Entourage Oil has been used successfully to assist with developing and maintaining a beneficial sleep protocol. Such a protocol is like a blueprint that maps the ideal list of activities that a person needs to follow in order to maintain an optimum sleep outcome. The protocol serves as a guideline that create good sleep habits for the medium to long term. Yes - this is going to take time - but good sleep is worth the effort!
 
Entourage Oil was developed for this purpose, and has since been shown to be able to assist with firstly changing the current sleep outcome and then over time, works as an influence that may help with an enduring shift to a more regular habitual and favourable sleep pattern. Developing a positive sleep pattern using elements of the suggested simple protocol will take some time - it is not the ubiquitous sleeping pill method - and is focused on a long term, holistic solution.
 
How better to explain a process than by describing a case study?
 
This case study is the second part of a three part series of sleep related articles that we are sharing in order to assist people with becoming involved in the process of improving the quality of their sleep. The first article discussed in more detail the “anatomy” and physiological activity that takes place during a good night’s sleep, below is one person’s experience.
 
Caveat  
Entourage Oil was developed following a personal near-death event due to an underlying epileptic state. While that event and the subsequent journey resulted in a commitment to managing sleep by using the cannabis extraction that became Entourage Oil as part of a holistic strategy, managing epilepsy is not the topic of this article, it is mentioned to establish the the seriousness of the intention behind the writing. Our story presented here and in this three part series is one of personal holistic appreciation, and our intention is to present an idea, something that worked for another person. The individuals approach to sleep should be considered responsibly and according to own lifestyle and circumstances. This article is in no way prescriptive, nor are we offering any medical advice and as such appears without prejudice.
 
The Basics Of a Sleep Protocol…
In an ideal world we would be able to live without stress but unfortunately stress and it’s negative effects are part of the modern human condition. Perhaps the most important side-effect of stress is the impact feeling stressed has on a person’s sleep. This cost is very high, so the first step towards a good nights sleep is finding ways to keep stress out of the bed-room.
 
This includes exclusion of a TV and limited use of devices that are distractions from the intention and purpose of the bedroom which is sleeping. Put the phone on Aeroplane Mode.
 
Reading an entertaining book for a measured 30 minutes before sleep is a good way to begin preparing to fall asleep. Stephen King does not come to bed with me, but that’s just me! If you are inclined towards books then choose carefully what you read (!), with a bedside light only, in a predominantly darkened room.
 
Thick curtains block unwanted light and act as sound mufflers.  
Aim for peace and quiet - earplugs are fantastic to cut out nocturnal noise. If you live in a bright apartment with lots of external light, an airline eye-mask might help with darkness.
When it becomes darker, our eyes message the brain, which in turn, then gets ready for sleep. The brain naturally releases a hormone called melatonin. The use of a Red light is also becoming very popular, used in the last hour before lights out in a bedroom.
 
Try to tick as many of these boxes as you can and make this change over time but also remember that you are human and should be flexible and forgiving if you break the habit or list of protocols every now and then. Aim for a dark quiet room, with a balanced temperature, adequate oxygen flowing, an inviting comfortable bed and minimal or no disturbances during your dedicated sleep time.
 
Get rid of the bright flashing digital clock or hide it under the bed if you use one of those as an alarm clock! The last thing you need is to wake up unexpectedly in the early morning, and flashing next to your pillow, like the sword of Damocles, is the clock timer reminding you to stress yourself with sleep related calculations - how much longer have I got to sleep? etc - instead of calm “go back to sleep” with meditations and deep breathing.
 
Person PD - a Case Study!
We use the acronym for Police Detective as a simple way to confidentially name our case study. At the time when he decides to give Entourage Oil a chance to help him improve the quality of his sleep, PD is in his early forties and is not a recreational Cannabis smoker. There is an element of bias on the side of not wanting to be associated with Pot Smokers involved in PD, who happens to be a commercial artist and a competitive cyclist, but we explain that Entourage Oil contains a whole “orchestra” of Cannabis ingredients and these will work together in harmony, internally to bring his system closer to homoeostasis.
 
These anticipated effect of Entourage Oil is different to the experience of a cannabis joint smoker who has burnt away the Entourage of “musicians” contained in the plant material, and in truth, lost the many of the multiple Essential Oils that have been preserved in Entourage Oil.
 
What is the difference between smoking a joint and taking measured drops of Entourage Oil? At the average temperature of the joint coal, burning upwards of 700 deg C, when puffing, that burning temperature, reduces the joint smoker’s benefits to the experience of a fantastic soloist - a piano or a violinist -  who is playing alone in the inhaled smoke.
 
That active ingredient becomes boosted when burned really hot, and is called THC as the solo player in this metaphor. Entourage Oil is extracted no hotter than 145 deg C, and this is purpose is to avoid ingredient degradation. By gentle heat extraction, our lab tests have shown that the widest range of ingredients becomes available to the person taking the olive oil based drops.
 
An internal process found in all mammals called the Endo-Cannabinoid System, then becomes hyper-active. When one smokes a joint there might be trace elements of the original list of ingredients that are naturally present, at different concentrations, in cannabis, but the heat of the joint has either removed them or left them as mere trace elements.
 
We are not suggesting that the sound of 1 great musician is not powerful and without benefits, we are merely making a clear distinction between the wholesome sound of a full, conducted orchestra, whose intention is to produce the Entourage Effect vs the more singular application of the smoked format.
 
The point is - Entourage Oil and smoking a joint - are not the same thing. If the Entourage effect and the Endo-Cannabinoid System are new to you we suggest a visit to http://www.entourageoil.co.za where we have dedicated information on the origins and science behind these concepts.
 
Entourage Oil is, for the most part, Extra Virgin Olive oil, is ingested using the dropper pipette supplied with the bottle. Using this measured dropper technique, over a period of three months, PD was successful in shifting his sleep patterns from unfulfilled and inconsistent and to a more positive and recharged sleep pattern.
 
Developing a Sleep Protocol
On a macro level sleep can be viewed as something that needs to be approached as a habitual measured activity that can be reset over time. There does not appear to be a holistic fix that works over-night, that does not come with unwanted side effects. PD was happy to commit to at least 21 days of focused Entourage Oil usage, where he had a reasonable approach to being consistent with ticking the bedroom environment “boxes” and sticking to the times discussed below, so that he could look back at three week intervals or 21 days, and review his progress and make any adjustments.   
 
We accept the inherent differences from person to person’s lifestyle and environments, but you can prioritise and aim at a sensible target sleep duration that over time is expected to produce improvements. Eight hours is what current experts like Prof Mathew Walker, director of UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuro Imaging Lab, who wrote the New York Times best selling book WHY WE SLEEP: Unlocking The Power Of Sleep And Dreams in 2017, agree is the gold standard for restorative sleep. Seven hours is still amazing, especially if you are one of those who struggle along with four to six hours of nightly sleep, so seven might be a more realistic target.
 
In the first 14 days PD, who previously ranged between four and six hours sleep on average, was delighted with an average improved duration of six hours sleep initially. His average day was spent drinking 4 to 5 cups of coffee to fight tiredness especially later in the day at work. He reported being grumpy at home and even aggressive when driving and socialising. Our experiment was intended to develop a new routine over time that he would be reasonable, but consistent with the methodology over time.
 
His target was to break the habitual inconsistent poor quality of sleep pattern that had become ingrained like so many people experience, by aiming at increasing the allocated duration of sleep to around seven hours. A person on seven hours can expect to wake up restored and feeling rested especially when compared to his usual four to six hours. He also includes in the morning before work, a regular hour and a half of road cycling, three times a week. This regular exercise ticks another important box in the list of possible activities that one should aim towards doing as practice in order to to get the mix (Protocol) right.   
 
The Protocol - in development
For at least five nights per week PD committed to adherence to a schedule that looked something like this:
 
22h00 - General lights out, bedroom time with no screens, TV or devices.
He reads from 22h00 with a small bedside light only, then last toilet call and lights out at 22h30 to 22h45.
05h45 - Alarm clock set time allowing time on the bike.
NB - There is opportunity for at seven hours of quality sleep in the allocated time.
 
Unlike some people, PD had trouble going to sleep and on top of this, found that he would also wake up too early in the morning, before the alarm, and then suffer the brain-tired consequences later in the next day.
 
We understand that Entourage Oil takes around an hour to and hour and a half to be felt (60 to 90 minutes). Research shows that amongst other benefits, THC is helpful to assist with going to sleep. The amount of THC present in one 0.5ml drop of Entourage Oil is less than 0.00035 % yet this micro-dosage has been shown, through empirical evidence, to have a remarkable effect on inducing sleep.
 
Also present in Entourage Oil are a number of essential oils, one in particular is called Myrcene. Myrcene, which is also present in Mango, Hops and Basil has been shown to have sedative effects. When THC and Myrcene play in the same entourage, THC’s potential for producing anxiety, is moderated.
 
Pinene, an essential oil that is also found in the resin and bark of pine trees, has been shown to be helpful in clearing the head, while having a calming effect. The Japanese appreciate a restorative walk in the forest, exposed to Pinene in the air, which they amicably call Pine Forest “Bathing”, or Shin-jin Yoku, practised for it’s relaxing meditative effects. The logical harmony of Pinene playing alongside THC, and Myrcene, is self-evident.
 
By example the presence of this combination of ingredients found in Entourage Oil, working together, balancing each others “effects”, result in an outcome is what the scientist who first observed this biological effect, Prof Raphael Mechulam, called the Entourage effect. This effect might peak between five and seven hours, depending of dosage, and in doing so, assist with the internal balancing act that takes place across multiple functions, in the sleeping human body.
 
PD took one drop at 22h00 for the first two weeks, so that he could have an initial  benchmark on the effect. He was understandably wary of his tolerance and adopted our motto of “Less is More”. His sleep was deeper and he reported not dreaming or at least no recollection of dreams in that first two weeks. The most remarkable feedback, which is not uncommon, in spite of the waking time still being too early - around 05h00 - was that he reported feeling more rested when he did get out of bed. He was positive with the output on the bike during the morning rides, and so was enthusiastic to continue to titrate his dosage, with incremental increases, to see if there were further improvements to be had.
 
In week three he increased his dosage to three drops, but did this between 20h00 and 21h30 and reported that he would become drowsy while reading, before lights out at 22h30. So taking the drops earlier helped with Objective A) actually going to sleep! The duration of sleep improved too and by week five PD was happy to report more than 6.5 hours sleep on a regular basis.
 
At the end of week seven PD decided to try five drops, taken around 21h00. After 3 days of five drops, he was struggling to focus on the words (!) while reading, especially as he got closer to the time of lights out at 22h30. He slept well but woke up around 05h00, ready to go, but this improvements was not ideal. PD had possibly passed the “sweet spot” in his effective dosage and was now showing signs of an undesired inverse effect.
 
We had established that PD’s optimal Entourage Oil dosage was 3 drops, taken around 21h00, and so he reduced his dosage and continued for another month with the three drop regime. Over the following two months he was able to maintain his new sleep pattern and began to titrate the dosage down, 1 drop less per week. Three weeks later, some four months into the Protocol, PD was not taking Entourage Oil on a regular basis any more. He did take the oil on nights were his routine was upset by abnormal stress, late night socialising and travel, and on recommendation, 3 drops every 5 hours during a bout of the flu, that incidentally cleared up within 3 days of taking drops.
 
This is an example of the personal, holistic attention required to work towards breaking a negative sleep pattern. Each individual will have their own process using Entourage Oil, and will need to adjust their consumption of drops accordingly. We believe the outcome is definitely worth the effort!
 
Our follow up, third article will discuss some fascinating but wider range of sleep issues including how “the Science” can present confusing messages, relative to sleep benefits and other therapies, depending who is talking, and how the negative dogma still prevails with the multiple aspects of cannabis healing.
 
Further Learning References
The Endo-Cannabinoid System is best explained by Dr Rachael Knox | TEDxPortland | The endocannabinoid system and the revolution of one. , a Fantastic spirited presentation – Highly recommended!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJbOQ9P2NYQ
 
 The Entourage Effect - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3165946/ 
 
Using Cannabis As A Sleep Aid
A Good balanced article on Cannabis and sleep, plus interesting other sleep related information.
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-aids/cannabis-and-sleep

Intro
Sleep is the most effective way to reset your brain and so a considerable degree, mental health. That said, sleep as a subject, is incredibly complicated. The brain goes through a wider range of of activity during sleep than it does when awake. Human beings are different, or sleep needs differ as do our individual experiences of sleep day in and day out. So there is no singular solution to better sleep. However the specialists like Neurologist Prof Andrew Huberman - more from him later in this series - agree on the anatomy of a hypothetical perfect 8 hours of sleep as the target outcome. In this article we discuss this hypothetically as if you sleep from 22h00 to 06h30. We accept that our human differences are many, so apply the thinking below as the ideal that is possible, and that your sleep pattern over time can be compared to the ideal, giving you a place to work back from when you try to improve the quality of your own sleep.
 
The current research presented by Dr. Matt Walker, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology and the Founder & Director of the Centre for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, has identified a complex set of biological processes that take place during sleep, and having a basic understanding of what happens neurologically, when we sleep, and how key aspects such as the duration and what happens anatomically at certain times of that total sleep period, are key to developing a strategy that will produce improved sleep.
 
 
What is sleep
There are 2 types of sleep broadly speaking - Non-REM and  REM sleep - and this sates are measured in terms of intensity of the brain waves as well as in changes in the physiological state. The brain and body do different things during different stages of sleep.
 

• Non-REM and  REM sleep happen in stages and in cycles, in other words, we recycle through stages of both of these sleep types during a typical nights sleep, multiple times, depending on the length of the total night sleep.
• Non-REM sleep (slow wave sleep) - this is where we dip into four stages from light sleep into deep sleep - 1 being the lightest and 4 the deepest. Later in the duration this Non-REM then gives way to more REM type sleep.
• REM sleep - Rapid Eye Movement of the eyes, moving from left to right mostly - during which the brain is very active but paradoxically the body is absolutely still, paralysed almost. This allows for the mind/brain to enter the “dream state” and for that to be uninterrupted by unwanted bodily/muscular activity.
• The above REM phase mixed with Non-REM types of activity, takes place for a duration of approximately 90 minutes in humans, and then the cycle begins again. So sleep consists of a series of 90 minute cycles of the two kinds of sleep at evolving levels of activity through the night..
• Then, importantly, throughout the night the ratio of the duration of each “kind of sleep” - more or less REM vs less or more Non-Rem sleep - changes.
• The first half of the sleep duration is different to the second half.
• The first half of the night is where deep sleep takes place - “stage 4 Non REM” is predominant in the first half of the night during those 90 minute cycles.
• The 90 minute cycle is also different in terms of it’s content and this “content” (Non-REM, at different stages vs REM) is influenced by the time in the total sleep duration that the 90 minute cycle is taking place.
• As we age we are inclined to wake up to go to the bathroom - this occurs naturally and is normal - and this awakening usually occurs at the end of one of the 90 minute cycles.
• Typically in the second part of the total duration of sleep - this half the 90 minute cycles are characterised by more lighter stage Non-REM sleep and REM sleep,  ie there is more lighter stage Non-REM and REM sleep during early morning in a typical night of sleep.  
• It makes sense that dreams will take place in the early to waking parts of the morning due to this ratio shift between the kinds of sleep.
• There is a clear physiological and neurological difference between the first half and the second half of an ideal nights sleep.
• If you are deprived of parts of the second half (predominantly REM Sleep) eg waking up at 04h00 you will experience a deficit in biological processes that are different to your deficit experienced when you struggle to go to sleep - in the first half of the process - and are therefore deprived of Deep Non-REM sleep.
• Broadly speaking the first half of the night - slow wave sleep - appears to focus on metabolism, heart function (Blood pressure and blood content regulation),  restorative to the muscular system and motor learning.
• The second half of the nights sleep focuses on emotional aspects of the mind such as letting go of stress, reset of emotional perspective, and not coincidentally Testosterone regulation, among other processes.

 
 
Why is sleep so important
Rest equals Recovery - it might be as simple as that!
The first half of the sleep ticks a bunch of boxes and the second half ticks another bunch of boxes so like a petrol car needing both the oil as well as the spark plugs to be changed - you need both halves of a nights sleep to get a full service.
Sleep has survived our evolutionary process and changing its nature has potential negative short and long term  consequences.
Quality Sleep is non-negotiable says Dr. Matt Walker.
 
 
Things you can do to improve your quality of sleep
Develop good sleep habits…
Be as regular or habitual as your circumstances will allow ie keep to a format where you approach the bedroom ready for sleep and match that to the same time to wake up every day of the week. Aim for this until it becomes a regular habit or protocol. This habit will obviously be shifted from time to time but sticking to the routine keeps the brain regular.
 
The Room, The Bed and the atmosphere

• Dark Room - in the dark our brain secretes melatonin naturally and this hormone causes “tiredness”.
• Flashing digital clocks and light from electronic devices should be covered and avoided.
• No TV or cellular phone screens in the last 30 minutes before the time that you go to bed. Light intensity such as the intensity of light coming off these screens tell the brain that it is time to wake up!
• Put the phone on Aeroplane Mode to avoid disturbances
• Make use of ear plugs if you sleep in an environment that is prone to irregular noises
• No Caffeine drinks after 18h00
• Be aware that Vit B 12 and other natural supplements such as Spirulina and Ginkgo Biloba / Ginseng have a very long effect, and take days to clear the system and can over repeat / ongoing daily dosages build up to a point that they influence sleep quality

 
Don’t beat yourself up in the middle of the night!

• Anything above 85% of time spent in bed actually asleep, is regarded as good, efficient sleep so don’t consider a visit to the Loo or a short period of wakefulness to be a bad nights sleep
• Remember that when you wake up some nights in the dark moments of early morning that you are probably just at the end of a 90 minute cycle part of the rhythm and that this is not cause for stress.
• A meditation for those moments - While taking two or three deep breaths with slow exhalations, imagine your mind to be the reflection of the moon on the surface of a slow flowing mountain  stream. See any thoughts that pop up as the water flowing beneath the reflection - let go of them as soon as they flow in.

 
Get regular exercise! 

• Find a physical activity that you enjoy, that gets the heart rate up and do this 3 to 4 times a week for 40 minutes of more and as this becomes part of your routine so too will the quality of your sleep improve.
• Try a 12 hour metabolic break - no food between 19h00 and 07h00 - giving your body a chance to focus on the processes that should have priority during sleep,

 
Part 2
 
Entourage Oil  & An Example Of a Successful Sleep  Protocol 
- A case study as an example of how to use Entourage Oil to develop a positive sleep protocol to suit an individual with specific needs and lifestyle
- What works and why it works (with references)

Imagine yourself powerless as you watch a good friend struggle with a mental conundrum! It is as if he is under the influence of an unmitigated psychotropic experience that’s onset caught him unaware. It has taken between twenty and forty minutes for him to explain the significance of something that is very real to him. And imagine, as it turns out, the statement that he is making means a great deal to you too? While listening you find myself tripping over yourself self trying to guess the word that his recently injured brain is trying to submit verbally in order to carry forward the thread of the conversation you have been having.
 
“Whenever we speak of the mind - making up our mind, improving our mind, changing our mind - we are actually referring to activities carried out by our brain” said neurologist Richard Restak, MD, in his National Geographic published book Mysteries of the Mind. “Mind” he goes on to say, “is simply a commonly employed descriptive term for the operations of the brain.”
 
So as your friend speaks you sense that his brain has a “vision” of what he wants to express, there is a tangible spark of the thought that is front of his mind, but as the thought arrives at the place where the idea needs to be vocalised, the thought finds itself enmeshed in a kind of traffic jam the likes of which you find in say India's New Deli during rush hour! That chaos appears to rob him of a key word that finishes his sentence, and this happens just as the word is about to leave his lips. This embarrassingly causes him to halt suddenly while in full stride.
 
Why is this happening?
 
Insert yourself into a hypothetical situation where you are having an intense conversation with someone who is close and as you speak the word that “in your mind” was ideally suited and perfect to express the point that you are making suddenly disappears!
 
So where did the word go? Hypothetically the enigma is like a metaphoric highwayman suddenly jumping into the road in ambush, abruptly robbing a word that was there a fraction of a second ago, and with the loss of the word, so too disappears the coherence of the sentence!
 
Now in your mind look into your empathic crystal ball while you as you participating in the conversation and try, as you guess-gaze into the near future, then quickly using your guesses, try offer suggestions that you know are pathetic attempts to read another person’s mind as they talk. This is no easy task. By trying to guess and insert the word for him, all you are doing is creating negative self awareness, and making it even harder for your friend to state his case.  It might seem to you that all you have succeeded in doing is drawing more attention to the titanic struggle involving a panicked word search within his brain. This knock on effect is significant enough to cause embarrassment and a loss of dignity that only results in escalating levels of stress and frustration.
 
Typically, since you are well acquainted friends, one tends to naturally  jump in motivated by the empathetic desire to help, but  ends up making the situation more difficult. Speak of the road to hell being paved by good intentions!
 
Never-the-less our friend is not the kind of guy to give up easily. On the contrary, he shows a kind of tenacity that the Americans refer to as grit and bears a well intended spirit that is always in control of his emotions. You confirm this as you observe his outwardly chilled demeanour, while internally he is activating the neurological processes that are involved in deconstructing that hypothetical traffic jam. Imagine as you watch, you see in his eyes, as he is slowly redirecting and finding new pathways, creating order in that neurological chaos. Our friend is a classic engineer and sports a temperament that for his lifetime, has been geared to problem solving.  Grabbing his cell phone he points to a low resolution calendar of last year and points to the day when he and his fiancé discovered that he had a cocktail tomato sized tumour growing in the Temporal Lobe on the left hand side of his brain. He explains in broken phrases, coming to the point eventually, and in the process described in broken english that he is very lucky to be alive.
 
The brain cancer diagnosis was the culmination of a long agonising process where his behaviour was changing inexplicably in ways that led to a collective realization, between him and his fiancée, that something was terribly wrong. The pinnacle for him, came he said, on the day when he was writing a final on-line exam for a post-grad qualification on property management and development. He was adding this somewhat minor accolade to a Masters in Engineering and an MBA, so the course, one would assume, this puny test, should have been a walk in the park?
 
 But this was not the case and he explained how he found that he was really battling to recollect information from memory during the exams. These were learnings that should have been instantaneously available, but were very difficult to remember at the time of the test.
 
A cascade of medical appointments with appropriate medical specialists followed, that included the scan that identified the tumour. And then, by the focused effort of his fiancée, a sheer miracle occurred when a “top 5 in the world” neurosurgeon - only due to an unforeseen cancellation in the doctors schedule - was able to perform  urgent life-saving surgery.
 
At the moment of the operation in July 2022 the collective medical consensus was that our friend had less than five months to live. The changes in his behaviour were caused by the slow pressure to his brain brought on increasingly by the invasive tumour that had birthed above and behind his left ear.
 
The human brain is the most incomprehensible part of the body and there is much about its nature that is yet to be understood. It follows that having a world class neurosurgeon available to perform a surgical procedure at short notice, in South Africa, is nothing short of a miracle. Following a harrowing 4 hour surgery and eventual discharge, our friend slowly dealt with the incredulous reality of learning to read and write again. His family rose to the occasion and stood by him every step of the way
 
Then in early December, adding insult to injury, a follow-up CT scan just under six months after the first surgery, the doctors saw in the scans some unexplained tissue in the area of the original tumour. This marker was of such a concern that they put the already traumatised man under the knife yet again. However, second time lucky and the prognosis following the second operation was positive. The biopsy results showed that the second tissue removed was largly Necrotic tissue - dead cancer cells!
 
Talk about good news where only bad had existed up until that point! Good but mentally expensive news. Why mentally expensive you might ask? The answer to that question lies buried in the complex nature of the Brain and the myriad of functions that it performs. After a major insult to the brain such as the swelling tumour, followed by two visits to the surgery, where after a myriad of post-traumatic conditions can potentially exist, imposes twice the risk of long term neurological harm.
 
When injury causes the whole Brain’s system to be traumatised we imagine metaphorically the effect on the hard drive of a dropped computer, some of the the files, particularly those in the area of the trauma, have lost their connective pathways to the central processor. The information is there in the files but the connections are no longer joined.
 
In order to repair itself, the Brain has a very special healing potential that neurologists refer to as Plasticity. This is an aspect of healing where the brain learns about and develops new pathways around the area that has suffered the damage, involves working around the traumatised area, reconnecting the system and slowly regaining functionality. This does not mean that the “old” person comes back and regains their previous practicality however. Rather it means is that there is a new person who emerges on the other side of the injury, and that, with time and work on redeveloping the neurological pathways, this process of brain plasticity potentially offers a degree of healing . And so, a new person is now emerging into the world.    
 
Add too to this story an aspect of healing that is so unconventional in that our friend has been systematically administering a Cannabis extract product that was developed initially, in isolation from traditional medicine to assist with managing Brain injury induced epilepsy. Our friend has witnessed first hand, with his engineer’s curiosity, how another person’s healing occurred over decades of recovery using the product that we call Entourage Oil. So with some irony, he is familiar with Entourage Oil and trusts that there is value in it’s application in his own healing process. Alongside the pair of radical surgical procedures that he has endured there was no hesitation towards using a medicinal plant extraction as an adjunct to the conventional Chemotherapy and Radiation medicine that he has been treated with, post operations. A twice a day consumption of Entourage Oil is on his list of “To Do’s”. This self medication began from the moment of the first Cancer diagnosis. Our friend is not the first to use Entourage Oil in such circumstances either, see the blog articles presented here previously - read the story of our favourite Cancer survivor and subsequent Iron Man finisher.
 
During the conversation our friend explains that he believes that he has experienced a direct benefit and much improved healing, that has flowed as a direct result of rigorous application of Entourage Oil. The neurologist who produced the second post-op report said that he was amazed at the amount of healing at the site of the surgery to remove the deeply seated tumour, and this surgeon he said, was surprised by the existence of so much necrotic  tissue - dead cancer cells.
 
We understand that due to the allopathic  lack of faith in Cannabis as a therapeutic, and readers of this article will likely understand, that the will to do such research is not backed by the funding required in this field, we will all agree that none of us know for a fact what effect Cannabis has Cancer cells. Our next step, having a few such questions and a hypothetical list of boxes to tick, is to use the internet and do some investigation and would you know it - there are multiple examples of published, peer reviewed scientific papers that speak to this issue. Here is an example - the renowned Neurologist and researcher of the therapeutic potential of the cannabis sativa plant, Professor Ethan Russo in a paper that he published in 2018 entitled
 
Cannabis Therapeutics and the Future of Neurology
 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6200872/
 
The paper is easy to read and to some extent understand, and it covers the basics of cannabis therapeutics including
the list of active ingredients found in cannabis extracts and the popular the Cannabinoids THC and CBD, and the Terpenes or essential oils, such as Caryophyllene and Pinene that Lab Tests indicated where present in abundance in Entourage Oil. This combination of synergistic ingredients are obviously found in cannabis plant stains or chemovars of cannabis sativa plants that are used in the manufacture of Entourage Oil. Prof Russo’s paper clearly indicates what biological actions these chemicals have and what neurological maladies they might be used to treat.
 
Here is a short except from the “Abstract” section of the paper:
“This review will examine the intriguing promise that recent discoveries regarding cannabis-based medicines offer to neurological therapeutics by incorporating the neutral phytocannabinoids tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabidiol (CBD), their acidic precursors, tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA) and cannabidiolic acid (CBDA), and cannabis terpenoids in the putative treatment of five syndromes, currently labelled recalcitrant to therapeutic success, and wherein improved pharmacological intervention is required: intractable epilepsy, brain tumours, Parkinson disease (PD), Alzheimer disease (AD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI)/chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).”
 
Professor Russo alludes in the section in the paper on CANNABIS AND BRAIN TUMORS to the idea that humans have used cannabis as a plant based therapeutic since the time of the Ancient Egyptian Copts, so this is nothing new. In the paper he speaks about how THC has been shown to be cytotoxic to cancerous tumour cells. Among all the other neurological conditions discussed that might benefit from cannabis therapeutics, there is a section on CANNABIS AND TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY and here we find an explanation of the wonderful neuroprotective antioxidant effects of cannabinoids THC and CBD. Effectively we have ticked two boxes related to the subject of this discussion by simply reading those two sections of Professor Russo's scientific paper.
 
So there is a growing abundance of knowledge available on-line - use Google - such as this wide ranging paper that was published in 2018 in the US governmental website Pub Med Central under the section Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience and many of them are free to view, download and print.
 
At the conclusion of the discussion our friend made it abundantly clear which side of the cannabis healing argument he rests. His journey, along with  many other Entourage Oil supporters, have felt a remarkable wellness effect and that is certainly a point worth making.
 
Citation :
Russo EB. Cannabis Therapeutics and the Future of Neurology.
Front Integr Neurosci. 2018 Oct 18;12:51. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2018.00051.
PMID: 30405366; PMCID: PMC6200872
 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6200872/


The well known anxiolytic property of cannabis provides an improvement in quality of life in all facets of living in the world. It is so sublime to feel contented well-being going through this process of healing. Sure beats life in a hospital.

~Dennis Hill