Cannabis and MS: Let's talk LIVE!

we are live howdy howdy everybody aaron boster here and thank you for learning about mess with me if you're looking at the screen you may have noticed something i'm not by myself so today we are joined by an expert in the field of medical marijuana and cannabis a friend to the channel and a friend to me austin thank you so much for joining us everyone let's invite austin and make him feel welcome by filling the chat with flames if you're watching right now flame up the chat and let us know that you're excited for austin to be teaching us today about medical marijuana and multiple sclerosis go ahead and take a second and fill up those flames so excited to be with you all this is going to be awesome now once the chat is full of flames we're going to get started i want to do some introductions we're going to talk about tonight's live stream of what we're trying to accomplish tonight oh there we go look at that the flames are a flaming we've almost got oh there you go okay austin is officially welcome to the live stream this is a monthly event uh where we get together as a global growing online community to up our game to energize to empower and to educate and today we have a special focus today we're talking about ganja no no medical marijuana we're talking about cannabis and i have gone through quite a journey in my understanding of medical marijuana it gone from being a hater to someone that sees potential benefits beyond what i ever could have imagined and the vast majority of that knowledge came from this guy and so i am super excited that he's here today to teach us now i'm going to spend a little bit of time doing some introductions and i have a couple other channel announcements but in the next five minutes you are going to get to learn from austin about medical marijuana cannabis ms water challenge when i drink you drink so drink up austin you can too if you want now before we get started that was very loud before we get started i wanted to show you guys something that is super super special to me so what you see here is a gorgeous framed uh logo you know of the boston center for ms and there's an amazing family that presented this to us and i was just amazed it looked really cool and the paper as you can see is handmade paper and then i read the back and i'm going to read it to you this handmade paper sheets are made from 100 percent post recycled materials containing packaging cotton balls alcohol swabs medication packet inserts marketing materials and statements from the multiple sclerosis medications beta-ceron copaxone techfidera and ochrevis which have been used to treat my wife the signed edges of the singed edges of the sheet signify how ms can be smoldering purple is dr boster's favorite color i am beyond moved that he made this paper from in from the inserts and from the packaging of medicines that his wife took and i'm just absolutely honored so i'm not going to call their name out on the channel but i know that they're on right now and i want to say thank you very very much and i'm going to put this back here so i don't break it by accident okay so today as we do this live stream i'm not going to be giving you updates about the boston center i'm not going to be talking about updates and research instead we have a laser focused discussion with a world expert on cannabis in the next two minutes i'm going to share my silly story and then i'm going to completely shut up and i'm going to learn from a master years back i knew that marijuana was something kids did like behind the bathroom and high school and they weren't supposed to and i went to med school and we were taught that it was a drug and it was bad for you and and then as the world emerged medical marijuana started to become available in different states and it became available in ohio and i'm a nerd and so i read all the data and i was very very disappointed because there's a positive data and that made me like not into it i didn't i really struggled and so at first i was not on board with the idea of using cannabis in in the treatment of ms then i did something which i should probably do more often i listen to people so i started to listen to patients and in specific these 70 year old women that went to church three times a week and they confided in me with the door closed that if they smoked a little doobie they didn't need any of my nighttime medicines they weren't spasming they weren't having pain they slept like a baby and after four or five of these like fantastic old ladies who didn't know each other all told me the same thing i started to pay more attention now fast florida i've been a medical marijuana recommender here in ohio for going on two years i've learned a tremendous amount and it's a huge benefit to my patients without any further ado you guys are in for quite a treat we're going to learn from austin take it away my friend hi everybody i'm so excited to be here i'm incredibly grateful um i just want to start off with a little bit of a disclaimer this is not medical advice um i am not an expert in ms i've been i've had ms for 12 years so i guess that makes me an expert at having a mess and i've also used medical cannabis for about 11 and a half of those i have worked in the cannabis industry for the past three years and i have worked with several thousand patients that qualify in ohio with all the different qualifying conditions but my favorite is ms and so i've kind of tailored this talk today to be a little more specific about ms i i do want to add that at the end of the talk we're going to open things up for a q a i see that you're writing questions now um and i will try to go back and look through them but we're going to wait when you're done then we'll go through a series of questions so hold those questions till the end so cannabis is a vast lake of information and uh just this class alone there's a ton of information i'm overwhelmed right now thinking about all of this stuff and we are going to uh jet ski across the top of it today um so it's gonna feel like a lot you're gonna have questions at the end i'm going to give you my email so that you can reach out to me if you have direct questions and i'm going to try to answer as many as possible so let's see the purpose of this class is to help a someone that doesn't have experience with medical cannabis uh learn um and feel more comfortable to go into the dispensary get used to some of the terms that we're using um and have a well-rounded view of this because i think that there's a lot of misinformation out there and so to get a clear picture of this i think is really important for ms patients um so i'm 32 i've had ms for 12 years now i was diagnosed in august of 2009 my presenting symptom was bilateral optic neuritis which left me legally blind so i'm not totally blind but i can't really see myself on this right now i i can see the e on the eye chart when i look at it um so if you look see me looking over here in my computer closely that's what i'm doing um but initially uh 12 years ago the medications that were available had some harsher side effect profiles and the one that i chose i had to inject myself with three nights a week this would i did that at night because the side effects of this would peak in the middle of the night but i would still wake up feeling very terrible had a headache wouldn't be able to eat would throw up tons of mucus just not feeling good at all um and i actually described to people that i felt hung over now i was 20 and some of my friends were beginning to party at that age and i noticed that some of them were actually using canvas for their hangovers so i decided i had i had experimented with cannabis maybe once or twice in the past but um i decided i would ask my friend and see if i could get some and try it uh the morning after my medication i got up and went to the garage and smoked a little bit and i came back in and i ate breakfast and my headache went away and my uh and i just had my quality of life went up and my day was better and i've never really looked back um that was my initial use for cannabis was dealing with the side effects of that medication as my ms progressed i developed spasticity in my legs and it really likes to flare up in the evening before i go to sleep so cannabis is really great at a one-two punch for that because it really helps with the spasticity of my legs it also helps me go to sleep and stay asleep at night which makes a big difference um and then i also use cannabis just for overall quality of life um and mood which i'll talk about a little bit more as we go along here um so i first want to start with uh the stigma that is around cannabis um the word marijuana is one i think that the words that we use are very important um marijuana was that word was used to help create [Music] a negative light around cannabis to help make it illegal and so we are moving from using the word marijuana to its actual name which is cannabis and that's what you'll hear me say a bunch in this presentation there's another word that carries a lot of stigma which is high if i had a dollar for every time a patient came into the dispensary and said i'm open to trying medical cannabis but i don't want to get high um that that word uh it's that word that i think is really the problem there and um so we're moving from high to medicated i medicate with cannabis and because you are legitimately using it as a medication um you know i i think about uh with the stigma i think about like cheech and chong right um those are characters that we all know but the genius thing about those characters is that uh they aren't um they aren't what cannabis users actually look like they're what everyone thinks they look like that's a really good point and so uh that's a great thing to look at the stigma because as i um as i became more open with my family and friends about my canvas use i found that um it was almost like i was appearing behind a curtain and there were all these people that had experienced it with it and were using it and i just had no idea about any of that i mean so what i think you'll find is as you use cannabis and talk to your family about it um they will be more receptive than you probably think they will be now as we start the next point i'm excited to share 10 minutes and we have 215 people that have jumped online to learn from you today which is pretty awesome if you guys like where we're going with this throw a thumbs up or let's try to get the thumbs up up above 100 there's plenty of you on there's only 57 thumbs up and this information is to die for so let's push that thumbs up above 100 you got to jump out of the chat hit the thumbs up and jump right back in as soon as we get that up to show austin a little love he's going to jump back into his discussion all right we're at 84 come on so there we go 100 thumbs up thank you very much god bless we are back in the game my friend yeah so let's talk about the uh four things and dr boster has uh echoed this before the four things that i see cannabis helping the most with with ms um the first being pain and spasticity uh so cannabis combined with some medications with some pain medications can increase uh the efficacy of them it also seems to have some pain-killing um properties and then it also seems to be pretty effective at dealing with spasticity now i've seen it not touch someone with ms's spasticity and then i've also seen it completely alleviate its vast spasticity so it is kind of an individual experience there but if you are struggling with that it is something to try um it is an option uh the second um being sleep and insomnia i think i mentioned before that i use the cannabis to help relax my legs but also to help me go to sleep at night and stay asleep that makes a big difference cannabis is generally sedative and it's going to make especially a newer consumer um sleeping so uh it's very effective at that um keeps me asleep at night some people that wake up in the middle of the night with spasticity can use it to help them go back to sleep um so and we'll talk about the methods of consumption and how fast the onset is and how we use that in a little bit um third is nausea and appetite and this was i guess the first thing i used it for um which uh it does stimulate your appetite that we've all heard of the munchies and it also seems to help with nausea just as a side note this specific property is really good at dealing with the side effects of chemotherapy and cancer which i've seen great success with with cannabis and fourth is mood uh just improving your overall quality of life i'll give you an example of how i use cannabis that in a way that maybe people wouldn't generally think it is um so i can't remember the last time that i've exercised uh without medicating first um i use a peloton i haven't been using it as much as i wanted to lately but um when i when i do get on the peloton uh i medicate before a lot of people think that that would make sense um but yeah and you're working out pretty hard you're not just casually so and that's what that's what i was about so as uh i get heated up and as a lot of you know your ms symptoms sometimes get worse and so as i get on the bike and start pedaling my vision starts to get worse i start to deal with some spasticity i start to feel more uncomfortable with cognitive fog and i found that cannabis allows me to tolerate that discomfort for a longer period of time and push myself deeper into an ex into a workout it makes a big difference uh so there's actually videos online of arnold schwarzenegger using cannabis before he would lift because it would help him focus so that's something that's maybe counter-intuitive to the stigma out there but it can give you an example of different ways that you can apply it before we go further can we just highlight those areas um i think austin just went over something which is so so important cannabis is not going to slow ms but it can treat some really really important symptoms and he just listed four categories that i want to review number one was neuropathic pain and spasticity and i agree that in my clinic helping people with cannabis has done amazing with spasticity with neuropathic pain number two was appetite and nausea and there are situations where people impacted by ms whether it's because of the ms or because the medicine i'm giving them may be dealing with those issues number three was sleep and insomnia all right it's extremely common that patients in my clinic struggle with insomnia very very common and i have been blown away by the success of using cannabis for that specific indication and number four i always comment on irritability and i think a broader comment you made was on mood in general yeah um so you know i i have like the uh there's a joke like do you do you want to go to this two-year-old's birthday party or do you want to medicate with cannabis and go to this two-year-old it just makes your ability to tolerate um discomfort or a negative situation um it makes that better um so like i found probably not not medically but i found that like thanksgiving is much easier to deal with the family if i medicate beforehand so it definitely has an impact on mood okay so i'm going to read the title of this next topic and we're going to talk about the actual plant now but that over this is uh indica sativa hybrid and all that nonsense um so let's talk about the cannabis plant cannabis originated out of central asia around 6 000 years ago it was spread around the earth by humans and it evolved and adapted to live in the different climates and that's how we have the variety of cannabis that we have today there are three types of cannabis cannabis indica cannabis sativa and cannabis root oralis cannabis reuteralis is hemp and we're going to forget about that one for now cannabis sativa and indica um and then in the dispensary we have a combination of the two of those which is called a hybrid now uh what i'm talking about right now is just the plants um what the in in the absence of actual science uh the illegal black market has associated feelings with these botanical names for cannabis this is not correct this is not true i have seen a wide variety of reactions to different types of cannabis and they say so to say that this type of cannabis is going to do this to everyone um it's not uh it's just not true and so if we can just throw out the common misbelief and then dispel it so i i would you say that commonly people think that an indica plant is going to be sedating and a sativa is going to like yeah exactly so i'm an indica plant which indica plants come from mountainous regions um so they're short and fat and hardier plants because they're closer to the sun and they have to be able to survive a mountainous climate um so these are said to be more sedative there's actually an old thing that's uh indica is like in the couch um so to help remember that again not true it's going to be your own personal experience sativas are from equatorial regions so they are tall uh big they have a big fan leaves um when you usually see a canvas leaf it's typically a sativa leaf um it's the most recognizable so those are said to be uplifting now i had a sativa last night before bed and slept like a baby this we just haven't had any way to uh quantify and explain to patients what the canvas is going to do to them and so it's really crazy but i know that this is not true and it is still informed a ton of my purchases in the dispensary because we don't have anything better um i buy indicas all the time because i use it to relax my legs and go to sleep um so so if somebody is new to this entire space they have multiple sclerosis and they have some of the symptoms we've discussed they go through the process of getting a card and they go to a dispensary what do they do uh well so it's gonna it's gonna take a lot of personal experimentation you're gonna have to try some different products um we are trained in the dispensary to help guide you to different products based on your taste um it's a really good idea to keep a journal because it will allow us to help narrow things down if there was a specific product you really didn't like the joke that we have in the dispensary actually because things have been crossed genetically so much is that everything's a hybrid and i think that's a pretty good approach is that it's going to create the whole spectrum of feelings and how it affects you is going to be individually is going to be an individual experience now as we abandoned the indica sativa paradigm uh the industry has started to shift towards claiming that the terpenes which are the flavor um and aroma of cannabis affect the way that it makes you feel um now this might be true but um if it is it's like essential oils um it's not um uh it's not like very definitive and there are also some flavors that sativas typically produce and some flavors that indicas typically produce um so who's my train of thought dr foster so so if we're trying to understand what the plant does oftentimes we're talking about cannabinoids we're talking about um cb1 receptors and thc and cb2 receptors with cbd here you're adding a layer of complexity to our understanding that that the aroma taste smell might be determined in part by terpenes terpenes don't have psychoactive properties i don't think but they can change the flavor profile yeah yeah so like a similar one is uh our common one is linolol which is in uh lavender so uh there might be something to that but the way that i explain the uh way that cannabis makes you feel to new newer patients is if you have any experience with alcohol um the way that alcohol the different types of alcohol makes you feel is very similar to the way that different types of cannabis will make you feel whereas someone that has experience with alcohol can drink a glass of wine and feel a little bit of a different buzz than if they had a glass of whiskey but it's very very nuanced and if someone has never had alcohol before they're just going to get intoxicated they're just going to get a buzz and not be able to tease that out so don't get caught up in that when you go into the dispensary but you'll see it's still the main thing that the dispensaries are using right now which is very very frustrating to me so it's all personal experience um and uh it's very important to keep a journal now the thing that i think uh really affects the way cannabis makes you feel is your uh mindset and the setting that you're in so for instance i used the sativa last night but i was tired before bed and helped me sleep so i think that that is probably the the biggest factor uh in in determining that i have a when when we try edibles for the first time uh it typically takes two hours um 45 to 90 minutes to kick in but we're gonna wait a full two hours but i tell patients that uh if they have a nighttime routine take the edible and then do the nighttime routine so that when that kicks in you're in a nice relaxed space what i advise against is taking the edible and holding onto the bottom of your chair for two hours and waiting for it to kick in because it will amplify whatever mood that you're in and um it's less likely uh that you're going to enjoy yourself in that situation and if i can highlight something that i think is so important um if somebody has some experience with uh we're going to talk about different kinds of ingestion with like smoking marijuana an edible is a different experience and so austin just said something which is really really worth repeating particularly if you're learning for the first time you want to take an edible and then you want to wait and you want to give it time so you can see because it's gonna it's not gonna kick in like a like a joint yes it's and so you can in order to figure it out i agree you take it and then you wait a couple hours yeah and we'll talk about that when we get to uh methods of consumption but um the metaphor that i use is that we want to wade in and not dive in with cannabis but okay so let's talk about the cannabinoids in in cannabis so thc is the psychoactive compound in cannabis that's uh the primary thing that we're using in dispensaries um so that that's what's going to happen an actual effect on your mood um but there are a ton of uh compounds in cannabis and most of them we don't know much about yet there is one that's also become very popular called cbd and that's cannabidiol and that that's a very interesting one seems to have some anti-inflammatory properties some people seem to see that it helps with their mood which i think is interesting but one thing anecdotally that i've seen it help with is it does seem to reduce the psychoactive effects of thc when taken together so in the dispensary if i have someone that's telling me that uh they're having an uncomfortable experience then i might try decreasing the thc and increasing the cbd ratio for someone that's going for uh max potency cbd might uh not be what you're looking for in that situation but there are also a lot of other cannabinoids there's cbn and cbg and so there's an idea um called the entourage effect and that's that the um that the cannabinoids work better together than individually um so i like to look for full spectrum products um that are closer to the actual uh plants compounds and uh gene and structure than say like a vape cartridge that has thc distillate in it that's only thc in that i i just have found it seems to be more therapeutically active for me when i look for products like that and now we get to the crazy part which is misinformation and the lack of science all around cannabis right now and this is a very important part to pay attention to so if you weren't paying attention earlier you're going to need to re-watch what we did because he just gave us some awesome knowledge but this is going to become very very important drum roll yeah and so this is the thing that i i see cannabis actually hurting people um is is all of this misinformation out there because in the absence of science there have been a bunch of snake oil salesmen that have moved i think that there is absolutely a place for canvas in ms and can help improve the quality of your life but there are some crazy claims out there so a big example and one that i personally rally against all the time is a product called rick simpson oil and this is sold in all of the dispensaries it's called rso for short and it's a very uh crude form of hash and it's it was made by a man in canada named rick simpson um and he has a whole website and a bunch of books um all about uh but he makes insane claims about what this uh rso can do um including like here this is from his actual website i just thought uh i would read this to you exactly can be you cannabis can be used with great success to cure or control cancer ms pain diabetes arthritis asthma my personal favorite infections inflammations blood pressure depression sleeping problems and just about any other medical issue that one can that imagine like the literal definition of snake oil salesman so in case you turned on the live stream at that exact second um austin is not suggesting that things are true he's dispelling some nonsense um at a very very popular website yeah and so uh it does bother me that this product uh continues to carry his name um because people are going to his website and reading this information about it i think that that's a good product it's a full spectrum hash i think a lot of people get relief from that whether ingesting it because it's already activated or putting it on topically some people inhale it i wouldn't recommend that because it would probably be pretty harsh um but that's just an example of uh where all this um how people have come in in the absence of scientific data and taking advantage of these things and so it's very important to watch out for those if it seems too good to be true it probably is and so that's what i hope to be for you is to be a resource that you can ask if you have any questions specifically about something and whether or not um this is snake oil because i'm just constantly looking for it um to try to protect you guys and we'll include contact information for austin in the description section after the video live stream's over so you'll be able to go back and figure out how to contact them and you know rick simpson would uh would qualify with would say that he is in alternative medicine and um and cannabis is in the alternative medicine space and so i'm i'm really trying to get away from that word as i'm big about words and and move from alternative to complementary medicine we're not saying don't take your cancer treatment and eat a bunch of cannabis oil um actually that rick simpson oil is um for cannabis it's uh titrating all the way up to a gram a day um they want you to ingest uh 60 grams in a 90 day period which is uh i i cannot imagine doing that um that is a very very high dose and uh yeah it's uh that's part of it it almost seems unattainable and very expensive so to get the thing that they're claiming you have to do the very unattainable thing so complementary makes a lot more sense i'm an allopathic doctor you know so i prescribe lotions and potions to help people live their best life with ms and i agree with you that in my mind the role of cannabis in ms symptom management is that it's a compliment yeah and so i may have someone who has baclofen and they also have cannabis and and together we figured out how to make that work i i like that term also yeah yeah i just really want to discourage anybody from thinking that this is an alternative cure to things as it's being claimed to be in some areas um that that's important yeah and so canvas um is a quality of life drug it's not good professor said live your best life um you know that's what i'm looking for in patients uh and when when i train employees that's what we're looking for is improving the quality of life if i have a cancer patient that's coming in on chemo and he tries some edibles and when he comes back the next time there's more color in his face because he's able to hold a meal down and he's sleeping better than i'm doing my job you know it's not treating the cancer but it is indirectly treating the cancer by managing his symptoms it does not stop my uh immune system from attacking my brain and spinal cord it does help me get a good night's sleep which i know as a lot of you know if you don't get a good night's sleep that starts to snowball in the wrong direction and so to keep myself in a healthy good place it makes a big difference and that indirectly treats my ms and so it complements it well so uh and yeah and the so we're improving the quality of life for everybody um the last thing i want to talk about here is uh cannabis use disorder which cannabis is habit forming it does have some addictive properties i don't i can't quantify how much because we don't have the science behind that but it does have uh it is habit forming um so is coffee um so uh but the way so there have been several different definitions of cannabis use disorder depending on who's defining it some people uh talk about daily use um well that that really depends on the patient and the dose and so there's a lot so it's hard to so the way that i like to define it is if cannabis is getting in the way of your life if it's reducing the quality of your life if you find that um you can't go to things without your cannabis first because uh you need it so like if it starts to get in the way of your everyday activities that's when i think uh we should talk about maybe changing and trying a different medication or maybe stopping cannabis use really that's what we're going for is improving the quality of your life um do you have anything else that we'd like to say about that one i i think that as a medical marijuana recommender i need to be in constant discussion with you about how it's going and you might find uh some discussions about how to use it but you may find some other discussions about it causing a problem and i think we have to be open about that um in the same fashion that i may prescribe to a pyramid for someone for headaches and it makes their lips tingle and you know it makes them have cog fog that turns out not to be a good medicine for that patient we take them off the topomax cannabis is not a panacea and if we're having side effects which are interfering with the quality of your life that's in counterpoint of what we're trying to do so i i just like that you call that out because there are going to be some people where the the side effects are are worse than the benefit yeah it's not forever and that's and so you just have to uh there it's definitely in the recreational side of things and the illegal black market before cannabis was legal anywhere there's a belief that it is not addictive and that um you can use as much as possible uh with no uh negative effects essentially um so it's kind of like the uh the safety drug kind of in in the um recreational space yeah and so because of that it just it carries this idea that it doesn't form habit or anything like that but it definitely does and has those properties so just keep an eye out for that it's important that we keep that discussion open all right so now we're going to get into uh the fun stuff which is the methods of consumption so in ohio it is illegal to smoke cannabis to combust it the only uh approved methods of inhalation are vaporization but there are two types of vaporization and that is uh okay no we're great almost changing those things so there are two types of vaporization vaporization it's really important that you understand the difference between the two so the first one i'm going to talk about is dry herb vaporizing and this is where you actually get the bud or the plant and you would grind this up and you would buy a device called a dry herb vaporizer and they have some that fill up bags and some that are handheld but essentially what this is going to do is cannabis combusts at 450 degrees fahrenheit but it starts releasing its cannabinoids around 200 degrees fahrenheit so what a dryer vaporizer is going to do is heat up in some it has several different ways of doing it but heat up air that's going to pass through a chamber with that ground up flower in it and it's going to heat it up below 450 degrees but above 200 and you can set the temperature and it will you can play around with strength um based on that temperature as well and flavor um uh so shoot i lost my channel so talking about different ways of vaping yeah dry herb vaping is one of the two ways yeah so um and drive so with dry herb in ohio the cap on uh thc percentage is 35 um and so in a drier vaporizer uh the strongest t amount of thc that you're going to be inhaling is 35 and you're actually probably getting like 40 of whatever is in the plant by vaporizing it but this is an interesting point um when you vaporize the raw flour you actually get almost twice as much thc out of it as when you combust it so it's actually much more efficient um to vaporize the dry herb is that just physics like because you're setting it on fire when you smoke it a lot of it's being i i'm not i i do not know for sure why that is um but that that is uh when they have a measure of that that's neat um so uh yeah and so i i smoked cannabis for a while um and as uh it became legal in ohio i mean i got my medical card i switched to vaporization and that did make a big difference on my lungs i noticed a difference in that um and so that's 35 percent uh max potency and that's the drier and that is the drier vaporizer now we're going to talk about the other type of vaporizing which is cartridges which is something that i think a lot of us are familiar with or it's become very very popular it's probably one of the most popular products in the industry if not the most popular one but a cartridge is basically an e-cigarette cartridge that's full of cannabis oil um and that they have a uh standard one that's called 510 threading and it will screw on to pretty much any standard e-cig battery but there are also companies that make proprietary cartridges and batteries where their cartridge will only work with their battery um but this has a concentrate in it and in ohio that those concentrates are limited to 70 but in other places they can be as high as in the 90 wow and so it's important to realize that when you're inhaling a dry herb vaporizer versus a uh cartridge vaporizer that you're inhaling something that could be three times more potent um out of a cartridge vaporizer uh so this is uh a very important thing to keep in mind when dosing um so let's see so we've talked about smoking cannabis which is illegal in ohio and definitely not my recommendation because of what it does to your lungs and your your um vascular system and nervous system we talked about vaporization both dry herb and then concentrate do you have a recommendation for someone who wanted to to learn about vaporization or is it really a trial and error about which is best so um so there are some differences between the two when you're using a dry herb vaporizer that's going to smell um typically like you would think cannabis smells like people are going to know that you have it dry herb also smells very strong um so that's a factor with the cartridge vaporizers um it's very very stealthy so for people that have kids or that are around family members or that are on the go cartridges are very very useful okay it's just important to keep in mind that that's going to be much more potent so you need a lot less one inhale off of cartridges to begin with i think is a good place to start excellent information yeah so it's very very important to know the difference between those two and we can talk about uh more differences in the future but the second form of method of consumption is ingestion and this is edibles and tinctures and so edibles are thc binds to fats so they put it in pretty much everything there's peanut butter olive oil there's a company that just came out with ghee um buckeyes cookies brownies all the things that you think of and then tinctures which it comes in a dropper bottle um and it's a liquid it's either oil or alcohol and that would be dropped under the tongue and held there some would get into your system um sublingually and then the rest would take effect like a normal edible so edibles are going to take 45 to 90 minutes to kick in for the first time you try an edible you probably want to wait a full two hours just to be safe five milligrams or less of thc this is very important five milligrams is sometimes more than enough for a patient to reach the desired effect some people have five milligrams and don't feel it at all but we are going to wade in and not dive in so so the average edible comes in what strength so typically a gummy is going to be 10 milligrams like a recreational in colorado for instance all of their gummies are 10 milligrams that's like the dose so if you grab a gummy that's too much to start with if you're trying to learn about this for the first time you're telling them to cut it yeah yeah yeah cut it in half okay um that would probably be the best place to start um and then wait that full uh out per two hours and again do your nighttime routine if you have a bath you watch a movie read a book by the file don't sit in a chair like this freaking out it will amplify and i've seen people uh become very uncomfortable from that um also there was a patient i'm thinking of that came in and said he tried a 10 milligram edible didn't feel anything for 20 minutes so he ate two more of them and then he couldn't get him off the couch for the rest of the day and had a very uncomfortable time so that's what we're trying to avoid um if you're if you're feeling uncomfortable it's probably dosing and we just need to reduce the dose but just to give you a range like i was talking about before uh with the rick simpson oil people are titrating all the way up to a thousand milligrams a day i would not take that ever personally but that uh that's a dose that people are getting to so we have a big range on that um i typically am around uh 80 to 100 milligrams is about the right dose for me to reach the desired effect um so just to kind of give you or i five milligrams i i don't even perceive um but other people more than enough um so that's where the trial and error comes in and that's where that exactly so uh let's talk about the difference between uh tinctures and edibles um so edibles right are going to take 45 to 90 minutes take effect for someone that needs a quick onset that can be very difficult if you know that you're going to have a problem ahead of time edibles can be great but if it's something that just shows up in the middle of the night inhalables are great for that like if i wake up in the night my legs are spasming i can grab my vape pen and get very quick relief but for people that don't feel comfortable inhaling tinctures are great because they're trying to bridge that gap between edibles and inhalables if i can give a quick example of what i consider to be a success story a patient that i take care of uses a wheelchair and he's not able to use his arms very easily and he has trigeminal neuralgia which is arguably one of the most severe pains that a human being can experience where his face feels like he's being stabbed and it hurts so bad he tries not to cry and he doesn't want to move his mouth because if he moves his mouth it's extremely painful and so he's had surgeries he's been on multiple different seizure medicines and it's been actually a bit challenging to treat we introduced cannabis and it fixed it but he can't suck on a vape pen because it hurts too much so his wife can slide a tincture in his mouth and squirt the tincture in and then it relieves the discomfort and so i really viewed that as a success and it was largely based around finding the right method of delivery for him yeah and i just i was i i really was appreciative of of cannabis that day because it fits something we were having a really hard time fixing and that's what i specialize in is trying to figure out um what the best way to get cannabis into you is so tincture is really great though because they're bridging that onset gap um you're gonna drop it under your tongue and some is gonna take effect within 15 minutes and then you swallow it and the rest will be like an edible 45 to 90 minutes but you will get some relief and for people with spasticity that don't feel them that don't feel comfortable inhaling um tinctures are a great product that's awesome um this has been so informative thank you very much if people have further follow up questions tell them where they can find you yeah so i uh created an email called ask austin about cannabis i'll put that in the i'll put that in the chat at gmail.com so please feel free to email me with any questions i want to start a conversation with you guys so i was going to tell this story at the end uh uh when i would sort of diagnose with ms um and found that cannabis helped me i didn't have anybody and i got ripped off and shorted i didn't know what i could get um the first time i had actually i ate the raw flour in my room thinking that that would affect me and that doesn't um so my goal is to be the resource for you that i wish that i had then it's awesome and so please there are no stupid questions feel free to ask me anything i also have an instagram that i haven't posted on in a while but i'm going to start up again it's um at comfortably underscore chronic so i'll put that in there so instagram that's probably my favorite slang term for cannabis chronic chronic so comfortably chronic yeah comfortably underscore yeah okay comfortably underscore contrast that's the that's my instagram and i'm gonna start posting educational things on there now because i want to be more visible to all of you guys i love working with all medical cannabis patients but i especially love working with ms patients and we're very very appreciative now we've been chit chatting for about 45 minutes that was an awesome didactic thank you there are 225 people that have jumped online which is really really impressive if you guys enjoyed that lecture and you want to transition to some questions we need some flames in the chat so go ahead and fill up the chat with flames let me know that you love what austin just taught us about let me know that you're ready to switch over to a q a so go ahead and throw some flames in the chat that we're going to make some changes here and start to do a q a all right so we've got kate who is all about the flames we've got nancy who's all about the flames delaney is on tonight hello delaney got some flames angela's got some flames john hart is in the house marilyn has done it for us lydia has done it for us i think they're ready for some questions all right so so here's how this is going to work i ca we can't diagnose or treat you on the interwebs okay so if you ask a question please try to frame it as a general question so that we can all benefit from it um if you don't have your question answered normally i go back and answer them although i may have to call on an expert to help out all right so let's start to look at so first of all nicole says what a fantastic presentation thank you and and i most certainly agree there's a bunch of flames um and so sherry says nothing in uh i'm in georgia nothing here and and i actually run into that a lot yeah can we talk very briefly about how how medical marijuana is state specific and how if you cross state lines it's a very big federal problem just real quick so that people hear about it yeah that it is illegal to cross state lines carrying a federally controlled substance um so or an illegal substance so if you go to michigan where the prices are cheaper uh then in ohio you buy when you cross the border you're breaking the law if you're caught doing that um it's illegal and so uh so it's it's a kind of a patchwork right now um some states will accept other states medical cards some states won't i know in georgia i actually just recently looked up the laws there and they only allow very low-dose thc oil which is very strange to me i don't understand that no this is actually along the same lines allen asks a very relevant question in ohio any chance of employment protection in the on the horizon so if you could talk a little bit about the issues surrounding employment i think anyone considering cannabis needs to be unfortunately no um your medical card in ohio will not protect you from your employer um this is something that we've run into multiple times in the dispensary also people getting jobs and getting drug tested for the job uh your medical card will not allow you to fail the drug test for that it's going to be up to the company and that's very important to understand some states are starting to look at that i know in massachusetts it's illegal for your landlord to evict you if you have a medical card so there are some protections that are being formed but we really need a federal legalization so that we can have laws across the board that are the same now john hart asks a great question are there still concerns surrounding vitamin e in vape cartridges that could cause lung damage yeah so that's really interesting um that was a huge problem so vitamin e acetate um is in additives that so what what i what was happening is uh people were going into a dispensary and buying a cartridge let's say a gram cartridge with a gram of oil in it then they would leave and they would buy an empty cartridge and they would put half of the oil in that cartridge and then they would fill the rest with filler and um that is how this vitamin e acetate was getting into these cannabis vape cartridges in ohio it is very rigorously tested there is none of that it is pure cannabis oil in the vape cartridges so that's great the illegal black market was producing that and that honestly there was that was such a problem they were talking about we need to federally legalize this so that we can address this uh on a national level now nancy asks me dr boster how do you feel about vaping so i don't want you to smoke stuff whether that be tobacco or cannabis i think that if you need a fast onset of action vaping is probably less pro-inflammatory than smoking and i say probably because i don't think that we actually know but just anecdotally i think it's probably hurting your lungs a bit less so i'm going to be very excited about edibles for my patients tinctures for my patients topicals for my patients i will recommend people get a vape pen if they need a fast onset and a tincture is not going to make sense for them so um thank you for that question yeah personally i i think between the two between cartridges and drier vaporizing drier vaporizing is probably safer just in my head because you're literally just it's just heat through it's just the urban there's nothing there is like kind of a wispy kind of smoke too like a vapor to it but not it's not harsh um and probably the easiest on your lungs so yusuf and a lot of other people said great job austin i agree kate asks a very important question she says do you think it makes cog issues word finding worse yes it can do that absolutely and if that's a problem for you that's definitely something to consider 100 what he just said i want to i want to reiterate it is true that cannabis can interfere with thinking of memory and as we're all well aware on this channel ms can cause difficulty with thinking of memory so can a lot of the medicines that we use for spasticity for pain for bladder etc so when we're looking at the playing field trying to gain out how to make you think more clearly we have to think about all that including if there's cannabis use including if there's other medication used so i think that's a really good point um kyle roberts uh asks for the email address i put it in the chat but kyle i'm gonna put it in the description below uh when we wrap all this up so you'll be able to find it just as a side note like i get get some cockney fog especially as i get heated up like while i'm working out and so in that situation while the cannabis might make the cognitive fog a little bit worse it also allows me to tolerate the discomfort of that more so it keeps me in a state that allows me to not get as frustrated i guess so eyes only says thc capsules with a bunch of exclamation points what can you tell us about thc capsules um so it's essentially just uh a pill like an edible yeah it would be an edible but in pill form we see that in the ohio market i know like uh that would be moving towards a more traditional medication uh format like which i yeah i think honestly helps it would help with dosing in kinetics when we get when we think about medicine i can tell you like with great accuracy the onset the peak because we study all that in a lab um with cannabis you kind of have to create that for yourself so sometimes i'll ask a patient to kind of chart if you take an edible when do you notice it kicks in when do you notice it peaks when you notice it wears off were there any side effects and what was the benefit and if they can come back without information i think we can now start to have a conversation and that's just me thinking about it like a medicine now he asks a question what's the smallest cbd thc ratio in tinctures um to get more cbd oh they they make um every ratio that you can think of uh but it's like i've seen 30 to 130 cbd to one thc so there's a there's a huge yeah and same uh yeah topicals same thing lotions massive uh variety of ratios between cbd and that's why you got to keep a journal and figure out what works best for you so here's an interesting question do tinctures contain alcohol in addition to thc now i i think when you mentioned alcohol maybe some people thought it was like drinking alcohol some are alcohol-based and that's how that so the alcohol-based ones are going to absorb faster under your tongue and that's because thc is fat soluble and it can be dissolved in alcohol they can make it um yeah they can make a water soluble so that's one of the things they're trying to make edibles with a faster onset yeah so they're water-soluble edibles interesting easy eyes says neuropathic pain um and so i think what we're putting together here is that that oral or those thc capsules are helping uh mary ann said i missed the first half so you may have covered this um but how long does eating uh type stay in your system oh yeah thank you for bringing that up i actually forgot to mention that so um edibles are going to last for four to six hours um and if you don't have if this is your first time probably longer than that um inhalables are going to last two to three hours but they're going to onset with it fully onsite within 15 minutes so so inhalables meaning uh vapes like we've been talking about you're going to see an onset in up to like 15 minutes pretty quick you're also going to start metabolizing it faster so it's going to be out of your system soon an edible is going to take upwards of 90 minutes to kick in but then it's going to stay around for four hours maybe yeah and that a lot of that depends on your own metabolism and um what the edible is made out of all of that so alex asked an outstanding question um does insurance cover medical marijuana for multiple sclerosis i wish so so um as a medical marijuana recommender i have some forms that we ask patients to fill out which were given to me by my lawyers and one of them clarifies no it's not covered by the update and no it's not covered by your insurance and in fact i think insurance wants nothing to do with this in the space or at least that's been my perception is that they're going nowhere near it yeah that i i would imagine we'll have to see um federal laws change before we would see any insurance companies move paul asks an interesting question says great job guys austin do you have any experience with delta h delta eight i'm sorry he wrote eight i've said yeah so um that that's very interesting i actually uh encountered that when i was in chicago recently there was a bakery that had these delta eight drinks um and i asked the guy behind the counter uh what what that was about he explained to me that delta eight seems to be a little less psychoactive uh form of uh delta nine thc which is what we're typically getting um and products it's very interesting to me some uh companies have figured out how to get around regulations using delta eight instead of delta nine um so is it a psychoactive substance yeah it is psychoactive yes but it doesn't seem to be as psychoactive as delta nine okay so it's interesting so they're saying like it might be a good product for new people to cannabis but uh it's brand new to the scene so now kyle asks what dry herb vaporizer device would you recommend i really like uh for table tops which would be one that you would plug into the wall i love the volcano that's the and by that same color brand yes and it's by it's by a company called uh stores and pickle they're a german company they make um the volcano tabletop and then they make a handheld one called um uh shoot i i lost it in my head and i can't help you i'm sorry oh i know but it's the same kind of it's called the mighty um and it's like a big it looks like a big black brick and it has some like arrows on it where you can change the temperature um and that is a fantastic product and uh lasts a long time that's a problem that you run into with the cheaper vaporizers is that they'll they won't last as long they'll get thc built up in them and they'll have problems so karen shares with us when i take a gummy at night i sleep like a baby and i wake up rested and not tired that's awesome okay um so mary writes so if sativa made me anxious the first time it might not the next time i don't know any time uh feel that i don't ever want to feel that again so um yeah it it it's all going to be a personal experience and it's also uh your mindset and your setting at the time so think about that time that you tried the sativa uh were you in an anxious state already were you in a place where so that that could have played a factor um i have found that there's a strain um uh called triangle kush um that there's a patient with ptsd and he loves it helps him with his anxiety helps him with his pain buys it by the ounce triangle kush typically gives me anxiety so i stay away from it it's like the exact uh but again that might just i haven't tried it in a while and that might just be my mindset and the setting at the time that i tried it so uh i would be open to that a little bit more but yeah so maybe try an indica see try so here's a very interesting thing that i found in the dispensary um i had a big smell a big glass case with a bunch of smell jars in it i mean they had all the different types of cannabis in it all the different aromas i would try to pick ones with different aromas and when a new patient came in i would show them all these different aromas i'd watch how they would react to them i would tell them that the nose knows and so i've personally found the best way to find cannabis that i like is if you like how it smells you're probably going to like the way it makes you feel interesting there are things that smell great to me that smell terrible to other people and vice versa and i watched that and so that my nose has led me to cannabis that i like this is awesome we've been going for an hour we're going to wrap up my name is aaron boster and as always thank you for learning about ms with me today i am absolutely excited that we got to learn from a master in campus and medical marijuana as we learn about this complementary medication of sorts if you've enjoyed what we've done go ahead and throw some flames in the chat one last time and let us know that you've done what we did and if you would like to hear more from austin hopefully you'll be willing to come back on the live stream sometimes absolutely and that email is there too so you guys reach out to me i'm happy to answer questions however so we'll have your ig in the description down below and that was at comfortably underscore chronic and we'll also have your email ask austin about cannabis gmail.com and all that's going to be in the back thank you again i really really appreciate your help everyone until next month god bless take care done

Channel: Aaron Boster MD

Views: 4,824

Rating: 4.9658117 out of 5

Keywords: Aaron Boster Multiple Sclerosis, Multiple Sclerosis Vlog, BosterMS.com, Boster Center for MS, ms treatment, multiple sclerosis symptoms, multiple sclerosis (disease or medical condition), MS info, multiple sclerosis videos youtube, multiple sclerosis treatment, boster center multiple sclerosis, aaron boster md youtube, ms exercises, aaron boster, multiple sclerosis, cannabis MS, medical marijuana, mmj, Medical cannabis

Id: GDRD_oHSMF4

Length: 60min 32sec (3632 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021