CBD, CBG cannabis oil for cancer, Why?

Nov 01, 2020

This article is for those who want to learn more about the use of cannabis oil with CBD for cancer. And to understand how cannabis and CBD could potentially help some cancer patients, it's important to first understand how cancer actually develops.

CBD oil for cancer?

Cannabis has been used for centuries as a natural medicine by many cultures. Particularly in the East, cannabis has been used as an intuitive part of medical practices along with other herbal medicines .

In Europe , our medical practices rely on clinical evidence (to prove that the medicine works), which is why cannabis is not considered an accepted medicine: research is still in its early stages.

That's why it's so controversial to mention cannabis and cancer in the same sentence these days. However, this controversy does not stop cancer patients around the world from using cannabis . They are living proof that cannabis oil can provide much needed relief to the thousands of patients diagnosed with cancer each year.

From a moral point of view, it is certainly not correct to give cancer patients false hopes about their prognosis, but at the same time, we believe that these patients should be able to choose the treatment plan they want.

This article is for those who want to learn more about the use of cannabis oil with CBD for cancer. And to understand how cannabis and CBD could potentially help some cancer patients, it's important to first understand how cancer actually develops.

What is cancer?

Cancer is a disease of the cells of the body. The disease can occur at any time of life and in any part of the body, but certain factors can make cells more susceptible to cancer :

a poor diet
sedentary & stressful lifestyle choices
also hereditary factors 5 to 10% of cases are among the causes of cancer.

The condition, cause, and prognosis of cancer can vary widely from patient to patient, but in general cancer is due to damaged genetic material.

Genetic material (our DNA) is responsible for dividing and replacing cells in the body to ensure that a fresh supply of cells is always ready to maintain and defend vital body functions. However, when our DNA is damaged, it is no longer able to create healthy cells. DNA may be damaged from birth (due to a genetic defect), or it may have been damaged due to our lifestyles .

When damaged genetic material loses control of its cell production, the risk of uninhibited cell growth increases. This is how tumors grow. Tumors can be benign, where normal cells divide too quickly and create relatively harmless masses; or damaged DNA can cause growth of abnormal cells that mutate and become malignant tumors: cancer.

How Can Cannabis Help?

Just as the prognosis, type and treatment of cancer can vary, the potential benefits of cannabis can differ from person to person.

Cannabis oil with CBD can make a difference in many ways for each patient. This has been confirmed by cancer researchers and patients, whose experiments with cannabis to fight cancer span decades. Such evidence has proven that patients can benefit from using cannabis oil for cancer at different stages of its progression, including:

- Palliative care (symptomatic treatment)
- Complementary treatment
- Fight against tumors and prevention

Cannabis for palliative care

For many cancer patients, treating their disease is often more exhausting than the cancer itself. Radiation therapy, operations and chemotherapy are among the commonly used methods of treatment for cancer patients today. There are also many other treatment options, but the different types of cancer and treatment often cause a long series of uncomfortable symptoms, such as:

- Nausea and/or vomiting
- Pains
- Weightloss
- Wounds, swellings or infections
- Lack of appetite
- Insomnia and other sleep problems
- Anxiety
- The Depression

Since 1975, researchers have paid a lot of attention to the impact of cannabinoids on cancer cells. Since cannabinoids are primarily used in palliative care research, scientists have focused on alleviating the symptoms of cancer and the side effects of its treatment.

Such research indicates that cannabis oil with CBD can effectively relieve the aforementioned symptoms, but scientists also suggest that cancer patients can:

- Use CBD to reduce nausea
- Use cannabis for pain relief
- Benefit from the anti-inflammatory properties of CBD
- Restore your appetite with the use of cannabis
- Relieve feelings of anxiety and depression using CBD
- Use CBD to improve their sleep quality and feel more energized throughout the day

Cannabis oil with CBD can potentially help reduce many of the side effects cancer patients may experience as a result of their disease and treatment. It can further help them improve their quality of life , as well as their level of motivation and hope throughout their illness. But in fact, cannabis can do more than that.

Scientists have achieved even more interesting results by giving patients CBD during their cancer treatment.

Cannabis as a Complementary Treatment Option

Studies on the combination of conventional cancer treatments with the use of cannabis oil and CBD have attracted a lot of attention in recent years, where the medical use of cannabis is slowly gaining acceptance from doctors and experts. medical.

The studies mostly focus on synthetic or isolated cannabinoids, which are individual copies or compounds of the active ingredients in the cannabis plant, but the results are still very promising.

The most studied cannabinoids are tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) and recently CBG (cannabigerol).

They are known to have positive effects on nausea, pain, appetite, and inflammation, and other effects are currently being researched.

Preliminary studies have also shown that CBD can make chemotherapy more effective and thus increase the effectiveness of conventional cancer treatment methods.

Recent animal studies also indicate that CBD may help reduce cancer cell survival rates by activating the body's innate anti-tumor response .

Cancer cell at moment dividing 3d illustration Premium Photo

The body is indeed able to prevent the spread of cancer cells , but an imbalance in emzyme levels can limit this ability.

CBD can help the body restore this natural balance and help limit the spread of cancer. For example, studies have shown that CBD can suppress the reactions that cause breast and lung cancers to metasterize.

Specifically, CBD is able to reduce the immune function that transports cells from one part of the body to another. This migration of immune cells aims to protect the body from infection, but when our DNA produces abnormal cells, the immune system is unable to keep up; it is stressed because it cannot repair or kill cancer cells on its own.

This is where CBD's ability to reduce cell migration becomes invaluable , as it prevents damaged cancer cells from spreading.

And in doing so, CBD oil is also able to reduce inflammation that creates the acidic environment (low pH) where cancer cells thrive.

CBD therefore has the potential to regulate and suppress the immune system . This is quite similar to the effects of chemotherapy , which also suppresses the immune system in order to “pause” it and kill cells that our damaged immune function cannot do on its own.

In this way, CBD helps the body activate its own cancer-fighting abilities. And perhaps the most significant difference between chemotherapy and CBD is that CBD causes far fewer side effects.

Unfortunately for cancer patients in some countries, researchers are still unable to identify exactly why CBD has such an effect on cancer cells and tumor growth.

One theory is that CBD stimulates the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) , which are pure poisons for cancer cells and help kill them.

Another theory suggests that CBD, among other cannabinoids, prevents the breakdown of anandamide , an endocannabinoid that can reduce tumor growth.

The endocannabinoid system and cancer

Endocannabinoids are cannabinoid-like compounds that the body produces.

Cannabinoids in the body are called endocannabinoids because endo means "inside" in Greek, while cannabinoids in the plant are called phytocannabinoids (phyto means "plant" in Greek).

The body's production of endocannabioids and the whole system, which also includes the immune system and the central nervous system, are jointly referred to as the endocannabinoid system. This system consists of a bunch of receptors all over the body, both phyto-, endo-, and synthetic.

The endocannabinoid system uses these cannabinoids to regulate the body's response to disease. This is probably the reason why high levels of endocannabinoids and overactive cannabinoid receptors have been observed in patients with many types of cancer. Especially in aggressive cancer types, high levels of endocannabinoids have been observed.

This indicated that endocannabinoids might be the body's way of trying to kill cancer.

When endocannabinoids are unable to prevent cancer cells from growing and spreading, it is a sign of a bodily imbalance. This can lead to an overactive immune system, which is also believed to be closely linked to the occurrence of cancer due to the acid levels that inflammatory immune responses create in the body. In its attempt to heal itself, our body can actually make things worse.

Research has shown cannabis oil with CBD to be effective as an anti-inflammatory, immune system regulator, and immune suppressant, meaning the cannabinoid could potentially help restore a natural, healthy body balance . As such, CBD oil could help the endocannabinoid system fight cancer. Both synthetic and phytocannabinoids that activate the endocannabinoid system and those that don't have in several studies been shown to reduce the spread of cancer cells by preventing tumor angiogenesis (when tumors extract "roots" by creating their own vessels blood) and also stop metastases.

Additionally, scientists have located an endocannabinoid-killing enzyme in malignant tumors, which further indicates that cancer cells do not like endocannabinoids . And when the researchers reduced the levels of this enzyme, the tumors grew at a slower rate.

Unfortunately, not all types of cancer respond equally well to endocannabinoids . The theory as to why this is the case suggests that cancer types originating from tissues with low endocannabinoid receptor activation are less susceptible to the possible carcinogenic effects of CBD.

The anti-cancer properties of cannabinoids

Medical researchers generally prefer to use synthetic cannabinoids in their studies . These cannabinoids do not come from the plant or our own body, but are made in a laboratory. The reason for this preference is that synthetic cannabinoids are easier to copy, which is the gold standard in medical research: reproducibility. Isolated cannabinoids (derived from plant material and processed in the laboratory) are also easier for researchers to study, as they facilitate the process of elimination (i.e. identifying which cannabinoid has certain properties).

Many active scientific studies using synthetic and isolated cannabinoids have found compelling evidence of the anti-cancer effects of these cannabininoids.

In animal trials, mice and rats were given small doses of isolated THC over a period of time, and results showed a reduction in neoplasia (the growth of tumors associated with chronic inflammations) and also an effect preventive against the development of cancer.

Another study investigated the effects of THC when injected directly into malignant tumors. Here, uninhibited tumor growth showed signs of remission, further supporting the theory that THC can kill cancer cells.

Unfortunately, such experimental studies are only offered to terminal cancer patients, as the medical world remains very reluctant to use this potentially psychoactive cannabinoid. But the patients included in this study did not show any adverse or psychotropic effects of THC.

Most medical studies on cannabis focus on the cannabinoid THC, as it was the first cannabinoid identified and isolated by scientific researchers. It is also one of the few cannabinoids that researchers actually know about how it is metabolized in the body and, more importantly, how it affects cancer.

THC directly activates CB2 receptors in the endocannabinoid system, and this is why researchers suggest that THC can directly cause cancer cells to commit suicide.

The theory of THC coating cancer cell suicide is based on the discovery that certain types of cancer cells have CB2 receptors. As such, THC might have the potential to bind to diseased cells, shut down the inflammations that keep those cells alive, and may force them to commit suicide. In fact, this knowledge is not new; scientists have known this since 1998 .

However, studies that use isolated or synthetic cannabinoids rarely achieve the same convincing results as those that use natural cannabis extracts in their trials.

CBD in isolated form has anti-inflammatory, antiemetic, and analgesic effects, but not of the same caliber as the all-natural CBD extracts from the cannabis plant.

Also known as the entourage effect , the harmony between different cannabinoids and also the many other natural compounds of the cannabis plant (such as terpenes and flavonoids ) contribute profoundly to the pharmacological reactions of cannabinoids.

Unlike isolated and synthetic cannabinoids, cannabis products work synergistically with endo- and phytocannabinoids to induce the death of diseased cells, while healthy cells are unaffected. Natural cannabinoids are also capable of initiating selective cell death in membranes, where only defective parts of a cell die (also called autophagy). The synergy between cannabinoids has shown positive results in breast and prostate cancers, as well as lung, liver, cervical and thyroid cancers.

Due to these groundbreaking results, cannabis researchers are beginning to agree that the synergy between phytocannabinoids is not reproducible in a synthetic version - and it is this synergy that makes cannabis cancer-fighting. a very valid possibility. So when researchers isolate cannabinoids (or replace them entirely with synthetic analogues) in hopes of identifying their anti-cancer properties,

they also lose the synergistic effect that may well be why cannabis is so interesting for cancer research.

The cancer treatment of the future

It is still too early to say whether cannabinoids will be the cancer treatment of the future. Such a statement will require more research, evidence and medical testing to be validated. Nevertheless, researchers have already confirmed the anti-cancer effects of cannabinoids.

Whether it is primarily the anti-inflammatory effects of CBD, the cancer cell reducing properties of THC, or the complex synergy between the many cannabinoids found in the plant that make cannabis a viable option for the future of cancer treatment are still unknown. The research is still in the preliminary stages, and more studies and experiments are needed to confirm whether cannabis kills cancer.

CBG for Cancer

CBG also shows promise as a cancer fighter. CBG can help by blocking receptors that cause cancer cells to grow. In a study of mice with colorectal cancer cells, CBG was able to inhibit cancer cell growth, slowing disease progression. Also, some laboratory studies have shown that CBG inhibits the growth of prostate cancer cells, while others show inhibition of oral cancer cells. Although there is still a lot of research to be done, these studies show exciting possibilities for cancer treatment with CBG.

That means there's only one way to find out if cancer-fighting cannabis works for you: by trying it yourself. It's a brave decision and therefore not one you should make alone, which is why we always recommend that you speak with your family, a friend and your GP, before you start using cannabis oil for cancer. .