Doctors say cannabis treats Meniere’s disease

More good news about cannabis. People suffering from intense vertigo and nausea due to an inner ear problem — a condition of unknown cause and limited susceptibility to conventional medical treatment called Ménière’s disease — find significant improvement from cannabis, according to California doctors.

California doctors routinely approve the use of cannabis by Meniere’s patients who say that it helps ease their symptoms. “Meniere’s causes dizziness, dizziness causes nausea, cannabis relieves nausea,” says David Bearman, MD. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the symptoms caused Mrs. Gee to be a little depressed and of course cannabis helps that, too.”

Robert Sullivan, MD, corroborates: “I’ve issued many recommendations for Meneire’s, as well as tinnitus [ringing in the ears]. It works well enough to make a significant improvement in patients’ lives, i.e., symptoms not gone but much abated so they can function and carry on their daily activities, instead of sitting and suffering. It also aids sleep.”

R. Stephen Ellis, MD, has given some thought to how cannabis might help in the treatment of Meniere’s. “Three possible mechanisms come to mind,” he says. “Number one, the anti-anxiety effect of cannabis would be very useful to a Meniere’s patient. These people are anxious as can be when they hit the ER. When they get an attack it’s as if they are wired — that’s why Ativan is one of the treatments, to bring them down. Two would be the anti-nausea effect. Duh! You’re barfing and there’s a drug that offers relief in 10 seconds. The third is slowing down the vertigo itself — the sensation of spinning caused by the inner ear problem. My patients say cannabis is as good as Benadryl, which is the classic treatment. I recall reading that the auditory nerve does have CB1 receptors. I don’t know about the cochlear structure itself.”

Fred Gardner has more.

Hat-tip to mayan.

It’s an eminence front, a put-on, a lie, a deception

The Who – Eminence Front

Say hello

to Defend Integrity.

There is worse coming

if you don’t stop them.

Every one of them is a hypocrite

Sara Robinson writes the definitive article on the hypocrisy of the right-wing in light of the resignation of Mark Foley, a representative who fronted his strong moral opposition to the exploitation of children, while engaging in solicitous conversation with a sixteen year old boy on the internet.

Update: This story keeps getting squickier. What with the release of explicit instant messenger conversations between Foley and the teen boy, and the fact that house speaker Dennis Hastert was notified months ago by at least two representatives, house majority leader John Boehner and representative Tom Reynolds, none of whom did anything about this. Boehner for his part has changed his story several times today.

Hat-tip to Glenn Greenwald.

Update 2: Glenn has even more in this ever growing unfolding story that may envelop the entire house Republican leadership in scandal, and would not surprise me to reach its tendrils into the Duke Cunningham and Jack Abramoff investigations. This Republican congress behaves like a criminal conspiracy, because that’s what it is, and there are probably some Democrats involved as well given the pressure that must have been put on them to pass the Torture Bill last week. But this is just my speculation, carry on.

Another perspective on voters for torture

If we are against torture and I am, it is not sufficient just to say we oppose it, if we do not do what we can to stop it. To do this requires that we try to understand why anyone supports it, even ambiguously, and respond to those kinds of perspectives in a constructive way if possible.

Doctor Biobrain has a similar way of analyzing things to my own, by adopting a little bit of right-wing or conservative thinking for a moment as a thought experiment to see how certain false premises and faulty logic which excludes important consequences can lead people to make wrong decisions. This is not stated as a condemnation, but a recognition that torture is simply wrong under any circumstance.

In describing how the Democrats in congress voted for this Torture Bill, rather than appealing to the baser motives of nominal support for ambiguous torture which Adam Scales proposed, Doctor Biobrain thinks this was actually a compromise.

And the thing to remember is that this is the compromise position, because the conservatives didn’t think Bush had to ask Congress for these powers.  They thought it was theirs for the taking.  I’m sure it was a major blow to them that they had to make all this public and admit that Congress was nominally in charge of this kind of thing.  Because that means that Congress can also take this away; a position that the Bushies would never agree with.

Perhaps, and let me credit that it is certainly a reasonable self-deception. By forcing the president to concede that congress had any say at all over the matter was to concede a great deal in theory, but in practice it does not put off the inevitable constitutional crisis very long and makes it larger and harder to resolve. Worse, and this is the part that the adherents of this theory do not wish to countenance, by sacrificing the people who will be tortured to the administration, to commit human sacrifice to the boy emperor, for the sake of some feeling of security, is precisely what they have done. Unknowing and unconscious, perhaps, but not without some self-doubt, which reassures them of their humanity, I’m sure.

And so they are, human every one of them, even the worst of them. But they will regret what they have done worse than any words I can express. All of our actions have consequences which we will experience in time.

Letter to Adam Scales

Adam Scales is a right-wing commentator at the right-wing neolibertarian Volokh Conspiracy. Sometimes I jump across the pond to see what’s being said, and Adam’s comment was insightful and worth highlighting as a way of comprehending the mindset of people who vote for torture.

Adam writes in part:

Second, I am not sure that the legislation under consideration actually marks a profound transformation of our legal culture. If 2/3 of the Senate, the President, and the House think “ambiguous torture” is permissible, there’s a good chance that they didn’t reach this view suddenly, in the teeth of an obviously opposite legal culture. I also have the feeling that a solid majority of Americans will support these measures – and more. I expect to find a great range of disagreement among judges, though less so among academics.

These “pro-torture” constituencies may be wrong, or stupid. It may even be that they do not have the legal power to take these steps. I have little unique insight into these questions. But one should consider how these constitutive parts of the legal culture could so do, if the legal culture was in fact profoundly opposed to them.

What Adam says may be partially true, there may be a substantial democratic constituency for ambiguous torture. Our culture has been so propagandized for war for so long, it has been denied a true free speech media for as long as most of us have been alive, with the present exception of the internet (though even here there are constraints on what can be said.)

If a majority of Americans supported ambiguous torture, that would not make it acceptable. This is where I will speak against democracy, in the abstract. But in the concrete, I do not believe that most Americans will support torture if they know it is happening.

Torture is unacceptable in any case, and every one of us who tortures will feel what it is like to be tortured. When you become conscious of what you have done, you will experience what you did from the other side. You will know, and you will stop doing it. That is how justice is done.

Too few perceive God anymore. God reflects us. Be Love, and God is Love.