Meta-Analysis Supports Medical Cannabis in Cancer Care and Treatment
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A meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Oncology has revealed strong scientific consensus supporting medical cannabis for cancer symptom relief and potential anti-cancer properties. With over 10,000 studies analyzed, this is the largest research effort to date evaluating cannabis’s role in oncology.
“Our goal was to determine the scientific consensus on the topic of medical cannabis, a field that has long been dominated by a war between cherrypicked studies,” Ryan Castle, Research Director at the Whole Health Oncology Institute explained.
The research team synthesized data from 10,000+ peer-reviewed papers, encompassing 39,767 data points. Utilizing AI-driven sentiment analysis, they categorized the evidence into positive, negative, or unclear correlations across health outcomes, cancer dynamics, and treatment impact. The results showed that support for cannabis as a medical tool was 31.38 times stronger than opposition.
The findings were particularly strong in areas such as anti-inflammatory properties, relief from pain, nausea, and appetite loss. Perhaps most notably, cannabis was also shown to potentially inhibit cancer cell growth and promote apoptosis—the programmed death of cancer cells.
Castle says his team hoped to find “a moderate consensus” about cannabis’s potential as a cancer treatment, and expected the “best case scenario” to be something like 55% of studies showing that medical cannabis improved cancer outcomes. “It wasn’t 55-45, it was 75-25,” he said.
“That’s a shocking degree of consensus in public health research, and certainly more than we were anticipating for a topic as controversial as medical cannabis,” Castle said.
Castle emphasized that the goal is not to lower the bar for treatments, but to recognize that medical cannabis meets or exceeds existing standards: “We are arguing that medical cannabis meets or exceeds those standards, often to a greater extent than current pharmaceutical treatments.”
The authors call for re-evaluation of cannabis policy and expanded clinical trials to explore its full therapeutic potential.
Reference: Castle Ryan D., Marzolf James, Morris Miranda, Bushell William C., Meta-analysis of medical cannabis outcomes and associations with cancer, Frontiers in Oncology, Volume 15 - 2025
DOI=10.3389/fonc.2025.1490621
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