much better.  She was able to eat again, in small amounts.  She did get a little buzz from it, too, which didn't hurt.

Short story is that the marijuana made the last days of her life much more comfortable and bearable.  If for no other reason than this, marijuana needs to seriously be considered as a viable pain/nausea management option.  In California we do have medical marijuana laws, but they conflict with federal laws, so it's a pretty interesting situation at times.

I don't know if hemp oil is really a viable treatment for cancer, but if it has any positive properties at all, even if it can't cure cancer but can be beneficial in some other way, then yes, it should be investigated.  I'd really like to take some of those holy-roller Senators who continually vote to keep this harmless weed illegal into a terminal cancer ward sometime, and then ask them to reiterate why pot is such a danger to society.

/end hijack

I don't think this is a hijack at all. Valid points here. Marijuana should have been legalized forty years ago, but we've seen that issue drag on instead. There is no doubt that studies have already been done regarding medical marijuana for nausea and pallitative care, and that it is effective. That's confirmed. It's the claims of 'cure' that are not validated by clinical studies.

To respond to a point in the previous post though (Dennis, this is for you), it is essentially a Straw Man argument for people to say that you can't patent a plant. That's not the point. You don't need to. While you can't patent the entire plant itself (unless you create a new plant from scratch), you can patent the individual compounds responsible for any anti-tumor, or apoptotic effect. I mentioned this a while back, and gave a widely used example of the California Yew tree. And the point of saying this is because it isn't the entire plant that is responsible for any anti-tumor effect, it is almost certainly a combination of a few, some, or many of the molecules within the plant. You don't need the whole plant, and in fact, don't want to include the compounds which have no anti-tumor effect from the plant, if you want to use it in a treatment. The object is to use only what is necessary and has direct effect on stopping tumor growth (or those compounds which help with nausea and pain).

Don't misunderstand. I'm all for legalization (mainly because I'm mostly a "hands off", Libertarian-ish person). And I am completely in favor of studying anything, natural or otherwise, to treat, beat, cure, stamp out, eradicate, force into permanent retirement, kill, disable, maim, and spit on...cancer. And other diseases. That's why I'm also in favor of certain aspects of transhumanism.

Now that I've actually hijacked this thread, let's get back to hemp.    She just doesn't like the way they look. I told her to burn them, then she'd like them more.

[DennisK]

I recently found this regarding a potentially amazing cancer treatment.  It is a video of 60 Minutes a year or so ago.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4011961n