Plant Medicine, Cannabis & Improving Your Quality of Life

Nutrition, plant medicine, lifestyles, and medical cannabis, they're my favorite topics. And I think it's what everyone needs to know if they want to maintain their optimal state of well being. I'm Sherry Kaplan Stellino. I've been an integrative mental health clinician for over 25 years. And I'm the founder of Connected Wellness. You know, most, most people don't think about the fact that we live in this self healing, self regulating organism. And we go to doctors and we think that they have this magic pill for us, they have this solution that's going to magically make us all better. And the truth of the matter is that our lifestyle contributes so much to, to how healthy our bodies are gonna be. And if you just think about the fact that you can cut your hand and wash it underwater and within a day or two it starts to heal all on its own. So why don't we take that logic and apply it to every area of our life, every part of our health and well being. Back in 2002, I was on a crusade to discover what was going to make our bodies function at their optimal state of well being. And it was really spurred on by the birth of my son in 2002. And he was born with a central nervous system disorder. I had worked with many kids who had central nervous system disorders, many adults and adolescents. And I just knew that there had to be a way for me to get him to function so he didn't have to spend his life as somebody who had a lot of special needs. And I'm a big fan of Albert Einstein and I believe in the theory of relativity that light bends around a mass. And my son had several different things going on in his brain. And I figured if I could use music and movement and so study neuroscience and neuroanatomy and figure out how to wire his brain. Like using parts of his body to affect changes in his brain and using parts of his brain to help motivate parts of his body. I was hoping that I'd get him to be a typical kid by the time he started growing into his adolescent years. I went to acupuncture physicians and I studied journals from around the world on different kinds of plant medicines. Because if you don't know, plants also work on sound frequencies. So when I was thinking of circuiting my son's body, I looked into plants and I was able to find research and a lot of studies that were done on different dosing of various different plants from around the world. And between the plant medicine and studying Neuroscience and working with physical therapists and speech therapists and occupational therapists, and coming up with protocols to get his brain and body circuiting and working at their optimal state. We were actually very successful. Today, my son is going to be 17 years old, and he works at a bike shop fixing and building bikes. He is a BMX bike rider, and he participates in BMX competitions, and he organizes BMX bike events. And I would say he's a typical teenager, dirty room and all. But that did get me on my journey of learning about plant medicine and especially cannabis. Cannabis became really important in my world because cannabis can regulate seizures. And back in 2013, I had met a physician who actually dosed patients with medical cannabis who had mental health disorders, various illnesses like Ms. And Parkinson's. But he also worked with a lot of patients who had seizures. So I flew out to California, and he offered to teach me what he knew. And I learned, and I continued to go back out there and work with him so that I could learn more. And when it became legal in Florida, I turned my integrative mental health center into an integrative health center. And I was very fortunate to get several very talented and prominent doctors in our town to come work with me. And we now write medical marijuana recommendations for patients who have cancer, patients who have Parkinson's and ms, and people who have autism and various different types of disorders. So, as I was mentioning earlier, when I was trying to come up with different formulas to help my son's body work more efficiently and effectively, I started to put together these plant formulations from around the world, like different plants. Whether it was to calm his central nervous system, or whether it was to give him better attention and focus, or help him sleep better at night, or decreases anxiety. I started looking at the dosing from these journals from around the world, and I actually found somebody who could supply me with these plants, who had a physician who actually traveled around the world to get the most organic plants that were grown in the environments that they were originally, that they originally came from. So I started creating these formulas for my son. And every day that he would take them, I started noticing more and more developments. And his teachers were telling me. And just to give you an idea of where he was at, he had every accommodation that you could have in school. He had what they call a paraprofessional, which is a person who would follow him around from class to class. And today he's in honors classes. He has all A's and B's. He is doing extremely well and doesn't need any of that kind of support. And I do believe it is due a lot in part to the plant formulations and the cannabis medicine that really was, you know, what I consider the home stretch of his treatment to get him to where he is today. What I feel most fortunate about is that he gets to, you know, live a life that every kid has the opportunity to live who doesn't have special needs. And I've been able to take the formulations that I used with him and share it with other patients. And we now take those formulations and I, and I have quite a number of them, around 283 of them. And we actually use them in cannabis to assist the cannabis in a more focused way. So not only do we get to use these magical plants that have over 100 cannabinoids in them that can get our bodies to adapt to, to different types of illnesses and stressful environments and get it functioning more optimally, but we have these other plants that can assist it and support it in getting our bodies to function at their optimal state of well being. And I think we're helping a lot of people alleviate their suffering. We have a lot of people come to us who are not sleeping, who are in a lot of pain and who have a lot of anxiety and, and we are seeing these patients move on to having a better quality of life. Our patients called to my attention that there is a lack of information out there, a lack of knowledge and a lot of misinformation out there about medical cannabis. The dosing is hemp the same as CBD from cannabis? Is the CBD the same from hemp? Can you just take cannabis alone and not do anything else? So I think those are a lot of great questions. I think there are a lot of different answers. However, there is a society for cannabis clinicians and I think these are some of the leading clinicians out in the world of medical cannabis. And there is much to learn from them. There is much to learn from the doctors who are treating the patients. This is an ever evolving world of medicine and there's new science coming out. And as the laws and rules are changing, we'll have more and more science. And I hope that we will be a platform where people will turn to us to really hear about not only the latest and greatest research that's coming out, but what is actually working for the patients, what is the accurate information about the plants and what they're doing. But I also hope that the people will come to hear about many different plants and the lifestyle changes and the nutrition that they really need to be taking into consideration when they are looking to alleviate their suffering and move on to building the life that they want to live.