CBD and Inflammation

Inflammation gets thrown around a lot as a bad word, but it’s an important defense mechanism in your immune system for healing and fighting off disease. When your body detects an intruder like bacteria, a virus, a bee sting, or another injury, it launches an acute immune response to fight off that disease or intruder. Where inflammation goes bad is when your immune system attacks your own body, as it does in many autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto’s disease, Type 1 diabetes, arthritis, Lyme disease, and heart disease. This chronic inflammation can progress to other diseases, including cancers. It’s important to understand that many chronic diseases are very preventable — obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and a poor diet high in simple sugars, meats, or processed fast foods all contribute to chronic inflammation.

One of the most powerful properties of a full-spectrum CBD oil is its anti-inflammatory effect, and there are studies that support this. This is truly relevant to the current issue of COVID-19 infection: there’s a powerful acute inflammatory response with COVID infection, and with pretty much any acute viral or bacterial infection, called a “cytokine storm.” In short, a cytokine storm is a syndrome found in severe cases of infection involving excess inflammation, swelling, severe pain, and organ damage — the immune system can ramp up so much that it starts killing the body’s own cells. Steroids are one of the tools used in medicine to fight off this type of reaction; if you have moderate to severe asthma, you likely know what inflammation in the lungs feels like, and probably use some sort of steroid inhaler to fight it off.

Research shows that using a full-spectrum CBD oil can work just as well, and in some studies even better, than steroids at fighting off damaging inflammation and cytokine-storm-related effects. It’s important that the CBD oil be high-quality and full spectrum, including its terpenes — the compounds that provide the aroma and earthy taste to CBD oil. The full range of compounds in CBD appear to work together in fighting inflammation, and in supporting anxiety relief, sleep, nerve healing, and improved brain function. This research, much of it out of Israel, where there’s a great deal of CBD research happening, has in some cases shown effects two to three times more pronounced than steroids in decreasing inflammation and cytokine-storm severity. Think of the improved recovery times and reduced damage to the body that implies.

This matters for other chronic inflammation issues too. Imagine the long-term damage of chronic inflammation in autoimmune diseases — this is a big part of why full-spectrum CBD oil is used in many of the disease processes seen in clinical practice. The studies here are still ongoing and show great promise.

As for side effects: steroids are powerful tools that help with many medical conditions, but their side effects include nausea, weight gain, anxiety, and trouble sleeping. With a high-quality CBD oil, the side-effect profile is much lower — in fact, it may help improve some of the side effects of other medications, including chemotherapy.

Dr. Ben González, MD, is Medical Director of Atlantis Medical Wellness Center.

References:

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7187842/
2. https://www.cannabissciencetech.com/view/evidence-grows-for-cbd-as-potential-covid-19-treatment
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilyearlenbaugh/2020/07/15/cbd-for-coronavirus-new-study-adds-evidence-for-cannabis-as-covid-19-treatment/
4. H. Khodadadi, É. Lopes Salles, A. Jarrahi, F. Chibane, V. Costigliola, J.C. Yu, K. Vaibhav, D.C. Hess, K.M. Dhandapani, and B. Baban, Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, https://doi.org/10.1089/can.2020.0043

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