Blog

Charles Snyder III

My name is Charles Snyder the 3rd. I have a condition called Nail Patella syndrome. As soon I was able to comprehend the fact that I had small knee caps that would dislocate when my knee bent and didnt have thumbnails, I was able to, Id say was about 4 or 5 years old when I started to really realize like if you bump you knee and dont have a kneecap there, you have a lot of long term pain.

Charles Snyder III

Nail Patella Syndrome is manifesting in Naveya, and Charlie. Naveya had the clubfoot aspect. Charlie does not however; he just has the nail manifestation

The Unconventional Foundation for Autism and Current Trends Hair Studio Bring Free Haircuts to Special Needs Children

Current Trends Hair Studio in Orange County, CA will be providing boys with special needs free hair cuts from 10am – 4pm Tuesday May 18th.

Mieko Hester-Perez founder of The Unconventional Foundation for Autism has vowed to help parents, not just through her advocacy of the controversial treatment of using medical marijuana to save her son’s life but, also her mission to “Pay it Forward”.

Medical Marijuana 411.com - Interview with Josh Howard - ACC - talks about why he became a caregiver

My name is Josh Howard I’m 29 years old and Im one of the original caregivers of this collective. I helped start it. So Ive been with AAC since the beginning. Before that I was a volunteer with another collective in Long Beach. But I really started getting involved around 2005, 2006 visiting other collectives in the area. Volunteering at a collective I just saw so many people that this law was passed for in 1996. You know this compassionate use act was passed for people that I was seeing on a daily basis coming trough the collective. People that are a dying, or people that look completely healthy one month but you see them the after radiation treatments the next month. Half their hair is falling out they might look healthy to the average person from a distance but sit down and get to talk with them you come across some seriously ill people that are being helped through these collectives.

Josh Howard ACC Patient Story

The reason I started using medical marijuana was due to pain, insomnia and an addition to painkillers. I had s surgery for a metal rod placed in my arm and so due to the pain from having metal rods, pins and screws stuck in my arm I became hooked on Vicodin. Prescription drugs. My doctors were willing to just give me all I wanted.

Colo. Senate OKs state pot dispensary regulations

DENVER — A push to regulate the state’s medical marijuana dispensaries appears to be nearing the finish line.

The Colorado Senate passed the proposed regulations in a 26-9 vote on Thursday, sending them back to the House to review changes made to the bill. The lack of controversial changes makes it likely that lawmakers will be able to pass regulations before they must adjourn next week.

If the House re-approves the bill, it would likely become law because it contains provisions requested by Gov. Bill Ritter, including allowing local bans.

Dr. Frank Lucido in MICHIGAN May 1-10: Seminars for Physicians

May 8, Saturday 10-5pm; Dr. Frank Lucido’s AIMLegal Course for Physicians

Dr. Frank Lucido’s AIMLegal Course for Physicians

DETROIT, MICHIGAN 10am-5pm, (at Law Office of Matt Abel)
by RSVP only to DrFrank@DrLucido.com

Please contact me directly if you are a doctor interested in attending either of these seminars or if you know of a doctor you believe would be interested in attending.
(Association of Independent Medical-Legal Consultants)AIMLegal Physician Locator:
https://www.drfranklucido.com/pages/aimlegal.org-cannabis-physician-locator.php

Osteoporosis and Research

There are many aspects that one can talk about. One is the basic biochemical, pharmacological, scientific aspect of the whole problem. Here we have a new neurotransmitter. A group of compounds that have a huge amount of tasks if we look at the chemically related compound, I made a list of that, these compounds are involved almost all physiological reactions. So many of them, That I think here there is so much work to be done by scientists over the next 20, 30, 40 years. A lot of those compounds are around, some of them bind to the cannabinoid receptors, others are just chemically related and bind to other receptors are involved in many many other things. And I mentioned before, those that bind to the Cb2 receptors are part of a general protective facility, if you wish, in our body like the immune system. So that is the basic thing, then there is the medical thing, we have to find out how we can use them and what are the diseases we can use these compounds against.

Osteoporosis

These two receptors that are specific to cannabinoids. But cannabinoids also, some of them bind to other receptors. There is one-called 133 I think, GPR133, there is another one, which is GPR18. I may be mistaken on the numbers, but I think GPR18, GPR133 and so on. They are not specific for the cannabinoids so there is a lot of discussion between the pharmacologists should we call them cannabinoid receptors. The decision at the moment is lets wait and sees. At the moment we have only two that have been approved as cannabinoid receptors. All the others with a question mark. Two receptors have evolved for certain specific conditions, feeding for example, appetite, feeding, and things of that sort. But some of the other actions most definitely go through other systems.

Dr. Raphael Mechoulam

My name is Raphael Mechoulam. Im a professor at Hebrew University. I have been there for many years. Im doing research on the chemistry and biology of natural products, mostly, but also some drugs. There is no drug that has no side effects. I doesnt exist. The same is probably true for cannabis. Now being a chemist, I was particularly interested in the individual constituents of the plant. Surprisingly, the constituents of the cannabis plant were not well known when we started work many years ago, several decades ago. The psychoactive component of cannabis was not known at that time, surprisingly, again. Because morphine had been isolated from opium about 150 years before that, cocaine about 100 years before that, and yet the active component of cannabis had never been isolated in pure form.

Dr. Raphael Mechoulam

Endocannabinoids this is the short name for endogenous cannabinoids. Cannabinoids is a compound, which acts on two receptors. One receptor is found mainly in the brain, the other receptor is found mainly in the periphery. But, surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, during certain diseases the second receptor that is not present in the brain starts to pop up. All of a sudden it is available there. So the suggestion has been made by many others, and us that actually this receptor, the Cb2 receptor, is part of a protective mechanism. We have protective systems in our body. The immune system is a protective system. It guards us against microbes and viruses things like that. If we didnt have an immune system, we would be dead in a week. Probably eaten up by microbes.

Investigation of Cannabinoids

Our non-profit organization that we set up about 2 years ago has been doing a lot of work educating physicians around the medical cannabis issue. We have realized there is a need for physicians to be taught more and they really appreciate hearing it from other physicians, who either have experience with patients, who are doing research like myself. And this group, its call the Canadian Consortium for the Investigation of Cannabinoids, its a fairly big mouthful, but the CCIC for short, is the group, and that has been really rewarding.

Cannabis As Medicine

I think that as we accept the medical utility of cannabis. We are going to start to dig more deeply in to the cannabinoids the key constituents of the marijuana plant that are providing this benefit. From a pharmaceutical company perspective, I think there is going to be an interest in trying to isolate those compounds. Or trying to work within the endogenous cannabinoids system that system of cannabinoids, which is functioning within all of us all the time with, out any external influence. Trying to target that with medications that can up regulate the level of cannabinoids in our bodies can eliminate the break down of cannabinoids. So perhaps getting a cannabinoid effect without really taking in a cannabinoid but by enhancing our own endogenous levels. So I think that is one area the pharmaceutical industry is going to be taking. I think another area is trying to improve the over all quality and regulation of herbal cannabis.

Pioneers of Medical Cannabis: Chris Conrad: Expert Witness

By Dr. Frank Lucido As we approach the November elections, in which California voters…

Dr. Raphael Mechoulam

I was asked by my Parliament, the parliament is called the Knesset, to head a committee to decide to go ahead with cannabis both a medicinal agent and so on and there was a committee of government officials mostly, and I was the only one from the outside so I was chairman. And we wrote a big report that said that it should be utilized as a medicinal agent. And more research would be done and also young people should not be sent to prison, or convicted, or criminal files should not be opened, to make things more tolerable. And although it never became a law, and government officials who were in charge of these things, apparently instructed the police to follow these recommendations. So since then, to the best of my knowledge, young people who were caught smoking pot, they were scolded, were told, you, you have a lot of problems, but they never opened a criminal file, they never appeared in court, they never were sent to prison, the reason was, it makes sense.

Cannabis During Pregnancy

Dr. Raphael Mechoulam – Cannabis During Pregnancy Raphael Mechoulam (Hebrew: רפאל משולם‎) (born 1930)…

Medical Marijuana Helps AIDS Patients

There are patients able to overcome their nausea and vomiting from their chemotherapy and perhaps even be cured of these malignancies by using cannabis. But what really started me in my research was in my work with HIV AIDS patients. Again seeing them being eaten alive if you will by the AIDS wasting syndrome, which was a common sort of end of life phenomenon that we had before we discovered effective anti retroviral drugs and about the time Delta-9 THC was approved, thats the drug durnabinol or marinol, for treatment for this wasting syndrome in HIV patients.

How Medical Marijuana Helps AIDS Patients

We did that study, and we showed that there was no damage to the level of the aids drug in the blood stream to the patients immune system or to the level of the virus in their blood stream over 21 days of smoking a government cigarette 3 times a day. And that led us then to move on and do other research looking to see if whether or not cannabis had any medicinal benefit for patients with HIV. Particularly we were fortunate in California when we had a budget surplus that one of our state senators established a center for medicinal cannabis research at the university of California. And that center worked out a deal with NIDA so that NIDA the only legal source of marijuana for research in the country would supply investigators who had been favorably peer reviewed by the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research to do clinical trials looking at the effectiveness of smoked marijuana. So I submitted a study to look at marijuana in patients with the painful HIV related peripheral neuropathy, which is the damage to the nerves in the hands and feet. For which we really didnt have any treatment.

Medical Marijuana and Cancer

I think another very exciting field about cannabis medicines, is the potential effect that cannabiniods and maybe some of the other components of the marijuana plant may have against cancer cells. Interestingly, although this work was initially being done the National Cancer Institute in the 1970s. It disappeared in the United States and most of this work is done in Spain and Italy. And many of my colleagues in those countries are very enthusiastic about the anti cancer activities of cannabiniods and how they work in many different places in the cancer cell cycle. To lead to arrest of cell division, cell migration and metastasis and cell invasiveness. So I think that there is a lot to be studied in this field too that is very exciting.

Cannabis Compared To Opiate-Based Medicines

Dr. Donald Abrams Compares Cannabis To Opiate-based Medicines Donald Abrams, M.D. explains he first…

Dr. Donald Abrams Compares Smoked & Vaporized Cannabis

Donald Abrams, M.D. explains why smoked plant matter has properties that help the body heal, as does vaporized (non-combusted plant matter). The operative word is plant, not the pill (form of THC). Dr. Donald Abrams is the Chief of Hematology-Oncology at San Francisco General Hospital, as well as Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco

Federal Judge Suggests Reclassifying Medical Marijuana

Los Angeles, CA — Federal District Court Judge George H. Wu issued a 41-page…

The K2 Debacle: What's this really about?

In a March 15th story, Marty Swant reported for the Columbia Missourian on how the House was quick to shoot down efforts to legalize medical cannabis during a debate concerning House Bill 1472 regarding K2, the so-called “synthetic marijuana”. Senate Bill 887 is very similar to this.
In a related STLToday article, Missouri Representative Franz was quoted as saying, ” We’ve got to do something, because somebody’s going to be using this, driving a vehicle and killing somebody.”

Cannabinoids Rather Than Ritalin for Children?

Treating Yourself, a medical marijuana journal for patients by patients, in a recent article posses several questions, one of the most obvious being: how could anybody give psychostimulants (like Ritalin and Adderall), amphetamines and methamphetamines, to children?