Cancer. It’s a diagnosis no one likes to hear. Even though it’s not necessarily a death sentence, the treatment for it may feel like one. Radiation and Chemotherapy both mess with your system drastically, and can make you feel like you’re dying even though they’re actually helping you. Marijuana can help ease the symptoms obtained from both of these treatments. Here are just five of the many benefits it can provide.

1. Regaining of Appetite
Both chemotherapy and radiation affect the cancer sufferer’s sense of both taste and smell. This can make the patient want absolutely nothing to do with food, yet in order to get better, cancer patients need to eat a nutritional diet. THC, the main ingredient in marijuana, has been proven to not only increase a cancer patients appetite, but also their sense of smell and taste.

2. Decrease in Pain
The treatments used to defeat cancers aren’t very pleasant. A lot of patients experience extreme pain while their body is fighting the disease. Using marijuana medically can ease that pain, making the battle of the person suffering a little more comfortable.

3.Can Help in Slowing Down Tumor Growth
Believe it or not, the AACR (American Association for Cancer Research) has actually found that the use of medicinal marijuana in both lung and brain cancer patients can significantly slow down the growth of tumors.

4. Helps with Dizziness
Again, this is a treatment problem. It really is a shame that the treatment for this disease causes as many problems as it does. Many patients that are going through chemotherapy or radiation, some are going through both even, find that their treatment makes them dizzy and they’re unable to focus a lot of the time because of that. Medical marijuana (especially the oil) has been found to actually help with the dizziness, which in turn also reduces the amount of vomiting a lot of the patients experience. This in turn helps them to keep their food down and gain weight, an important factor in recovery.

5. Helps the Patient Sleep
Some cancer patients have trouble sleeping. Whether it’s from dealing with the fact that they’ve been diagnosed with the disease, or they’re not responding to the treatment well at all, insomnia isn’t any fun for anyone. The THC in medicinal marijuana has been shown to relax patients that are dealing with having cancer and help them fall asleep faster and easier. Sleep is an important part of the recovery process. If the body can’t sleep, it’ll have a much harder time healing.

These are just five of the many benefits that medicinal marijuana can have on fighting cancer. So if you or someone you know has recently been diagnosed, or even if you’ve been fighting the disease for awhile, you may want to consider booking an appointment with your oncologist and asking him if the use of medical marijuana would be beneficial to you. Though it’s not legal everywhere yet, it’s certainly becoming more widely accepted by more medical practitioners every day.