AIDS Sees 30th Anniversary as Donald Abrams is Recognized for Community Efforts
As we reach the 30th Anniversary of the recognition of Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome…
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Dr. Donald Abrams
“And these also could interact with the levels of the aids drugs. So we proposed a study to see if smoked cannabis could alleviate the pain of this peripheral neuropathy and ultimately we wound up doing a placebo-controlled trial where 25 patients smoked real cannabis from the government and 25 smoked cannabis that had the active ingredient had been extracted. And we showed the group that smoking the real cannabis had a decrease not only in their peripheral neuropathy pain in an experimental pain that we created in the patients by heating their skin to 104 degrees and then applying caparison cream on top of their skin. So that study funded by the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research actually was the one of the first modern studies to be done that showed in a randomized placebo control fashion that cannabis does have a medicinal use and that is for treatment of HIV related peripheral neuropathy.”
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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.
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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.
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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
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