What would you do if your 3-year old son was stricken with brain cancer? Most parents wouldn’t think twice about bringing their child to a mainstream doctor, only to undergo modern-day cancer ‘treatments’ such as chemotherapy. This is what one father, Mike Hyde, from Montana did when his 3 year old was diagnosed with brain cancer, but the father doesn’t attribute his sons victory against cancer with the use of chemotherapy or any other mainstream treatment; the dad actually says marijuana oil is what made the young boy beat cancer. While the story isn’t recent, it is one that everyone should hear about.

Marijuana Oil Helps 3-Year-Old Son Beat Cancer

In May of 2010, radiologists at Community Medical Center in Missoula, Mont., discovered a stage 4 brain tumor in a 20-month-old boy named Cash. Shortly after the tumor was discovered, the toddler was brought to Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he was placed in intensive care. It was recommended that Cash receive three cycles of chemotherapy, only to be followed by another 3 cycles of high-dose chemotherapy with stem cell rescue. The boy would also receive ‘max amounts’ of anti-nausea pharmaceutical medications.

“After his first round of high-dose chemo in August 2010, he no longer ate anything, and this went on through September. He was getting worse and worse…By the end of September he was so sick. He no longer was able to take feedings into his G-tube. His stomach lining was burnt from the chemotherapy, it was no longer processing anything – it was fried. I asked doctors if there was anything else we can give him and they said ‘We’re giving him max amounts of all anti-nausea medications we can give him.’ They basically told me that this was as good as it was going to get. I told them that it was unacceptable,” Hyde said.

The results of the chemotherapy were less than effective, as with most chemotherapy treatments, and the anti-nausea drug cocktail was causing numerous side-effects. These results caused Hyde to pull his son off of the medication, and begin secretly administering .3 milligrams of marijuana oil through his sons’s G-tube. Hyde says that once he began with the marijuana oil, his son started eating again and his quality of life completely changed for the better. The father was told that it was a miracle that his son began sitting up and laughing again.

“Doctors told us he was not going to make it. He was on life support for 40 days and was in a medically-induced coma. They said he would have brain damage and his lungs would fail. But I knew the medicine (marijuana oil) was in his body, and that helped him heal. It helped to rebuild his stomach lining, his liver and his lungs. He walked out of the ICU in mid-December. The nurses and doctors called him a ‘Christmas miracle’,” says Hyde

Was this one of the few cases where chemo ended up working? Perhaps, but the this mainstream treatment nearly killed the young boy in the process.

“It brought him to the edge of life, and if I wouldn’t have stepped in when I did, he wouldn’t be here right now,” Hyde explained. “The marijuana oil was the best pain drug available for Cashy, as well as a neuro-protectant, antioxidant and antibacterial. I know it saves Cash’s life.”

Seeing how marijuana oil helped the young boy to survive isn’t surprising – the benefits of medical marijuana are vast, with the plant even able to fight cancer. The point of this story is to recognize that alternative solutions do exist which can be utilized. The marijuana and cancer relationship is very real; this is just one more of many cases that proves it.

Additional sources:

Fox News

Providing all natural, side-effect free relief from toothaches while also potentially able to replace anaesthetic injections, a plant from the amazon is beginning to be recognized for its positive attributes. The plant, called acmella oleracea, is just one more sound solution and alternative to risky pharmaceutical drugs pushed by western mainstream medical professionals.

Plant from the Amazon Utilized as a Painkilling Gel

Although acmella oleracea is hardly a plant most people would recognize, it has been used for centuries by Inca tribes as a pain reliever for toothaches and to help aid irritable bowel syndrome. The plant is so potent that it could even replace anaesthetic injections.

Coming across the plant over 30 years ago while living among a secretive Peruvian tribe, Cambridge University anthropologist Dr Francoise Barbira Freedman experienced the incredible healing properties of the plant when suffering from severe pain in her wisdom teeth. Upon taking the remedy offered by the tribe, the discomfort ‘went away immediately’. Years after her encounter with acmella oleracea, Freedman supplied Cambridge with a list of rainforest remedies, with acmella oleracea being added to the bottom of the list as an afterthought.

Researchers from Cambridge were more than pleased, and ended up using extracts from the plant to develop a gel which blocks the pain receptors in nerve endings. In formal trials, the plant helped to relieve pain during the removal of teeth which were impacted. Other informal tests done by a Peruvian dentist found that extract from acmella oleracea also helped to treat ulcers while also dampening pain caused by braces, tooth removal, gum disease, and dentures.

“This treatment for toothache means we could be looking at the end of some injections in the dentist’s surgery…We’ve had really clear results from tests so far, particularly for procedures such as scaling and polishing, and there are many other potential applications…We think people prefer to use natural products and this is particularly the case for baby teething, for which, to my knowledge, there is no clinically tested natural alternative.”

The release of a acmella oleracea product, which is expected to hit the market within 2 years, will enable consumers to choose yet another alternative for pain relief rather than indulging in death-linked pharmaceutical painkillers.

Sparking fears among technology experts, General Electric (GE) is seeking permission to build a $1 billion plant for uranium enrichment by laser. Critics say that the technology, which can be used to produce both the fuel for a nuclear reactor and the fissile material for an atomic warhead, could be taken over by rogue states or terror organizations.

Breitbart reports:

Uranium enrichment can be used to produce both the fuel for a nuclear reactor and the fissile material for an atomic warhead. New technologies are seen as potentially dangerous as they make it easier to build a bomb.

Monetta said the plant could enrich enough uranium each year to fuel up to 60 large reactors — in theory, enough to power 42 million homes, or a third of all homes in the United States.

Donald Kerr, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory who was recently briefed on GE’s advance, said laser enrichment “appears to be close to a real industrial process” and a genuine technological breakthrough.

But critics say the technology could be co-opted by rogue states such as Iran or terror groups and used in the covert production of weapons, as it would be more difficult to detect small laser-equipped facilities.

“We’re on the verge of a new route to the bomb,” Frank von Hippel, a nuclear physicist who advised former US president Bill Clinton and now teaches at Princeton University, told the Times.

A tiny plant called Arabidopsis thaliana just helped scientists unearth new clues about the daily cycles of many organisms, including humans. This is the latest in a long line of research, much of it supported by the National Institutes of Health, that uses plants to solve puzzles in human health.

While other model organisms may seem to have more in common with us, greens like Arabidopsis provide an important view into genetics, cell division and especially light sensing, which drives 24-hour behavioral cycles called circadian rhythms.

Some human cells, including cancer cells, divide with a 24-hour rhythm. One of the main human circadian rhythm genes, cryptochrome, has been associated with diabetes and depression. Both of these discoveries grew from work with plants.

“We don’t have stems and we don’t flower, but our body parts, like those of plants, are controlled by circadian clocks,” says NIH geneticist Laurie Tompkins. “Clocks operate more or less the same way in all organisms, but some aspects of clock function are easier to study in plants.”

Turning Off the Lights for Growth

The new work, released this week in the early online publication of the journal Nature, investigated why Arabidopsis does its major stem growing in the dark — a pattern common to most plants. Biologist Steve Kay and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, report that a specific trio of proteins regulates the rhythm in Arabidopsis stems.

The group of proteins, called the evening complex, works in the early evening to silence two genes that usually promote plant growth. When the evening complex’s activity trails off a few hours before dawn, proteins release the brakes on growth and plants enter their nightly phase of rapid stem elongation.

When Kay’s team mutated the three genes that code for the evening complex, they noticed that this made the Arabidopsis biological clock run out of sync — stems grew unusually long and flowered early.

Scientists aren’t yet certain why night is the best time for stems to grow, but Kay speculates it has to do with using resources efficiently. Plants pick up carbon and nitrogen during the day, then store these essential nutrients as starch and proteins. “In the later night, they can release these resources in a coordinated fashion to provide the building blocks for stem growth,” says Kay.

“Our understanding of human health and the role of clocks in health and disease can greatly benefit from studying how clocks work in plants,” he adds.

Kay’s work could also shed light on how clock genes regulate cell division in human embryos.

From Crops to Cures

Scientists like Kay are interested in answering basic biological questions, but others who work with plants have their eyes on future disease therapies.

Plant-based molecules, for instance, are being used to target reservoirs of HIV that hide out in their hosts. At the University of California, Berkeley, chemist Jay Keasling is looking for simple ways to get microbes to produce greater quantities of these plant-based molecules at lower cost.

How plants like Arabidopsis suppress harmful genes may also help improve HIV therapies. A team of biologists led by Craig Pikaard at Washington University in St. Louis is investigating RNA polymerases, chemicals important in determining which genes get switched on, to learn how plants silence harmful virus-derived genes. Similar silencing pathways could be harnessed for HIV therapies.

More generally, scientists are looking toward plants as a medicinal source. Chemist Sarah O’Connor at MIT is genetically engineering periwinkle plants, the natural source of the anticancer drug vinblastine, to produce variations of the drug with halogens attached. Halogens make some medicines last longer in the body, meaning that probing periwinkle’s capabilities could make cancer treatments more effective.

The operating company of the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, “Tokyo Electric Power”, will not be able to liquidate all the consequences of the catastrophe by the end of this year. This was revealed by the company’s high-ranking representative who preferred to remain unnamed.

Earlier, the company announced that it planned to stop the largest leakages of radiation by July and to lower the temperature in the three reactors which suffered most down to 99º Celsius in another half a year. This would have allowed bringing them into the state of so-called “cold stop”.

Meanwhile, the task turned out to be more difficult than it had seemed at first. It turned out that in all these tree reactors, the nuclear fuel had melted because of lack of refrigeration. It burnt through the reactors’ body frames and damaged their outer shells. This means that the system is no longer leak-tight – if one tries to put them out with water, it will pour out.

In an interview to the Voice of Russia, an expert in nuclear and radiation security Maxim Shingarkin commented on the situation in Fukushima:

“In fact, this statement came with a big delay. The operating company deliberately concealed this information. The explanation is simple – the company is afraid that any checking by competent experts would reveal its inability to save the situation. Only recently, foreign experts founded a consultative body for the clean-up of the accident’s consequences. Moreover, the company is concealing the information about the amount of pollution of the environment.”

However, “Tokyo Electric Power” still pretends that it knows quite well how to clean-up after the accident. It plans to build water-purifying units at the Fukushima plant, which will cost $ 650 mln. But the cost can turn out to be even higher, because the water has been infected with radiation several times and may need a more complicated purifying.

Moreover, this system of circulation may not withstand the summer typhoons. The roofs of three energy blocks were destroyed by explosions on March 11. The operating company suggests covering the holes in the roofs with some special polyethylene web, but the plant’s administrators doubt that this will be effective. Besides, summer showers can erode the ground, which, in its turn, can increase the onslaught of water into the plant’s lower premises. Showers have already increased the level of the water in one of the reactors by 20 cm.

In the other power blocks, the situation is also disturbing. About 85 tons of radioactive water have already accumulated there, and it is pouring out of the territory of the power plant. Not all the area around the plant has yet been covered with special synthetic resin which stops the spreading of radioactive dust.

630 monitoring stations in Russia’s Far East, situated both on land and on ships, are intensively watching the radiation situation. Fortunately, they haven’t yet revealed any increase of radiation which can be dangerous for people. The stations have already switched back to the normal mode of work, checking the radiation level once in 24 hours, not twice as they had done recently.

Still, it seems that the world has not yet recovered from the shock caused by the Japanese tragedy. Recently, Germany’s government decided to stop exploiting all the country’s nuclear power plants by 2022. This is still the first country to take such a decision.

Downgraded from a tropical storm, former Typhoon Songda is en route to bring strong winds and torrential rainfall to the Fukushima area. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the operator of the plant, has openly apologized for not being prepared to face the storm. Due to lack of progress in preparing the crippled plant for the onslaught of the typhoon, radioactive material may be carried into the air. Depending on the reach of the storm, this could mean some serious health consequences for surrounding areas.

“We have made utmost efforts, but we have not completed covering the damaged reactor buildings,” a Tepco official said on Saturday.

“We apologise for the lack of significant measures against wind and rain,” the official added.

One incomplete job involved the containment of toxic materials. In an attempt to stop the spread of carcinogenic substances, TEPCO has been pouring synthetic resins over the facility.  The company also failed to provide a scale of radiation leaks, and now faces a “massive” problem with contaminated water. If toxic radioactive material continues to spread around the globe, an explosion in radiation-related ailments may soon follow.

Tokyo Electric Power Company has detected high levels of radioactive strontium in soil inside the compound of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Strontium can cause cancer and like calcium it tends to collect in bones once humans inhale it.

Up to 570 becquerels of strontium 90 per kilogram of dry soil were detected in samples from 3 locations. They were taken on April 18, about 500 meters from the Number 1 and 2 reactors at soil depths of up to 5 centimeters. The amount detected is about 130 times higher than a previous high, level that was measured in Fukushima Prefecture before the accident at the nuclear plant.

TEPCO also said it found 4,400 becquerels of radioactive strontium 89 per kilogram of dry soil taken from the same location.

Earlier in March, strontium was detected in soil and plants outside the 30-kilometer zone around the Fukushima plant.

A director of the Japan Chemical Analysis Center, Yoshihiro Ikeuchi, says humans could inhale strontium when wind stirs up the radioactive substance, but the amounts would be very limited. He says the current levels won’t be a health hazard to plant workers wearing face masks, but monitoring of strontium levels in the air is needed.

Radioactive substances have been leaking from Japan’s tsunami-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant for nearly two months, and the plant is likely to continue emitting radiation into the atmosphere, and possibly into the ocean and ground water, for many months to come.

People living within a 20 km (12 mile) radius of the plant have been evacuated, while those in five towns downwind from the plants have also been told to prepare to leave their homes.

Following are some questions and answers about the health risks from continued radiation exposure from the plant, 240 km (150 miles) from Tokyo, as operator Tokyo Electric Power Co struggles to bring it under control:

HOW MUCH RADIATION HAS BEEN MEASURED OUTSIDE THE EVACUATION ZONE?

The highest radiation reading outside the evacuation zone on Thursday measured 0.046 millisieverts an hour in Namie, Fukushima, which is one of the towns whose residents are preparing for evacuation.

Most areas outside the evacuation zone logged readings around 0.001 millisieverts an hour or less.

Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences calculated that in the month from March 14 to April 11, following the earthquake and tsunami, a person in Tokyo who spent eight hours a day outdoors and drank tap water would have been exposed to about 0.12 millisieverts.

In absolute terms, these quantities are extremely small. People in Japan are on average exposed to 1.5 millisieverts of natural background radiation a year.

HOW MUCH EXPOSURE IS DANGEROUS?

Experts’ opinions vary. One benchmark from the Symposium on the International System of Radiological Protection recommends maximum exposure levels of 1 millisievert per year for the general public.

Children, whose cellular activity is more active than in adults, are especially vulnerable, and public health officials say they should be shielded as much as possible from unnecessary exposure.

CAN LONG-TERM EXPOSURE TO LOW LEVELS OF RADIATION CAUSE

CANCER?

Yes. Radiation is cumulative, and in theory, every radioactive particle that makes its way into the body increases the risk of cancer.

But there is no conclusive study that links a rise in cancer to cumulative radiation doses of less than 100 millisieverts. Experts are divided on the policy implications for these lower dosages.

Researchers are stumped in part because it can take decades and even generations before cancer emerges, and because so many other lifestyle choices can increase cancer risk. Researchers also had very poor quality data on dosage measurements after Chernobyl.

Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences says that cumulative exposure to 100 millisieverts of radiation raises the risk of death from cancer by 0.5 percent.

Every day, people are exposed to a vast array of other cancer-causing substances through cigarette smoke, eating and drinking habits, chemicals, viruses and bacteria.

IS SOME RADIATION MORE HARMFUL THAN OTHERS?

Yes. Radioactive particles are most harmful when inhaled or ingested, and particles that are easily absorbed and which have longer half-lives can cause more damage to cells and genetic material inside.

When examining radiation from the Fukushima plant, health officials focus especially on Iodine-131. Inside the body of an adult, it has a half-life of 7 days, but it accumulates quickly in the thyroid gland. Children are especially at risk because their thyroids are still developing.

Another by-product, Cesium, spreads throughout the body, concentrating in muscle tissue. Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years, but inside an adult, the amount will be halved in 90 days.

Strontium and plutonium are rarer by-products of nuclear fission. But if they are ingested, they tend to collect in bones, where they are likely to stay put. Strontium can cause bone cancer. Plutonium is more dangerous when inhaled, increasing the risk of lung cancer.

HOW CAN RISK BE MINIMIZED?

Everything depends on how good the Japanese government is in monitoring radiation levels and how thoroughly it samples food products.

“The Japanese are very sensitive when it comes to food safety, so I am confident that children will not be exposed to radiated milk products,” said Shunichi Yamashita, professor of biomedical sciences at Nagasaki University.

“Just as we have become attuned to pesticide risk, we will have to learn to live with radiation risk and do what we can to avoid contaminated food and water.”