OPPOSITION TO MARIJUANA STUDY AN EXAMPLE OF WARPED LOGIC

Editor:

Re: Medical marijuana study wasteful letter to editor of Sept. 4.

Thank goodness Mr. Eibisberger is not in charge of medical research
in this country.

His is a perfect example of warped logic.

In one paragraph he states that a study showing a benefit to people
with chronic pain by using marijuana should never have been done, yet
he says he feels compassion for these people.

So, don't use a scientifically validated therapy, or further study
it, because others don't like you doing it. In other words, I feel
bad that you have a condition that is making every minute of your
existence misery, but don't you dare use or study a drug that helps
you because I don't like it. Better you should suffer.

In the next paragraph he says instead we should put our efforts into
a therapy for MS that is unproven with only some anecdotal stories to
back it up.

Dr. Zamboni claimed that 73% of MS patients improved with venous
angioplasty (putting a balloon into a vein and inflating it to open a
narrowing).

In his study he also stated that none of the healthy participants in
the study had the venous narrowing while all the MS patients did. Yet
ongoing studies are showing these numbers to be very suspect.

In an ongoing Buffalo study 62% of MS patients did have the
narrowing, but then so did 26% of healthy control subjects and 45% of
patients with other neurological diagnoses.

Another study in Amsterdam showed no difference at all between MS
patients and normals. Yet Zamboni gets a number of zero in his
normals. Because he did not blind his study (in other words he knew
at the time which patients had MS and which ones did not when he
looked at whether the subject had narrowing of the veins) he could
easily have been biased in looking at the radiological studies
because he really wanted his theory to work out. That is why a good
scientific study blinds the person doing the measuring from knowing
which of the people he is reading the data on that has the dis-e ase
and which ones don't. Zamboni's study is simply not well designed.

Additionally, it is known from studies using venous angioplasty for
other conditions that the risk of re-narrowing of the veins is
considerable, so the logical inference is that the same would occur
in MS patients.

Yet the use of stents to keep the veins open has the risk of stroke
or death because of the need to use blood thinners in these patients
to keep the stents from blocking off. And at least one patient had a
venous stent dislodge and float into the heart, requiring open heart
surgery to retrieve it.

The reality is that MS is a disease that waxes and wanes in severity
with acute episodes of worsening, so ones might expect that some
patients would feel better after a procedure touted to be a cure,
since some patients are bound to feel better just by the laws of probability.

So, in summary, according to Mr. Eibisberger's concept of medical
research we should put a halt to studying a therapy that proves a
benefit to patients with chronic non-relapsing pain that is
destroying their lives (just as surely as MS destroys the lives of
its sufferers) in favour of studying a therapy with highly suspect
data in a disease with a naturally waxing and waning course, instead
of waiting to evaluate studies that are now in process of being done
on that therapy.

Dr. Phillip LaLande

Owen Sound