SummaryOpen the quick read
- Dr Shiksha Gallow's five-year study monitored 90 over-60 Eastern Cape men diagnosed with advanced Stage 4 prostate cancer across three treatment regimens.
- Patients receiving a combination of chemotherapy and medicinal cannabis achieved a 63% rate of tumour reduction or remission, compared to 30% for chemotherapy alone and 33% for cannabis alone.
- The research demonstrated that medicinal cannabis enhances chemotherapy effectiveness rather than interfering with it, while improving bone pain management and quality of life.
- Despite facing intense academic pushback and multiple publication rejections, Dr Gallow successfully earned her doctorate from Durban University of Technology and secured peer-reviewed publication.
- Dr Gallow is advocating for formal medical regulation in South Africa, warning against unregulated commercial products and urging oncologists and practitioners to examine the clinical data.
The humble dagga plant — the informal icon and backyard champion of Eastern Cape agriculture — has taken one step closer to being acknowledged as a medical partner in the treatment of cancer.
And much of the impetus of the global clinical research movement into the medicinal impact of cannabis came from a woman who lives in Gonubie, now sitting before me on Saturday morning.
Dr Shiksha Gallow, a holistic integrative practitioner and clinical pathologist, has worked out; she has taken her kickboxing class and led a Pilates class at the local gym, and we are seated among the birds, trees and fish at Lavender Blue talking about her latest research findings.
There are rules to our interview — she is only allowed one sentence to describe her academic qualifications — and she plays along gamely: she has three masters degrees (public health, MBA, and medical science) and three doctorates — in medicine, business and medical science.
Her life is in the air right now. She and husband Wayne are on a relentless global travel binge — she is a celebrated researcher and is a sought-after speaker at conferences around the world.
There are many more positions she holds, but today is about journalism, and not her CV, I tell her.
Her latest PhD — a study of the impact of medicinal cannabis on the prostate cancer treatments of 90 over-60 Eastern Cape men — was the toughest.
Cannabis is not officially approved for cancer treatment.
Nobody wanted to be her supervisor, and the panel of academic peers put her through a smokehouse of fiery criticism going under the euphemism of peer review.
She says it took two years to find a supervisor — three in actual fact — and a total of five years to do the research, write a thesis and get it peer reviewed in two journals, and only then was she able to walk the stage and get her latest academic cap, this time from the Durban University of Technology.
Getting prostate and oncology publications to publish her work saw her getting rejected a number of times with the oft-repeated words “this is not a suitable journal” ringing in her ears.
“I got rejected over and over …”
And yet she says she can find no other research on the topic in the world and says work like this “puts SA on the map. Nobody's done this particular arrangement of research.”
Round one in her academic pitch saw her up against the ropes as more than 15 professors gave her a critical bashing.
They call it academic rigour, a form of due diligence.
But Gallow is a full package of contradictions; a bright, successful, beautiful 46-year-old woman, who is passionate about her topic and studies relentlessly.
She was once persuaded by a pro-cannabis campaigner friend to take part in a beauty pageant and to use the platform to call for greater awareness of the plant’s value, only to be told by the organisers to please tell “South Africa to be quiet!”
While most of the aspirant beauty queens spoke of wanting world peace, Gallows says: “I want to change the world.”
But she says part of her ousting there was her refusal to be quiet about the discovery that the pageant organisers wanted “poppies who looked pretty” not outspoken, empowered women.
The deviation was a good experience, something we laugh about, but it did help steer her back to her core role as researcher.
After our interview it is back home to her next academic qualification, this time in Chinese medicine practice.
Husband Wayne, a swimmer and paddler and all-rounder businessman, says he expects to hear a lot of strange-sounding noises in the home this afternoon as his wife gets her tongue around Mandarin medical terminology.
He says his wife pushes past the tears, and his love can be pragmatic too — he told her when she wanted to quit: “Don’t take it personally.”
This is what her line of pioneering research requires.
In fact, the academic maul at the start was taken to heart and turned out to be mostly constructive advice.
“So what was nice about this whole thing, about all the professors, was that they were guiding us and not just knocking it.
"So at the end of the day, I didn't take things personally. We looked at everything as a whole and said let’s just do this.”
In our interview, some of her comments are from the mundane past — the mother grundies who happily conflate medical cannabis treatment with getting stoned for fun — but mostly she was studying the 90 men with advanced Stage 4 prostate cancer who were recruited and consented to be part of her research.
By the time ethical conditions had been met — and there were many and it was onerous — Gallow was principal investigator of a team of medical academics and practitioners who medically monitored three groups, one group opted for only cannabis treatment, the next, the control group, only for formal chemo treatments, while the third group opted for the combo package — formal chemo treatment together with cannabis medication.
There were multiple considerations in the forming of the groups, some participants could no longer withstand the side-effects of chemo, others only wanted the pain relief from cannabis, some wanted to live out their natural lives with no more formal intervention.
“The research went beyond the patient saying ‘I'm feeling good’ or ‘I'm feeling happy’. We wanted to see what it actually does.”
Technically, the THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) in cannabis mimics the body’s own naturally-produced anandamide molecule (N-arachidonoylethanolamine), which is a neurotransmitter which releases a feeling of joy in the body.
In Sanskrit, the word for joy and happiness is “ananda”, known in modernity as “the bliss molecule”.
There were other cannabinoids in the mix.
She speaks about the evidence — PET scans, PSA levels — but also about “quality of life.
So for a lot of patients, the cancer has metastasised to the bone. So they can't move, can't walk.”
The team applied the World Health Organisation’s cancer pain management guidelines.
The results viewed from a holistic perspective encompassing “evidence-based” medical impacts and mental and emotional responses, showed that those who took the combined treatment outperformed the rest, faring better than the cannabis-only group which she found “interesting. It shows that cannabis does not interfere with the chemotherapy group, it enhances it.”
In the chemo and cannabis group, 63% of patients achieved either remission or a reduction in tumour size, compared with 30% in the chemotherapy-only group and 33% in the cannabis-only group.
And now what does she want? Yes, there is a good chance that medical trials are already happening, but her main desire is that her research thesis is read by practitioners — she wants every oncologist, every urologist, general practitioner to read it or at least the peer-reviewed published pieces.
She makes it clear that her academic research is completely different to the process of medical trials where medical cannabis will be officially tested by the medical and pharmaceutical professions and industry, possibly starting in Costa Rica.
And, unlike her research, there will be a group who will be led to believe they are getting treated with cannabis as well, but this will not be true — known as the placebo group.
Placebo groups, fascinatingly, measure the power of the mind over matter but essentially, they are only a neutral measure in the much larger process of formal clinical trials which will go on to have profound and massive impacts on humanity.
But she is delighted to say that despite the many gates that had to be negotiated in her battle to do her academic research, the results stand as a bright light leading the way to a progressive future where cannabis finds its rightful place in a society trapped in a rising sea of cancers.
Her appeal goes beyond the miniscule medical world to the wider public: She wants us all to read the articles or credible summaries and sweep aside the reactionary, vested propaganda which marginalises cannabis.
In the years to come, her vision is that people will say: “Oh my word, we can use cannabis to treat cancer. It’s not just all getting high and getting stoned.”
She says big industry is not free from criticism with powerful pro-big pharma funders unleashing insidious, vested criticisms in the '70s and '80s about the war on drugs among them calling cannabis the “Devil’s lettuce”.
In fact, despite being a businesswoman, she has steered away from the way the walls have fallen on personal use of dagga in SA.
She criticises the tardiness of parliament to produce clear legislation legalising cannabis use in a structured, regulated, holistic, healthy, and safe way.
She is appalled at the idea of rough traders “dishing out Gummy bears” to people who need proper diagnosis, treatment and accurate public information.
She and Wayne have spent decades working with the legalisation campaign and both feel that without national regulation the sector is prone to exploitation and abuse.
At some point her tofu poke bowl arrives and I catch her delivering a faint, private little prayer – “just giving thanks, being grateful”, she says.
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