Cannabis: Separating the Science from the Hype | Mara Gordon | TEDxPaloAlto

hello in 1996 my life was forever changed when after a botched back surgery I was left with severe chronic pain this began a cycle that lasted over a decade of fentanyl patch neurontin methadone Norco a myriad of pharmaceuticals that at the height had me over the next decade on 26 different drugs a day what I was left with was overweight depressed unable to work unable to even drive a car but more importantly what I was also left with was chronic pain because we're opioids are an excellent option for people that are in acute suffering they are not the best solution for people having chronic suffering such as mine so I went looking for other solutions about this time I met a woman by the name of K kurta Posse and k was a self-described waken Baker each morning she would wake up and she would pull out her little pink Hello Kitty pipe and she would have a couple of Puffy's so I judged K very harshly I saw her as a drug user but she also told me something very interesting and that was that she was making pot brownies for her boyfriend who had chronic neck pain and that he was able to use or eat one of her brownies before bed at night and not have to use any harmful pharmaceuticals to sleep through the night and that got my interest because up to that point we all had heard the hype around this but all of a sudden I'm like there's got to be some science here so I I started looking for solutions and the first thing I did is I went to a doctor in California who was willing to write me a recommendation to use cannabis and I thought great I'm gonna go and I'm gonna see this doctor and I'm gonna walk out of there with a prescription and know exactly what to do but instead what I got was a sheet of paper with a list of dispensaries and he pointed to one of them and he said this is the Nordstrom of dispensaries so I suggest you go there well I love nor DS so of course that's where I headed so I went over to the dispensary I stood in line I walked up to the counter and I said to the young man behind the counter now that I know is called a budtender and I said okay I have chronic pain what do I use what do I do and out from beneath the counter he pulled a rice krispies treat a bag of caramel corn and a chocolate brownie and I'm looking at this and I'm thinking what how do I use it what do I take and he's like well I have no idea you know I just like this one and it no it kind of makes me and I was like okay great this is not science this is not medicine I need to go and find out more information so I then made my next stop was it heme con well heme con fulfilled every stereotype that I had about cannabis I mean you had your young ladies with the body paint and the strategically placed pot leaves you had the I heart vagina signs along the wall you had the the deafening boom box you know boom boo-boom boo-boom and I'm trying to listen to the vendors and I'm asking them questions and they're giving me answers and and I can't hear anything but what I also heard while I was there was the same girl in the body paint was treating irritable bowel syndrome with cannabis you had the person with the chronic pain seeking answers the social anxiety looking for answers with cannabis so I thought there's got to be something here and I'm since I'm obviously not finding it I'm gonna have to go figure it out myself so I went next and I bought a couple of ounces of something called xxx chem dog and I got it at the granny rate and I went home into my kitchen and I started making this I could not believe that my pain had been so affected by this plant that I had gone from level 8 to a level 2 almost instantaneously when I had taken a puff of it and that no doctor up to this point had ever bothered to mention to me that cannabis was an option how was that even possible so I thought what is it going to take for a doctor to be able to recommend cannabis effectively for treating patients just me so I made this in the kitchen and I can add the oil and I'm looking at it and I'm trying it and I thought okay what is it gonna take so that a doctor feels comfortable actually recommending this for its patient so what are the keys that are gonna be there the first thing is there's gonna have to be lab tests associated with this product if you do not have a lab test associated with the medicine you do not know how many milligrams of each cannabinoid is in there you don't know what you're taking you don't know how to take it and you can't be consistent and frankly a doctor is only going to want to prescribe or recommend something that can be done consistently and accurately the next thing is the doctors going to have to do a very in-depth patient intake process because they're going to have to have all of the same questions that they would ask in treating any disease but then they have to incorporate a set of questions that are specific for cannabis use in itself the next thing is they're going to have to very well understand this plant and the properties of it there are over 500 chemical compounds within the cannabis plant and each one has its own medical potential within it and so how they work and how they work together is very important that a medical professional understands when making this sort of recommendation and the next thing is they're going to have to have a way of giving you specific dosing instructions for each disease that you're treating so that once they do start this feedback loop that they can see what's working and what's not working and refine the data and keep making it better and better I'm a process engineer finding patterns and establishing with data is just the logical way to figure out something and turn it from a plant into a medicine so I went out next and I got a whole bunch of different varieties of cannabis and I was very excited I made all these oils I sent them out for lab results our lab testing and lo and behold I sat down and I'm looking through all these labs and I'm like what am I looking at I have no idea what any of this means I do not understand I don't understand what beta carry a saline is I don't know what Elsa PI I don't know what any of these different components are this so I need to get more education on this because the thing that's fascinating about cannabis is that it is really a pharmacy and a flower because you have all these different compounds within there you know everybody knows about THC and CBD you hear about these in the press there's the misnomer that one gets you high and one is the medicine I would flip that and I would say one isn't of much value and the other one is really good medicine meaning the THC that's a different talk but let's go ahead and stick with this but you also have other cannabinoids in there like CBN and CBN is the one that helps to make you sleepy you have THC v which we believe regulates the insulin uptake in the body so there's all these other you then have all these things called terpenes what terpenes are what you taste and what you smell in a terpene for example in in lavender you have something that's called a little lool that's very calming if you've ever picked up a lemon and held it to your nose and smelled it and had that uplifting feeling that it gives you that's limonene that's also in cannabis so we know that it has all these various components within it and we have to see how they work together I learned about something called the entourage effect now this isn't an actor with a bunch of fans hanging around him this is how all the components of the plant work together in the case of cannabis the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts because you can buy isolated where they just use one component of it but it is not going to work anywhere as near as well as when you have all of the components together so let's talk about a piece of chocolate cake you could have your flour your butter your sugar your eggs your vanilla your cocoa all of the ingredients that go into a piece of care of chocolate cake but you certainly are not going to have have the experience of eating a piece of chocolate cake and that is a nutshell what the entourage effect is so now we know that we have to have the whole plant so that we have this entourage effect we know that doctors are going to be able to have to dose it correctly but what is in fact a dose because people don't understand that so what a dose is is how much you take and how often you take it if the doctor says I want you to take two in the morning and two at bedtime that's your dose if the doctor says I want you to take one three times a day that's your dose if they say take ten milligrams in the morning and 20 milligrams in the evening that's your dose now what is the therapeutic dose a therapeutic dose is how much is required for you to accomplish what your objective is for example if your objective is to sleep eight hours a night the amount of cannabis that is required to get you asleep keep you asleep and allow you to wake up after eight hours feeling refreshed that is your therapeutic dose if you're suffering chronic pain it's not the amount that knocks you on your butt it's not the amount that gets you high it's the amount that gets your pain under control to a point where you were still a fully functional member of society that is the therapeutic dose it's not just how much you can use so now let's take a look at what is not a dose all right because I hear all the time from people I'll say how much are you taking and they'll say oh I take a one-to-one or I take a one to five or I take a twenty to one well that's great that's a ratio that tells me how much you have one component is in relation to another but it doesn't tell me what they are it doesn't tell me how much concentration of each one is in it just tells me the relationship between two different molecules it's also not the number of drops if I say how much do you take and you say four drops or two drops or five drops if I don't know how many milligrams are in the whole I have no way of knowing how much is in an individual drop and then lastly the most important in the United States in particular where we are not on the metric system however the medical community is a milligram and a milliliter are not interchangeable one is a weight and one is a volume so you need to know how many milligrams of the cannabinoids or whatever the chemical compound is within the volume of whatever the product is whether it's an oil or a cookie or a rice krispies treat alright so let's take a look here at a theoretical therapeutic dose now I want to stay right here before I go any further this is not a particular dose for our therapeutic dose for anything for anybody it's strictly for the purposes of the disc demonstration and I have it up here and I want you to also before I go any further I want to say that no doctor in their right mind would ever recommend somebody start out in a dose this high you always want to start out very very very low and increased slowly until you reach your therapeutic dose but let's take a look at this for a minute we have a recommendation here of a THC dominant medicine that from the doctor they want you to take 25 milligrams a day divided into two separate doses with 1 5 milligrams in the morning when you get up and 20 milligrams about 1 hour before bed they wanted to have several of these different terpenes in it if possible and they want you to take it sublingually which means under the tongue thus the picture of the person sticking their tongue out at you a little bit rolling stones so I'm going to take that and say ok now that you've got this how do we take that information and convert that over to going to a dispensary to buy a product to match it so I'm going to take this as a typical infused oil because it's sibling wool we need to use a tincture or something that can be done under the tongue and let's take a look into a blow-up of the label alright so this on this label I'm going to look along with you it says it's an extra-strength THC product it has 30 milligrams weight of THC within each milliliter the volume so 30 milligrams per milliliter tells you how much is in there we also know that this is going to be about one milligram per drop because we know that a rule of thumb is when you have an infused oil it's approximately 28 to 30 drops per milliliter so in this case because it's 30 milligrams per milliliter it's gonna be about one milligram per drop so in order to achieve the five milligrams in the morning it's going to be five drops and for the twenty milligrams before bedtime you're looking at about three-quarters of a dropper or 0.75 milliliters to achieve that and that will give you precisely what the doctor has recommended for you so I encourage you when you leave here to go to your local dispensaries and look at the myriad of products that are available on the shelves today they come in all forms they come in capsules and waters and all sorts of other things and take a look and go up to the budtender and ask to show you what some of these products are you have the benefit now of a regulated market which means that you now have proper labeling so everything is easier to tell what is in it which really makes eases the way for you to begin your exploration of what cannabis products may work for what ails you and I just one last word of caution remember always start very low and increase slowly thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 436,836

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Entrepreneurship, Medicine, Plants, Women in business

Id: jyAGlb8PMRc

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2019