didier has been with us on the forums for a long time. I never got the sense in past posts that there was a tendency to favor alternatives over conventional, nor to advocate for them.

I think that everyone has stated this pretty clearly. We all have to make choices, and live with where we end up taking our ideas for better or worse. There is some positive work being done on cannabis, and there is also some questionable data from many years ago. On other forums and private blogs it has been talked about in more extreme terms, as "the" cure that no institution is willing to give up radiation and chemo to switch to. Various reasons are always given but for the most part they all circle back to the medical establishment making money. Conspiracy lives everywhere. The data is no human study heavy, but petri dish and mouse model driven, and we are not mice. We have cured a few cancers in mice through mechanisms that do not transfer to the human experience.

OCF's policies are pretty straight forward, but in this case I would say we are stepping into a gray area given the research of the last 3 years in particular. Nothing I've read makes me feel like THC or any other active ingredient in cannabis is the second coming, and going to replace anything in our current armamentarium of tools. There are great things in immunotherapy that I am very excited about and have seen great data from like the PDL-1 studies that were the hit of the ASCO meeting this year and still in clinical trials, which it sounds like this patient would qualify to be part of. But that's just me. Even those - with some pretty strong new data - are not going to replace what we currently use. But I can see those immune signaling pathway disruptors and similar monoclonal antibodies going mainstream as collateral treatments in the very near future.

I certainly, and OCF as an organization, will withhold judgment until there is some really hard data, peer reviewed and published, on the active chemicals in cannabis in head and neck cancers. There has been some NIH funding for looking more scientifically at it, and we'll see where that goes. In the meantime I would not argue with using it for things like appetite stimulation etc. where THC ability to deplete blood sugars to the point of being made hungry is both anecdotally and scientifically well established.

Ed has some serious experience here, and he has offered to take this conversation private which I would encourage. I also see no biological harms from use of this AFTER conventional therapies, which have a strong positive track record, have been used, and I think there is a consensus in the treatment community of lack of harm in doing so. Sadly this is all still a political football in so many ways.

So please discuss this amount yourselves off the boards, and it seems like it is about time for OCF to put a "current state of what we know" page up, though it will have a lot of maybe's and mights in it, and I will need to find the right doctors to help us craft it.

Thank you all for keeping this discussion civil and respectful.