Using Hemp & CBD for Cancer Pain Management: What Patients Need to Know

Brad Power July 16, 2025 “Once I got off of the opiates – it took a couple months – I was basically out there figuring what I was going to use next. The psychiatrist at Dana Farber was doing research in cannabis and mushrooms, all kinds of alternatives, and suggested that I try cannabis. So I did. I got it in Massachusetts, in the town I'm in, which had 12 retail operations right on the street. You could just walk in and get it.

But I'd never used cannabis as a younger guy. I was always a boozer in the 1960s and in college, and in the military afterwards, and then when I got out. Since I quit all that stuff, I never really experienced it. So I started using it, and realized what I wanted was the medical benefits from it, such as they were, such as the information you could get, but not the ‘high’ portion of it.

So I ended up using mixtures that I could get, edibles, at retail, that were low in THC, which is the compound that gets you ‘high’, but high in CBD. Then I morphed from that into studying hemp, and realized that there was a difference in that plant. ” – Jeff Dwyer “My presentation to you guys is, if you've got a pain issue, and you don't want to resort to opioids yet, or if you want to get off of them, you can try the CBD capsules.

Advanced cancer patients experience many mental and physical symptoms from their disease, including pain, depression, anxiety, nausea, constipation, neuropathy, urinary problems, and sexual problems. For example, men with advanced prostate cancer often have cancer progress to their bones, causing severe pain. They need to connect with a palliative care team early in their disease progression to mitigate their pain and manage side effects.

Among the treatments they might consider could be cannabis, but there is little evidence from randomized clinical trials (the gold standard of medical evidence) to support it. It remains in the gray zone of treatments that have some anecdotal or observational benefits. Consider the case of Jeff Dwyer, an advanced prostate cancer patient who searched for relief from his spinal pain following his diagnosis in 2019.

His pain resulted from spinal compression fractures (from his decreasing bone mineral density and osteoporosis), which in turn were driven by his prostate cancer. Presently, Jeff is using organic cannabis hemp oil capsules for pain mitigation. How should you search for relief from cancer-related pain?

Roger Royse Welcome to this week's meeting of the Cancer Patient Lab. Each week we try to bring you some original content on issues of interest to cancer patients, especially those who are very involved in their own care. We believe engaged patients get better outcomes. This week we are going to hear from Jeff Dwyer, who's going to lead a discussion about finding and becoming comfortable with care, including cannabis care.

He is a cancer patient himself, as well as some other things, and he has asked the brothers from Western MA Hemp to come along where he gets hemp, CBD, apparently, to explain what makes the cultivation of their hemp different from the majority of businesses, why it's useful, why you should use it, etc. Jeff Dwyer 1:05 I mentioned my story to Brad, and he suggested that I tell it to the group.

This is my sixth year of advanced prostate cancer, and as part of it, I learned that when the prostate cancer progressed into my bone, that I was having spinal compression fractures, I had a few of those, sports-related, when I was younger, but as they started, I did the DEXA scan, found out that I had osteoporosis, went to the spinal Center at Mass General in Boston and got referred to an osteo doc and a neurologist, and basically, because of comorbidities, after an MRI, they looked at it and said, “Yeah, you've got spinal compression fractures.

” By then, I'd been diagnosed with interstitial lung disease, and I'm old. I'm 78 years old, so they basically were very straightforward, and said, “We don't want to work on it. You’ve got some some issues in your spine, with your bone structure, and so you're going to have to tough it out,” which was interesting to know. ” I had not used any hormone therapy for my cancer care.

I had done strictly surgery with a prostatectomy, and then when the cancer recurred, it recurred on my sacrum. It was time after biochemical recurrence to make a decision about what I was going to do. So I chose radiation. I went to the University of Pennsylvania for two months of proton beam radiation to my spine, to my prostate cancer bed, to the iliac chain, and basically to the one met that was on my sacrum.

I got another couple years out of that. Then just recently, last year, I went back down to UPenn for two more spots. One of the spots was on my lung, and the other one was on L1 of my spine. By then I had been pretty much diagnosed by the radiologist who wrote multiple compression fractures in the spinal column. Almost all of them. I've lost three-and-a-half inches of height, so I was dealing with the pain issue.

You may recall, I think it was a year ago, Dr. Jim Tulsky spoke to the Cancer Patient Lab. He is an oncologist at Dana Farber, but he's also a head of their palliative care division, and he mentioned guys with pain issues should really consider affiliating with a palliative care organization.

Then I saw a presentation from the prostate cancer organization, with my own oncologist, Alicia Morgans, also at Dana Farber, where she's head of the survivors group at Dana Farber. She explained that there were a lot of benefits for early affiliation with a palliative care organization. Like a lot of people, I had assumed palliative care meant hospice and you were given up.

But I proceeded to go to Dana Farber, and learned a lot about it, and I'm glad I did. The meeting I had at Dana Farber was with a pharmacist, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a physician, the team. I walked away feeling that they could help with the pain issue. I'd been put on Tramadol for the pain, but I quickly escalated through the opiates until I was taking 400 milligrams a day, which led to opiate-induced constipation.

It's first time I'd been in the emergency room for pain, and it was from constipation, not from my back. So I did. You could just walk in and get it. So I ended up using mixtures that I could get, edibles, retail, that were low in THC, which is the compound that gets you “high”, but high in CBD. If I dealt with the hemp, I was not asking anybody to chemically change it, because the hemp plant has low THC and high CBD.

I found, strangely enough, Western Mass Hemp, which is two towns over from where I live in Western Mass, online, and interacted with Brian and his brother Michael, and started buying their CBD capsules and doing as suggested by them, but also in a couple of medical papers that I read, which I've uploaded to Roger that he can put on there. The most recent one was from Penn State.

However, it was explaining the use of cannabis for medical purposes, basically pain mitigation. I realized that within about two weeks, I was taking the equivalent of 20 milligrams of hemp CBD, five milligrams every six hours in a 24 hour period. I have four doses, which is basically a hemp capsule. It has dampened my spinal pain to the point where I can function. I know it's there.

I've been fortunate, from what the orthopedic docs have told me, that my spinal vertebrae have collapsed, but they haven't pinched the nerve. They basically collapsed like the World Trade Center, just that's why I'm getting shorter so far. The hemp is working. It does what I wanted to do. I can sleep. I can get through the day. Jeff Dwyer 11:05 I'd spent a couple of months in bed when they first started going to the vertebrae.

My future prostate cancer care is probably going to be continuing metastases, directed therapy with radiation. I use the hemp capsules to mitigate the pain. I have no hormone therapy. I'm basically surgery then radiation. This is my sixth year. At this point, I go every six months for a PSMA PET scan at Dana Farber, and then we deal with it.

If there are obvious new metastases, they're migrating so far into we believe my lung, which they were unable to biopsy because that would have involved a breathing tube, even just for a robotic biopsy, and they were fearful that I might have a reaction because of the interstitial lung disease.

It's pulmonary fibrosis, which is stabilized now from the medication I'm taking, but if it were to inflame, I might be stuck on that breathing tube forever. So they decided just to radiate it, and if my PSA went down, they're going to make the assumption that it was prostate cancer that had migrated into my lung. It had gone from 7 millimeters to 20 millimeters. It could be lung cancer, because they'd never biopsied it. We don't know.

I remember talking to Allen Morris about it. He said, “Get a biopsy. ” When you're on the banana peel with your co- morbidities, it's hard. So I didn't. I just nuked it, and that's where I stood when I was talking to Brian, to Brad, about this journey to cannabis, telling him I was doing research on it. I stumbled onto Jordan Tishler, who spoke to us. He's in Boston.

He's opened up an organization to educate physicians with continuing education in cannabis. But there's really a shortage of information out there. There are just a few physicians that have done any kind of trials in it.

I believe that's because it's a schedule one drug, and they have to use one lab that's federally authorized, so when you read the studies, they haven't looked into hemp, as opposed to the marijuana that's grown and is basically processed. These guys can talk about this. That's their business. They've been doing it for a long time growing hemp.

I'd like to introduce you to them, and let them tell you what they're doing, and you can ask questions about the technical aspects. My presentation to you guys is, if you've got a pain issue and you don't want to resort to opiods yet, or if you want to get off of them, you can try the CBD capsules. And if you want to stay away from the THC, you can do it with hemp. There's a lot of tests asking with placebos, I don't care.

It could be dog crap in a capsule. If it works, I'm fine with it, and that's the way I've come to it. I'd like to introduce Brian and Michael from Western Mass Hemp, and let them do their presentation. I've told you what I did, and Brian and Michael know what they're producing, and how it's different from the rest of the stuff that's offered nationwide.