Plants And Positivity: Olivia Newton-John’s Cancer Journey
Summary
April 2020 – Olivia Newton-John says she is living proof that cannabis is an effective medicine for treating the symptoms of cancer.
“For me, the proof is in the pudding and I’m the pudding,” said the 71-year-old Australian actress and singer, who recently announced that her tumours are receding. “At my last MRI, which is an exam where they look inside, things are shrinking and going away, or staying the same,” she said. “On a stage four metastatic breast cancer — that’s pretty amazing.”
This is the third cancer diagnosis for the Grease and four-time Grammy Award-winning actress who first discovered breast cancer following a self-examination in 1992, which she treated with chemotherapy and a mastectomy. After a car accident in 2013, doctors found that the cancer had returned and had spread to her shoulder. In 2017 she was told it had spread to the base of her spine. Then, on the eve of her 70th birthday in 2018, Newton-John experienced “severe pain” and discovered that she had suffered a pelvis fracture due to the bone cancer spreading to her sacrum. Newton-John has described “months and months of excruciating, sleep-depriving, crying out loud pain” before she turned to cannabis for relief, which her husband grows in their greenhouse in Santa Barbara, California.
Medicine Man
Her husband of 11 years, John Easterling, who has been described as a visionary thanks to the 22 years he has researched rainforest medicinal botanicals, is a famous advocate of plant healing. Easterling founded the Amazon Herb Company in 1990, a herbal wellness company that has since merged with TriVita, which sells herbal supplements.
Easterling now cultivates 21 different strains of cannabis for his famous wife, who refers to him as “medicine man”, to create an oil formed of 47% THC, 26% CBD, plus a mix of other cannabinoids, including CBG, CBC, and CBN. Using this oil, Newton-John weaned herself off the morphine that was originally treating her pelvis pain and says it has helped immensely with her sleep and anxiety too. “I really believe the cannabis has made a huge difference,” she has said. “If I don’t take the drops I can feel the pain, so I know it’s working.”
Although she has admitted that she was initially hesitant to use cannabis, last year the actress joined her husband at the 2019 Cannabis Science Conference in Portland, Oregon and is currently lobbying for Australia to decriminalise cannabis. “It’s not a drug. You see, that’s the problem. That’s a name thrown around with cannabis – it’s a herb and a plant,” she has said.
If you need any advice or help with purchasing the best quality oil, please use the contact form provided. We try to answer all emails within 24 hours and are happy to help and advise on all aspects of RSO FECO cannabis oil treatment and medical cannabis in complete confidence.
Positivity is a decision
In addition to hormone suppression therapy, Newton-John now takes cannabis and a mix of Amazon herbs including cat’s claw, camu camu and dragon’s blood, plus meditation therapy, which helps her to stay positive.
This, she says, is another essential element.
“ really a decision,” she has said. “And once you make that decision, you kind of train your brain to stay there, so it becomes normal. I talk to my body and I thank it for every step it makes of improvement. And I thank it anyway. It’s really a practice because you create your world by what you think.”
Newton-John refuses to call her cancer journey a ‘battle’ believing that fighting talk creates more anger and inflammation. She also avoids statistics because they induce more fear and rarely discusses her diagnosis with her daughter Chloe Lattanzi unless she feels she needs to.
“If you believe the statistics, you’re going to make them happen,” she has said. “If somebody tells you, ‘you have six months to live’, very possibly you will because you believe that.”
It’s this relaxed attitude that meant the actress once had to refute reports claiming she had “weeks to live”. She wrote on Twitter: “Happy New Year, everyone! I just want to say the rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated, to quote a very famous quote, and I’m doing great and I want to wish all of you the happiest, healthiest 2019 that’s possible.”
The future
Now Australia’s sweetheart has set her focus firmly on the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness and Research Centre at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital, which offers treatment, care and pioneering wellness programs that champion emotional wellbeing, staying active and eating well, while also researching clinical trials for breakthrough therapies. Soon, the centre will lead a randomised phase I/II clinical trial with 108 participants to evaluate the use of medicinal cannabis on the quality of life in patients with advanced cancer. The first-of-its-kind clinical trial in Victoria, Australia will assess quality of life, pain, appetite, anxiety, nausea, fatigue, sleep and weight loss, while further funding is sought to identify whether the use of cannabis may have anti-cancer activity.
Newton-John’s fundraising and research mission, which can be read about in her 2019 memoir Don’t Stop Believin’, has seen her organise an auction of some of her memorabilia including that famous leather jacket and those lycra pants she wore while playing sassy Sandy opposite John Travolta in Grease. In a sweet twist, the Billionaire buyer of the leather jacket she wore in the 1978 film has returned it to the actress after winning it at auction with a $243,000 bid so it can be placed on permanent display at her medical centre.
Source on her dosage: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/a28902912/olivia-newton-john-husband-cancer-cannabis/
Source on trials: https://www.onjcancercentre.org/research/research-home/clinical-trials
Further Reading
How and where to safely buy RSO medical cannabis oil online
Support and advise
If you need advice or help with medical cannabis please use the contact form provided. We try to answer all emails within 24 hours and are happy to help and advise on all aspects of medical cannabis treatments in complete confidence.
Disclaimer: Please note that whilst we consider ourselves subject matter experts regarding medical cannabis, we are not medical professionals. We are an information resource and there is still limited evidence that medical cannabis can cure all of the illnesses we discuss here. We recommend you do as much research as possible, and where practical seek professional medical advice before proceeding with cannabis oil.