Israeli Doctors Confirm That Cannabis Safely Mitigates The Cruel Side Effects Of Chemotherapy
When a patient is given a cancer diagnosis, oftentimes the first thing that comes to mind is chemotherapy treatment. It is, after all, the most common form of conventional cancer treatment. While it’s designed to target cancer cells, chemotherapy unfortunately also does harm your healthy cells. This causes several undesirable side effects which vary from one patient to another, but for many people, its effects can be so debilitating that they affect your overall quality of life.
The most common side effects associated with chemotherapy include hair loss, nausea and vomiting, anxiety, depression, mouth sores, loss of appetite, and digestive issues. The digestive tract, reproductive system, hair follicles, mouth, and the bone marrow are the most vulnerable to chemotherapy drugs. That doesn’t even include the serious emotional and psychological distress that comes with cancer and chemotherapy. It’s all worsened by the financial obstacles and numerous day to day responsibilities that patients still have to do despite going through chemotherapy.
Thankfully, cancer patients don’t have to go through chemotherapy alone. Cannabis is a natural way to help combat the side effects of chemotherapy, and it can even help increase survival rates. Cannabis can safely help mitigate the most common side effects of this treatment while ensuring that patients can enjoy improved quality of life compared to treatment without cannabis. More doctors and patients are now seeing the benefits of combining cannabis with chemotherapy and other conventional forms of cancer treatment with great success.
Many studies verify this, as well. A new study conducted by Israeli researchers and published in the medical journal, Anti-Cancer Drugs, builds on a growing body of evidence that cannabis can help cancer patients mitigate the horrific side effects of chemotherapy.
The researchers, which included Dr. Gil Bar-Sela, a director of integrated oncology and palliative care unit at Haifa, Israel’s Rambam Health Care Campus, assessed symptom outcomes among 17 cannabis-consuming patients and compared them to 17 patients who were non-users. Participants were all made to undergo evaluation before the study commenced, and they were evaluated again after three months.
“Improvement in executive functioning was demonstrated in the case group,” wrote the researchers. “In aspects of symptoms, improvement in fatigue, appetite and sleep disorder was demonstrated after cannabis consumption.”
Bar-Sela and the researchers also looked at the effect of cannabis on the patients’ cognitive function. “Patients consuming cannabis did not differ from the control group in cognitive functioning over 3 months of use. No significant cognitive decline was observed in either group over time,” they write.
“These findings are significant, given the increasing use of cannabis among this population,” concludes the study. “Larger and more representative studies should be carried out to further investigate this field.”
Dr. Gil Bar-Sela is one of Israel’s foremost authorities and advocates when it comes to cannabis and cancer research. This study is his latest; the previous others have also resulted in similar, promising evidence.
A 2013 study of his in particular examined 131 cancer patients over the course of 8 weeks. They found that the cancer patients required less painkillers after using cannabis. Though 200 cancer patients were originally enrolled to participate in the study, unfortunately 25% of them had passed away before the study finished. Others opted out since they were worried about the side effects and psychoactivity of cannabis. Seventy patients were using opioid medications when the study began, and 31 were able to decrease their dose just 8 weeks after. Meanwhile, 1 in 3 patients who were taking anti-anxiety or antidepressant drugs also said that they were able to lower their dose.
“All cancer or anti-cancer treatment-related symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, mood disorders, fatigue, weight loss, anorexia, constipation, sexual function, sleep disorders, itching, and pain had significant improvement,” he wrote. “The population of the prolonged users in the current study reported significant improvement in all aspects of supportive and palliative oncology care.”
A separate investigation of 39 patients suffering from neuropathic pain revealed that many reported positive results after inhaling cannabis, and those who reported severe pain dropped by half. “The vaporized cannabis, even at low doses, showed analgesic efficacy with minimal psychoactive effects and may present an effective option for patients with treatment-resistant neuropathic pain,” Bar-Sela wrote.
The results of the study were published in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
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