296- The Truth About CBD: An Interview with Dr. Alyson Evans

Welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor, where each week we deliver the latest chiropractic research and marketing strategies, all in the time it takes to get to your office. Now, here's your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid.

Hello, and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. On today's episode, I have an awesome interview with a friend of mine, a chiropractor and entrepreneur, Dr. Allison Evans. Allison was one of the people responsible for the explosive growth of rock tape, and she has moved on to a new project called Fringe. You might have seen me posting about this in some of my Instagram stories. We dive into exactly what she's trying to accomplish with Fringe, what are their initial products and services, and how you can get involved on the education side of things. This is an awesome interview with a ton of practical knowledge. And if you want to check out Fringe, you can go to joinfringe.com Again, that's joinfringe.com and if you want to check out the Smart Chiropractor, I'd encourage you to check out smartchiropractor.com demo this episode is brought to you in conjunction with the Smart Chiropractor. We power your patient's journey from being a potential patient to an active patient to a proactive patient. All of our tools and systems are designed to help power that journey in an automated fashion for you and your practice. So if you have not checked out the Smart Chiropractor lately, smartchiropractor.com Demo hop out with our team. Let's see if it's a good fit for you. But without further ado, here is my interview with my friend, Dr. Allison Evans.

We are two months now into the launch of a new company centered around, like you said, education community. And our first product line has been heavily centered around the CBD industry, actually. So just trying to do what I know I'm good at, which is to bring information and education to an industry that needs it in order for it to succeed in our profession. So that's. That's what I do, Jeff.

I like it. So what, so what got you interested? I know you know we're going to break down a lot of what CBD good for, what are the benefits, what are the misconceptions? I want dive into all of that stuff, but let's peel it back one more layer. When you thought about CBD and how it fits into Fringe as a whole, what got you interested? Why is that the first product you're leading with and maybe Talk a little bit about the story behind the brand and really the community you're building, because I think that is one of the most important parts about it.

Yeah. So the story essentially goes that I am probably more well known, but I was kind of behind the scenes. But I am probably more well known for being affiliated with Rock Tape. And I worked for rock tape for 11 years and I had a two year contract that I was finished up at Rock Tape after their acquisition. So it was a nice space. Very rarely are we sort of given a long lead time to go think about what we would do next. Oftentimes it hits us over the head and we're having to make decisions, you know, in the spur of the moment. So I had a couple years to start thinking about what would I really go do next after Rock Tape. And my role at Rock Tape was very similar. You know, to bring education to the health professional community centered around a product that was incredibly helpful, very innovative, very fun, and disruptive to some degree too, within the industry. So. So that is right around the time that we started seeing CBD literally everywhere. And by I mean everywhere, gas stations, grocery stores. But it also is interesting because the industry has grown so quickly and I feel like we see a lot of fads over a lot of years, but this, I knew, was not one of them. So I at least had enough of a background knowledge to know that the cannabis plant had been used for, you know, thousands of years by humans medicinally. And so I just basically started learning. And it was really nice because I had a year where I got to casually just learn about the cannabis industry, about the CBD industry, about what people were being told, about what people were buying, about the wildest amount of CBD products you can could ever buy, all sorts of crazy things from Amazon, gas stations, grocery stores. And I just dove in and I had time to think about it and really experiment. And one thing I knew for sure is that I was seeing CBD boosts at chiropractic conventions and not really good information about how it worked, why it worked, what mattered. Like what should we be actually learning as doctors, where people come in and talk to us about their pain and their stress and their inability to sleep. So for me, that's a light bulb moment where I see an industry exploding and I know that the education isn't super authentic. You could tell it had a big marketing flair and, you know, jazz hands around it like it wasn't really substantial what people were being told. So for me, that kind of brings me into this area Where I know, I know what to do, I know I love to do it. And I know that there's, you know, a path for me on that. So really I just dove in and started taking a bunch of cbd. And the nuts and bolts of it is my experience was good sometimes and other times not good. So sometimes it would help with some chronic neck stuff that I have, sometimes it would help with sleep, sometimes it wouldn't. The enjoyability factor of taking the CBD was super low for me. I'm not a good supplement, nasty supplement tasting person. I know some people are good at that. I was not. And so I really sort of started diving into trying to make the experience better. Not necessarily. First focused on the reliability of my experience. And I quickly, you know, ended that journey by finding a group of food scientists who were making tasteless and odorless CBD that was water soluble. And one of the main reasons they were doing it was to improve the absorption of the cbd, the predictability of the experience of the cbd, the value of the cbd. And that was kind of it for me. I was realizing, like, you now have a group of food scientists who understand not only what happens when you ingest it, what happens when you metabolize it, like what is actually going on in your body. The experiences went from being pretty gross to a very great experience because you don't taste it or smell it. And then realizing that having a partner like that would be amazing to bring education to the chiropractic community. So just like that, fringe was born. And I think it's interesting to sort of backpedal. And I do tell people this very regularly, that Rock Tape was the most fun. I learned so much and just was like one of those experiences that I wish everybody could have with the community that we built and the instructors that we had and the people that I worked for and that I worked with, it was just amazing. But it wasn't. I would. I'm not a big crossfitter, right? I'm not a endurance athlete. So from a standpoint of representing me as a brand, it wasn't my brand, you know, and fringe, to me and the name fringe is an interesting thing because it came about by me one late night, being on a couple chiropractic Facebook groups and realizing that within our own profession, we try to push people out of this defined accepted center and reference them as the fringe of our profession. So the interesting thing about the name is that it really just means unconventional. It means, you know, on the edge, which is interesting because it means really represents the chiropractic profession as a whole. But came over me in an environment in which the chiropractic profession, you know, was sort of against each other and referencing the fringe of our profession. And I was like, oh, my God, am I the fringe of our profession, or am I in the center? Like, I didn't really honestly know. And it was just kind of one of those moments where I thought, that name is amazing. It's totally used in a negative fashion, politically, religiously, you know, professionally, personally, that people who don't fit the norm are on the fringe. And I was like, I don't think that's where the world's going. I mean, I think that more people identify with being unconventional than they do with being, you know, mainstream. And I think it's silly that that delineation even exists. So that was a roundabout way to answer the question of the name, the brand, the story.

I think. I think it's awesome. Then as soon as I heard the name, I was like, that. That is fantastic. So. So well done. Well done with that. And you kind of alluded to, you know, just so much misinformation out there. And I'd love for you to break down maybe, you know, those top couple misconceptions that most stocks either hold true or don't know about. What are those biggest misconceptions in and around cbd? And after that, I'd love to get into more about how it works and patient archetypes and benefits. But let's start with misconceptions, because there is so much misinformation out there.

Yeah. You know, I think the hardest thing, what people are learning is essentially from marketing departments versus, like, combining clinical expertise with the evidence that we have available and then also factoring in patient, you know, values and preferences. So what? Gosh. I mean, the misinformation is massive. I would say probably one of the. On a collective whole, for consumers and people just in general, is that, you know, CBD is the panacea that might, you know, solve all of our problems moving forward. And. And that alone, people touting that, you know, no matter what problem you have, just take CBD and it'll help it. And it's. It's very interesting because without substantive information to support that, it obviously just falls on deaf ears in our profession. There's a lot of information that. I don't want to label it as misinformation, but it's what I would keep consider conclusive information when this industry is anything but conclusive at this point. So there is information that you have to use a full spectrum oil in order to have any benefit from the hemp plant at all, which is. It is not true. It could be true for you, but it's not true as a foil as a whole. I think that there's information that the oil based products are the most pure product of the plant, that you need to have the plant in its most pure form, which also is not true as far as efficacy and what actually can happen. The industry is obviously plagued full of products that are full of sugars and anything possible to cover up the taste of the cannabis plant, which is really tiny, kind of yucky tasting. And so there is, you know, a lot of products in both the consumer industry and the healthcare industry that are just really focused on trying to make the experience more enjoyable. So those are probably some of the, the bigger ones. You know, it's interesting. There's way more that we don't know, but we're understanding more literally every single week. And I think that that is the goal for myself and our team. We will have to bring information on a cadence that I'm not familiar with. I'm used to updating courses once a year and recording them and set it and forget it and call it good. This situation is very different. So there's a lot for people to learn. CBD is an incredibly compelling health industry. It is very complex and it is way more promising than I thought it was when I started exactly what you want to happen. I mean, I was of the belief that it could really help people sleep. I knew that it could really help people with stress and anxiety. And I definitely knew that CBD and inflammation and pain were going to be a really good part of our business. But I'm now realizing obviously that the impact can be greater for people.

I think that's fantastic. And you talked about a little bit about kind of broad spectrum and not, I know you guys launched with the topical and then two of the powders. What's the difference between those two? What do docs need to know and what are the basics of how this stuff, I guess works.

Right. So in general, when you look at CBD products, there's just generally three types of products. There's a full spectrum, a broad spectrum and then an isolated product. So if you're ingesting cbd, it'll probably fall in one of those three categories. Full spectrum means they remove the waxes and the chlorophylls from the plant and they try to keep as many compounds that are Natural to the plant, in the plant. Keeping in mind that hemp is a form of cannabis, it's just really high in CBD and basically very, very low in thc. So hemp legally in the US in order to have a full spectrum product, you have to have less than 0.3% THC. So a full spectrum product has mainly CBD because it's the dominant compound in the plant, a whole bunch of other cannabinoid or active compounds, bunch of terpenes which make it smell and taste kind of how it, how it tastes, and then a bunch of flavonoids which actually give it its color, and a bunch of other health benefits. And Then THC under 0.3%. A broad spectrum product means that the company who made the broad spectrum product pretty much removed THC from the product. So they went in with that oil compound. They did. There's a bunch of different ways you can remove compounds. A lot of it has to do with boiling points or pressure points or, you know, alcohol washes, whatever it may be, and they remove thc. So that's a broad spectrum product, which is the product that we have. We opted to remove THC with our first product lines because we're pretty much going to wait for THC to be federally legal before we go down the road of including it in our products. And I can kind of speak to that a little bit too. And then obviously isolate, which is one of the misconceptions is that isolate doesn't work. And isolate is pretty much pure cbd. They extract just cbd, they concentrate it. And the truth of the matter is, is, you know, for me, I love the isolated product. I also use our broad spectrum product. It could very much so be true that for a person that a broad spectrum or a full spectrum having the additional compounds in the plant could have a more beneficial effect for them. They believe there is some synergy amongst these compounds in the plant, but the claims do not match the evidence at this point. And so it's very, very early in our understanding of the relationships of the compounds. We know a lot about the relationship between CBD and thc, but that's typically studied in recreational marijuana or recreational cannabis use. And so, you know, that is unfortunately a misconception right now that a CBD isolate, you know, couldn't possibly work as well as something that has all the compounds in the plant. One of the reasons I wanted to start with an isolate is because I wanted to help destigmatize and demystify this industry. And I think a Lot of people and a lot of our patients are concerned about using anything that comes from the cannabis plant. And so in using an isolated CBD, we can 100% tell you it's just CBD, it's one compound. And so when you take it, the only information you have to provide is how, how did that one compound help you or not help you with what you're taking it for? And so it was really sort of a less is more approach to introducing CBD to a customer, to a patient, to a client. So we right now do say if someone's new to cbd, especially if they're hesitant, start them with the isolate, let them take it in the morning, see how they feel, if it's helps them feel more calm or helps their pain, or helps them focus in general, just makes them feel better for that day, then that's really great. Then they could move to a broad spectrum and even a full spectrum eventually. But at least then they've given themselves information and a process to know what is working and to know why it's working. And I am very passionate about that in the supplement industry because I feel like people don't spend enough time knowing what's working and why it's working and they get ripped off and I hate it. So those are the three main types of CBD products that people will see when they're looking at labels. Obviously for us, we make a water soluble CBD and it is very different than the products that are out there right now. So the majority of the products, they harvest the plant from the farms, they extract the oils from the plant and then they take those oils, whether they're full or broad spectrum or just a CBD isolate and they create a product from that. And I quickly learned that those products have a very low bioavailability, meaning we don't really absorb that much oil when we ingest it. Not only do we not like eating oils, that's kind of a no brainer, but our body doesn't absorb them very well. So 6 to 24% of the oil we actually take is absorbed and used by our bodies. If that oil was 90 bucks, I don't think that's a good value for the patient. And so the statistics on water soluble are literally fascinating because it's four to five times the amount absorption by our bodies, which equates to 400 to 500% more of an effective dose of CBD, which sounds dumb. So I don't even say that because it's so significant. Yeah. So the biggest I Would say input that we have had. People taking the products over the past couple months have been like, yeah, I can feel this quickly. You know, it's whether that's helping them sleep or just kind of calming their mind or helping with pain. The effects is something that we have answers to. We know that it's in your blood in 15 minutes. We know it peaks around an hour, it's peak concentration and we know it's out of your blood in six hours. So for us, we can provide docs and patients information about what they're doing with our product. And that was the most important thing to me. Oil is really dependent on what you've eaten. So you. Oil is not bad at all. It's just not as effective. It's effective if you ate a really nice high fat meal and had a really perfect environment in your stomach when you took the product. But you know, fasting versus non fasting makes a big difference on oil absorption. So that's my blurb on those two things.

I think that's great. That's just so much there that you unpacked that I certainly was unfamiliar with and I think is just so important for docs out there to be aware of as they're making decisions about what should they recommend, how should they think about recommending. And as you said, as the knowledge base continues to evolve, staying up to date on this is so important so that you can do your best for your patient. And a couple of things that you mentioned were some of the, you know, big benefits. I guess you mentioned sleep a couple times, pain, you know, I guess if you wouldn't mind spending a couple of minutes unpacking, you know, what are those top either symptoms or challenges people are having on the other side of that coin, what are the benefits that people can expect by taking it? And, and then I'm going to compound it by saying, do you view this more as therapeutic or everyday, everybody.

No, when I started for sure therapeutic, I thought this is something, you know, that people, people have habits that have been programmed by traditional medical communities. We take Advil when something hurts. We expect it to work in 15 minutes. People take sleeping pills to sleep. You know, people take medications in the day to feel less anxious. To me, that is something I didn't want to lose sight of that I'm not looking to make an impact in the circle of us who know that there's a better way. I'm looking to make an impact much farther outside of that circle in the statistics of people using prescription pain medication is mind boggling and so amazing. That conference that you guys put on and the doc, that case, that presentation, you know, what was his name again?

John Rosa.

Yeah, that was amazing because I present a course like that too, where it's like, I think we become numb to the statistics. And I think it's better when we say half of people in this country are struggling with a mental health illness, undiagnosed or diagnosed, anxiety, depression, it's significant. So if I'm in a room at a party, half the people there are struggling. That is where I feel like it makes an impact. I think 322 million Americans have clinical depression. That doesn't mean anything to me when I'm in a room. And I know that half those people could be, you know, not feeling good there, having social anxiety. This is before, you know, pandemic era. And so. And then the amount of people using prescription pain medication and, you know, sleep statistics, I think that that's something interesting. As chiropractors, we hone in on what people are experiencing. But if we can branch out our history and really ask, how are you sleeping at night? Not okay, no. How are you sleeping at night? Do you know how many hours of sleep that you get? Do you use a wearable tracker? Does it tell you how many hours of sleep you get? Do you have trouble falling asleep? Are you waking up in the middle of the night? Because sleep is essential. If I've got a hot low back with a patient and they are not sleeping, I am going to have a very hard time working with that person pain because their recovery just simply isn't there. So when it comes down to sleep and mental health and pain, I feel like they're all in a blender now. And it's just like that's the person. And separating those is something that we don't want to do at friends. So we want to have the conversation about pain, sleep and mental health collectively, knowing that we want to try and make an impact on whatever one we can. And I think the hard thing with CBD is I could tell you, I could sit and tell you the traditional information that's shared about how CBD helps inflammation and then how it helps balance your circadian rhythms and then how it can help work with some of our sort of like mood, more brain, chemical, I guess you could say pathways. But the truth of the matter is, is that for us is now the quest. The quest is to bring that information to the medical profession, all medical professions, on a foundational level, because we never learned it. So we have a Scientific director. Her name is Genevieve. She actually is a chiropractor, but she's been a researcher for almost 20 years. We text and talk to each other all the time. And it's amazing because it's literally every day as she's working on this foundational course, which is like saying to people today, we just found out we have a nervous system, and now we're learning about it. That is literally how complex it is. And she said to me today or a couple days ago, she said, you know, we can't even really call this endocannabinoid state system or the system in our body that responds to CBD when we take it. She's like, it's not even a system. She's like, it's inside our cells, it's outside our cells. It's involved in regulating every single thing that goes on. And she's. So she's breaking it out into, you know, CBD or endocannabinoids or just the cannabinoid system and immune health, endocrine health, respiratory health, musculoskeletal health, nervous system, because it is the system in our bodies that nurtures and balances all the other systems. And that's almost like, too much to say, like, ah, God, I don't like presenting it like that because it's like, oh, wait a minute. It's the system that manages all the other systems, but we've never learned about it. We don't even know what it is. I was like, that's too much for people. You know, how are you gonna bring that to people in a way that makes sense? And that is our challenge. Because I don't want to say to people, oh, you've got these receptors in your body, and when you take cbd, it unlocks the receptors, and next thing you know, you don't have any pain. That's not. That is not true. You know, it's so much more complex than that. There's enzymes, there's pathways, there's cellular signaling. But at the end of the day, it is truly. They call it the endocann Abenoid dome. Now, which is really a crazy word to say, but it's like a kingdom within our body almost, to me, like lymphatic or fascia or something. Something that's kind of hard to comprehend because it's. It is us where it regulates all the other systems. If something's too loud, it turns it down. If something's too low, it turns it up. It's there to create stasis. I just did a post on this and stasis isn't so sexy. You know, sometimes we crave more than stasis. We don't just want to feel normal, we want to feel better than normal. And so that is not what CBD is about. That is not what cannabis is about. As a medicinal plant, it is meant to create normalcy in our bodies. And so that, for you, could look very different than what it looks like for me. It may help you sleep and it may help me feel focused in the day. Because the system in you that's out of whack is going to be very different than the system in me that's out of whack. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Evidence Based Chiropractor. If you want to grow your practice, come back for next week's episode. If you want to grow faster, visit theevidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership. Today.