CBD For Dummies. Blair Lauren Brown

of CBD use have cropped up. This chapter helps you examine which claims are legitimate.

Realizing the Potential Benefits: The Four Pillars of CBD (and an Added Bonus)

      This section explores the four most significant pillars of CBD care cases to date. These pillars are the most common ailments plaguing the American population today. Additionally, we explore the topic of CBD skincare and beauty, and while it is just as much a pillar to some, it is not as important to others. Among the others are the regulating bodies that impose guidelines on product claims and marketing.

      

To be clear out of the gates, I need to define relief. According to Merriam-Webster, it’s the “removal or lightening of something oppressive, painful, or distressing.” Terms such as cure, fix, remedy, and the like represent direct medical claims. In the United States, only items with FDA approval can make such claims. So I talk about CBD in terms of relief but always precede claims with a conditional word like “may” or “potentially.” Always remember that CBD is not a cure; it’s a hypothetical remedy that can vary in effectiveness based its application and the condition being aided.

      Relieving stress and anxiety

      For the sake of eliminating confusion between stress and anxiety, I break them down separately here. Stress is a natural response to help address circumstances that require a level of heightened mental alertness and physical response. Anxiety is a reaction to stress. Anxiety is painfully persistent even when the triggers aren’t present.

      

I look at stress and anxiety in comic book terms. Think about stress as Spider-Man’s Spidey sense, which alerts him of impending danger. Now imagine that Spider-Man routinely feels his Spidey sense even in nonthreatening circumstances, with no underlying cause. That’s anxiety.

Stress experiences are caused by mental and physical situations that result in symptoms such as pain, sleeplessness, gastrointestinal (GI) issues, anger, frustration, skin issues (which I discuss later in the chapter), and general fatigue. The body reacts to stress by releasing stress hormones, including cortisol and adrenaline, that push the body into a state of emergency action. In this state, your body is basically in overdrive — pumping blood more quickly through your system, increasing your heart rate, tightening your muscles, heightening your senses, and so on. The most identifiable feelings of stress manifest as nervousness, exhausting thoughts, lack of focus, compromised judgment, and disorganization.

      Constantly living in this stress state has been associated with a multitude of overall health problems, even heart attacks and death. Early studies have shown that CBD modifies the body’s chemical interaction with cortisol in a sedative way. It mitigates stress by preventing the overflow of cortisol.

      Though anxiety can feel much like stress, it’s actually clinically diagnosable. Because CBD seems to be apt at relieving stress responses, it also seems to be beneficial in cases of anxiety.

      Soothing mood conditions

      Your mood is affected by so many things, from outside stressors to chemical imbalances in the body. CBD can be helpful for clinical conditions (such as psychosis, clinical depression, and PTSD) and nonclinical conditions (such as sadness, feelings of isolation, frustration, and more) because it “calms” the brain by supporting the hippocampus. The hippocampus is the area of the brain responsible for behavior, among other functions.

      CBD has been associated with relieving depression and improving your mood, and it has been indicated in studies to have antidepressant effects.

      Helping manage sleep issues

      Sleep conditions, from insomnia to sleep apnea and narcolepsy, are an epidemic. According to the American Sleep Association (sleepassociation.org), such conditions affect between 50 and 70 million Americans, and more than 70 percent of the adult population reports insufficient sleep.

      Sleep studies in their early phases are indicating incredible results with measured doses of CBD. They suggest doses around 25 milligrams can help patients fall asleep, and then varying doses ranging from 50 to 160 milligrams can help people stay asleep. The studies indicate potential applications effective for the treatment of insomnia, a sleep condition that results in consistent feelings of unrest. And as I note in the preceding section, CBD seems to interrupt the body’s cortisol secretion, creating sedative effects that can also help with sleep issues.

Some studies have indicated that alertness is an effect of CBD use, and while some are taking it specifically to improve alertness, some take CBD to sleep. If taking CBD creates a sensation of sleep difficulty, exploring conditions and the root cause of sleeplessness are most certainly in order.

      Relieving pain and physical ailments

      Promising research indicates that CBD can reduce inflammation and chronic pain, which is one of the contributors to the opioid epidemic. Additionally, patients are unlikely to build up a tolerance to CBD; that means they don’t have to increase dosages to maintain effects (another issue with opioids).

      CBD affects a variety of enzymes throughout the body, including in the skin. For example, it suppresses the production of TNF-a, a pro-inflammatory enzyme found throughout the body, including the skin. CBD also promotes two receptors responsible for anti-inflammatory effects: TRPV-1, or vanilloid, and PPAR-y, or gamma.

      

A doctor once told me in passing at a conference that CBD is already known to interact with over 76 different receptors in the body. Whoa!

      The vanilloid receptor itself is responsible for decreasing the intensity of pain signals and the overall nervous system’s response to pain. Acute pain is caused by physical trauma of some sort, whether it has a known cause (like a shin bang or broken bone) or unknown cause (like a migraine or backache). For surface-level acute pain, you can use topical CBD treatments; for more severe acute pain, particularly internal, ingestible CBD is a better choice. Regardless of the pain type, you want to choose a CBD medium with a rapid onset so you don’t have to wait around for relief.

      Transdermal patches are starting to fill that gap in the topical space because they offer internal relief with a topical treatment (head to Chapter 1 for more on transdermal treatment). Otherwise, the fastest onset is inhalation or sublingual (under the tongue) tinctures. Doses for pain should be higher than supplemental doses, and you can use them until the pain is alleviated without worrying about becoming dependent.

Chronic physical pain can sometimes have a neurological component when the pain has persisted over a long time and may have a historical association with psychological or physiological trauma. The nerves can signal pain even when no physical reason for it actually exists. Theories and early studies indicate that a controlled amount of THC is the most significant relief opportunity in cannabis for this kind of pain. The current legal limit for THC in full-spectrum CBD is 0.3 percent, which just may not be enough for that kind of pain experience. But everybody is different, and giving CBD a try for such pain may still help. High doses of full-spectrum CBD and maybe even broad-spectrum or isolate may work for some because inflammation is often still at the core of many pain problems. (Chapter 4 has details on full- and broad-spectrum CBD and isolate.)