Pot smokers don't puff away lung health: study

[caseymoz]

103. No, it isn't a total bullshit misrepresentation.

Willow bark was one the few "historical" cures that panned out. If you take a proportion of the ones that did to the ones that proved to be bullshit, you'll likely find that people were probably just a little better off using herbs for sicknesses randomly, including the harmful ones. That's the only reason why doctors could prescribe arsenic and mercury with any credibility, because the herbals worked so fucking poorly, so doctors tried something different, and people were willing to go along with it. Then as now, human beings, strangely, are terrible at judging what makes them better when sick. The brain tells you when you feel better, and sometimes, it lies to you, the sick person, and you in turn, pass the lie on to the people around you. And sometimes, as they are finding with bacteria, the disease agent actually deceives the brain.

I'll add, that taking a hit of marijuana probably makes it easier for the brain to lie to you. And since doctors are 80 percent dependent on what a patient reports to make their evaluations, it might be easy for doctors to get misled, too.

Part of the problem is that all diseases are cyclical until their terminal phase. I'm not even sure if medical science has realized this yet, but it could be one reason for the "placebo effect." The majority of asthma patients will get better within a few hours of an attack, if it doesn't kill them. So, if they use marijuana and they get better, does that mean the marijuana did it? That's why you have science. That's why you have to be careful. I know these experiments controlled for this, though I don't know from the digests how well. The one with the five patients, though, the "control group" had to be at least fifty percent larger or smaller than its counterpart. That raises problems right there.

Tashkin is the most experienced marijuana researcher? His experiment still only had eight subjects. He has to be experienced enough to know the problems with that. I know that's not a scientific statement, but just sayin'.

There's one woman I know who strongly advocated pot, had pictures of her smoking it in her blog with the headings, "Legalize it," and used it every day.

Then she came down with asthma, and had to quit. And did.

I realize that's a single, anecdotal case, in my personal experience, and it therefore has no validity, but it's just as valid as any of the articles you cited. Since it's in my experience, it carries a little weight with me.

Besides the fact that using marijuana smoke to treat asthma sounds as counter-intuitive as using arsenic to treat syphilis. But, of course, the latter, is only in retrospect.