medicine available for pain management has a lethal dose, and as a physician that is worrisome. Understanding that a patient cannot overdose on cannabis - and it protects and saves lives - immediately lifted the pressure I felt as a physician. I knew we had to look into hemp and cannabis more and get involved.
In 2017, we brought hemp CBD (cannabidiol) into our practice at Integrated Pain Solutions and gave it to 100 patients. We immediately saw that it was doing something significant. We surveyed the patients and while our initial data didn't seem to show that the pain got any better, they did indicate noticeable improvement in three areas: sleep was better, anxiety was diminished; and they had a better sense of well being. Patients using CBD stopped reaching for drugs or alcohol as a coping medicine. These patients were finally motivated to participate in new activities and engage with society. As a physician, these findings were unexpected - and hard to measure. Pain relief was not the number one benefit. For the first time in a long time, these patients had hope.
Clinical Trials
Hemp is Hope: Neuroplasticity and Brain Growth
Our brains change in the chronic pain state. When someone is locked into pain or depression, their brain's ability to form neural connections and respond to everyday life is sacrificed. This is called neuroplasticity and it allows the neurons in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment
CBD helps the brain grow. Activating your Endocannabinoid System (ECS) will cause new brain growth and patients will start to problem solve their way out of pain. By taking control of their unconscious mind, and feeding their brain to start problem solving their way out of a debilitative state, the brain will evaluate pain and act differently than in the past.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a great example of when the brain gets locked in. A patient with PTSD might only be able to drive from point A to point B - they can't deviate from that without having a major panic attack. They can't think their way out of it. If they start taking CBD, all of a sudden they can tackle a situation like this. They begin to problem solve their way out of it. This is the future of how we can change our brain to a non-excitable state and cure chronic debilitating problems.
What we eventually learned was that these patients were actually feeling less pain, but they were afraid to be honest on the survey because they feared if the pain was less, their opioid medication would be reduced. That is the addiction controlling the brain. We continued to treat the patients and monitor them closely; we recommended a new nutraceutical that included hemp/CBD and found that it slowly started to decrease their dependance on narcotics.
It has not been easy to convince these patients to reduce their use of narcotics because they had become so dependent on it for so long.
become so dependent on it for so long. We have found that this transition takes a considerable amount of time.
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