CBD Oil For Pain – Video Transcript

In this episode today we’re going to be talking about CBD Oil for pain. So how can CBD oil help chronic pain conditions, what kind of chronic pain conditions it helps with and which ones it may not be so helpful with and then we’re going to talk about how to actually use CBD and the experiences I’ve had using high CBD types of hemp in medical cannabis with my patients with chronic pain. So this is a question I get asked all of the time in facebook groups by email and of course with my patients is they really want to try to use CBD and usually in an oil forms of CBD oil for their chronic pain now there’s some CBD oils that you can get over-the-counter in some countries that are from hemp and they don’t have any THC in it or less than 0.2 percent THC so basically none and then there’s the medical cannabis that really has high high high CBD low THC but does it a little bit of detectable THC in it let’s say 1% THC so in my medical practice in Canada where medical cannabis is legal I use a lot of very high CBD very low THC oils to help patients with chronic pain now chronic pain it’s a just a huge broad area of medicine because there’s so many areas where pain can come from pain can come from the nervous system being injured and come from the nerves called neuropathic pain or nerve pain it can come from inflammation so if someone who has an autoimmune disease or they have arthritis from just wear and tear they can all get different types of pain and you have pain in the nerve endings and you have pain in the body and then you have pain that starts in the brain that’s again something called central pain so with all of these different types of pain actually one of the most important systems in our body to manage pain is our own cannabis system in our body our endocannabinoids system so what this means is that when we are facing pain whether it’s chronic pain or acute pain there’s molecules in our body there’s chemicals our body makes to help fight that pain and our body makes cannabis like compounds cannabis like molecules called endocannabinoids it helps to really regulate our pain perception how we kind of perceive pain and also how pain really changes the brain over time so a really common question I get is you know what should I do when I’ve already tried CBD from somewhere over the counter from a hemp store for example for my chronic pain and it didn’t do anything does that mean that cannabis medicine in general and CBD in general it just can’t help me the answer is usually no usually the answer is that it probably can be helpful somewhat but it really depends on the type of CBD the concentration of CBD it’s different for every person in every pain condition and a lot of other factors like was it a full spectrum cannabis medicine product with lots of different chemicals in it besides the CBD or was a just CBD without anything else like a CBD islip what I find with a lot of chronic pain conditions is because CBD actually interacts with our own cannabis system in our own bodies called the endocannabinoid system it doesn’t actually turn pain off directly like a painkiller for example what it does instead is it down regulates our perception of pain and the kind of tones our our nervous system so to speak so it can help with chronic pain over a period of time but often times it might take weeks or months to see in effect and it doesn’t cure chronic pain so you have to keep taking it so what can happen with a lot of people is they start taking a very small amount of CS CBD oil and they don’t really see much difference if anything oftentimes they have to use a different dose a different product or sometimes adding a tiny bit of THC so using in Canada for example where this is legal a strain of cannabis oil that has a tiny bit of THC and still very very high amount of CBD actually works better for chronic pain in many cases because it actually binds directly to some of the the pain receptors using the THC and then the CBD makes the THC work even better even at these tiny little doses so normally even at those tiny doses of THC people don’t normally feel impaired or high so a lot of times people think that CBD oil is going to work directly for their chronic pain but again because CBD actually doesn’t bind to either one of the cannabis like receptors in our body the cb1 or the CBT receptor like THC does it works in a more kind of overall toning capacity like a lot of herbal medicines it’s all about really toning the nervous system and this is where CBD can be helpful over time there’s also still so much we don’t know about CBD and about the cannabis plant in general we’re really only at the beginning of our scientific understanding and this is really I mean I mean when I say the beginning I mean I read the most up-to-date cutting-edge research every week on this topic and I’m still feeling like you know we’re really at the beginning so that being said how can you actually use CBD if you have chronic pain well one way that you can use it is you can help use it to help decrease the anxiety that comes with chronic pain because what happens when you have chronic pain is in the back of your mind even though your brain gets used to having chronic pain it takes up so much bandwidth in your brain so much mental and brain energy to basically dampen the pain signals so you can just go about your life and not feel like you’re in constant trauma that over time it can cause a lot of brain anxiety and it can cause a lot of fatigue so what I find seem to be helpful with when someone has chronic pain one of the ways there’s many but one of the ways is helping to decrease the brain anxiety levels so basically it helps kind of calm their brain down which dampens the fight-or-flight response or you know the danger response system in the brain and that also dampens pain signals and it also dampens our pain perception because when you have chronic your nervous system is on edge all of the time it’s like you’re caught in this fight or flight running away from a saber-toothed tiger cycle all of the time and everything is heightened so your awareness of everything of sounds of smells of bright lights and of pain everything gets amplified so basically it just helps kind of calm everything down a notch and even in itself that’s really helpful with chronic pain sufferers another way that can actually help chronic pain is if the chronic pain has an inflammation component so that’s actually most types of chronic pain even indirectly if you have nerve pain sometimes there’s an inflammation component as well so what CBD does in animal models we know and we think in humans although we need really bigger research studies to say exactly how this works but it’s probably very similar to what we’re seeing in animal models is that CBD actually works on inflammation through a number of different pathways in the body so it can shut down inflammation in some pathways so if pain is coming from inflammation CBD used daily over time may help reduce inflammation and that kind of pain as well another factor in many forms of chronic pain even if you didn’t start out this way is the longer the pain goes on the nervous system tries to adapt to the pain and basically your own endocannabinoid system in your other pain control systems they get out of whack they just don’t work as well and they kind of reach this new baseline this new kind of dysregulated baseline of I’m okay but actually the nervous system is really just regulated so this is where CBD may be able to help again because it may be able to help rebalance the endocannabinoids system when it’s gotten out of whack so the last thing that I’m just gonna mention is okay what types of chronic pain do I see enjoy treat with medical cannabis and high CBD strains especially so I see quite a variety of chronic pain conditions one of the really interesting things that I’ve noticed in my clinical work with patients and this is not something that’s really in the published literature yet is after someone’s received chemotherapy for cancer in many cases they use different drugs that really affect numbness and tingling and burning sensations of burning pain the hands and the feet and this is kind of a neuropathic or nerve type of pain that specifically people get after a lot of chemo therapies especially the breast cancer chemotherapy regimens and what I’ve found is when patients use CBD oil after they finish their chemo and they keep using it their pain their burning pain in their hands and their tingling pain in their hands and their feet tend to tend to go away a lot quicker then I would say on average so it may be really a place specifically receiveed II show some promise there’s some animal studies on that type of pain specifically using CBD and we need more research to say exactly how it works in humans but it’s really promising another type of pain that I treat is fibromyalgia I also treat arthritis pain and pain that’s associated with a lot of other chronic diseases so I’m gonna talk about each of those in another video specifically but in general I think for chronic pain CBD holds a lot of promise especially when it’s combined with other chemicals in the cannabis plant and potentially with other herbals and other medications so if you like this video please subscribe to our Channel and also 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