Hello Questioner3 and welcome to Cancer Chat,

You are posting in the right place as we often get asked about cannabis oil on the forum and as you rightly say there won't be any pseudoscience here! You are absolutely right in your research and analysis and unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation on the Internet about it and it is certainly not something doctors recommend. It is concerning that despite doctors recommending chemotherapy your friend rejected it. Cannabis oil is also, of course, illegal.

Our nurses commented recently on a similar post from someone who was also asking for more information on cannabis oil and this is what they wrote:

"There has been a lot of interest on the internet and in the press about cannnabis oil.  But at the moment it isn't known how helpful it might turn out to be in treating cancer and it isn't readily available as a cancer treatment.  We have a blog post which sums up the research so far which you might find helpful to look at. You can read more about this here."

I hope the blog post will be useful to you. Do feel free to ring our nurses too on this free number 0808 800 4040 if you have any question on this.

Best wishes,

Lucie, Cancer Chat Moderator

Hello Questioner 3,

I am one of the enquiry nurses.  Lucie asked us if we could add anything else to your post. I think the bottom line is that doctors do not recommend cannabis as a cancer treatment.  Even though there are some research papers about cannabis and cancer, they don’t provide enough evidence to say that it is an effective treatment.

Research papers are quite complicated reads to the untrained eye, and may appear to give credence to any new treatment under investigation. So it is important to be a bit cautious about what the internet can come up with. Conventional medical treatment is underpinned by evidence, often gathered in clinical trials, that is thought to be very reliable.

As Lucie mentioned feel free to give us a call and pass our number on. 

Best wishes,

Julia 

Hi Questionner3,

At the risk of sounding insensitive, you are right to be concerned about your friend. She has effectively chosen to have no real treatment. There is a lot of pseudo-science out there about cancer treatment and cannabis oil in particular. Fortunes have been made in the USA selling cannabis oil to desperate people, but I have yet to see a single independent, peer-reviewed, paper that unambiguously concluded that cannabis oil cures cancer in humans. People *** foot around being polite and try to give reasoned arguments but I am fed up of this approach which seems to put these so-called cures on a par with legitimate therapies.

Cannabis has proven effectiveness in pain relief and it obviously gets people high and some of its constituent parts might eventually form the basis of chemo-therapy but that's as far as it goes.

In the U.K. It is illegal and as a result any cannabis oil people buy may not be of high quality - people have been sold all sorts of adulterated oil in the past which sometimes contains NO cannabis oil at all. Rick Simpson who is a well known name in this trade in the US and he uses naphthalene as a solvent - a very dangerous chemical. 

This FB group includes a link to a man who confesses he has been selling oil with no cannabis in it for hundreds of pounds www.facebook.com/.../

More info at:-

archives.sfweekly.com/.../Content

beyondchronic.com/.../

www.eastbayexpress.com/.../fda-warns-seven-cbd-and-hemp-oil-companies-over-medical-claims

Having cancer is bad enough, but falling prey to these scammers and con artists gives false hope and often tragically leads to people rejecting therapies which might well have prolonged their lives.

Cheers

Dave

All interesting stuff but even if all the potential benefits identified are realised, it seems unlikely that ingesting cannabis oil will provide a mechanism for delivering the active ingredients to the location of the cancer cells. The digestive system will most likely breakdown the active ingredients and render them ineffective.

Interesting, I guess at least some of the THC must get into the bloodstream when ingested otherwise hash cookies and cakes wouldn't work at all :-)

Not my bag either - I've never smoked tobacco or weed, ironically because of cancer fears since childhood. 

Hi Davek,

I used to be the same as you. I was pretty conscious with my health when i was young and had thorougly studied carcinogenic agents because my childhood friend and my good uncle died (unpleasantly) from cancer.

However that interest and fascination with chemistry and biology (and that forgotten fear from cancer) leads me to a profession that deals with a lot of hazardous chemicals and radiations. And after witnessing some really bad industrial accidents and industry related diseases, it kinda makes me a bit fatalistic and more accepting of calculated and practical risks and danger behind new pioneering noble ideas, (else i wont get any of my job done). In a way it kinda ironic for me too.

I guesa we've both had charmed lives!  In science classes we handled mercury with bare hands, used radioactive isotopes with little supervision and used chemicals which are now classed as hazardous. Then I was in the Merchant Navy for 14 years from 1977 onwards as a Radio Officer and exposed to unshielded High Frequency RF radiation from the powerful transmitters we carried, X radiation from the radars I worked on and we splashed carbontetrachloride round like water cleaning  electrical relays, switches and motors! Add to that and the fact that duty free fags were smoked by about 80% of my colleagues all the time and duty free spirits and beer were cheaper than cans of coke and it's amazing any of us survived past 40!