Sherry Kaplan Stelino explains three ways to use cannabis for pain: tinctures for steady dosing, inhalation for fast relief in 15 minutes, and topicals for local pain. She recommends working with a cannabis physician to combine cannabinoids like CBD and THC with other plant extracts, and to coordinate with your existing pain medications.
Questions this video answers
Up to 1.5 to 2 hours.
Within about 15 minutes.
About two hours (may only last for two hours).
CBD, THC, CBDA, THCA, and CBG.
Turmeric, feverfew, and California poppy.
Hello and welcome back to our channel. Pain is the body strategy that says something is wrong and it needs to self correct. So does cannabis aid in the correction or does it mask the problem? I'm Sherry Kaplan Stelino, founder of Connected Wellness. When the body has excess pain or chronic pain, the body is attempting to heal itself. So are you doing things for your body that promote healing or are you medicating the pain in hope that you'll just feel better for one more day? Well, wouldn't it be ideal to do both at the same time? So the question becomes, how do you want to have a relationship to your pain? Do you want to support your body in decreasing the pain and increasing the healing, or do you just want to get by for one more day? Pain shows up in your life and when it does, whether it's due to illness or a condition or an injury, how you relate to that pain is going to determine how you take care of your body. So cannabis and other plant extracts can be instrumental in not only decreasing your pain, they can promote healing in the body as well. So first, let's start with your mindset, because your mindset matters. It's very difficult to get a handle on your pain if you're feeling like you are a victim to this pain. So I know this is difficult for some of you, but it is important that you become an active participant in your pain management and healing process. You need to give yourself permission and the authority to take charge of how you relate to your pain and how you're going to manage your pain. So if you are an active participant in your pain management, then you want to be talking with your cannabis physician about ways to not only decrease your pain, but also promote your body's natural healing process. So let's start. Here are a few common sense strategies for you to take back to discuss with your cannabis physician. So the two things that you want to discuss are the types of cannabinoids and cannabis that you need to be taking and in what forms you take them that help to decrease your pain while aiding in your body's natural healing process. So forms of cannabis. Taking cannabis in tincture form makes it easier for your doctor to manage the dosing while at the same time getting some of the additional medicinal properties that are in the cannabis plant. So having CBD and THC in tincture form can not only decrease your pain, it can also aid in cell regular regeneration and decreasing inflammation that could be causing pain. So tinctures are also. They also make it easy to combine additional pharmaceutical grade plant extracts that can promote healing as well. So some of the more common and well known plant extracts that can help to reduce pain and promote healing are turmeric, feverfew, California poppy, and that's just to name a few. When it comes to which cannabinoids are the most helpful in pain management, according to the Society for Cannabis Clinicians, some helpful guidelines that have been shared by and for prescribing cannabis physicians are a combination of cannabis formulas. That means your physician would have to order you several types of cannabis formulas that would include cbd, thc, cbda, THCA and cbg, and the amount of each formula will need to be customized by your doctor for each specific situation. However, if your doctor is on top of these cannabinoids, it will make it easier for him to come up with your specific dosing. Now the only downside to tinctures, if there is a downside, is that tinctures can take up to an hour and a half to two hours to feel their fullest effect. However, if you're dosing consistently throughout the day the way that your doctor recommends, you'll most likely manage the pain from dose to dose rather well. Now let's discuss immediate relief, because a lot of people want immediate relief. Inhalation by far is the fastest relief method. You inhale from a vaporizer or flower and within 15 minutes you have relief from pain. Now that's the upside. The downside is that it can be intoxicating and your dosing isn't really exact. Also, inhaling your medicine may only last for two hours, so there's a balance here. You can use the tinctures for the overall management of your pain and helping your body to heal. And then you can use inhalation for your acute pain or when you have a strong onset of the pain. So tinctures for the overall management of the pain and using inhalation for the acute pain. Now that's the conversation that you might want to be having with your physician, as the tinctures can offer you more control of your dosing as well as promoting the healing and a rescue inhaler. The vaping and the smoking of the flower can be used for more concentrated times of pain or acute pain. Last but not least, topicals. There are so many topicals on the market that may work well on muscular pain, achiness, soreness, but when you have bone on bone pain, nerve pain, or more medically complicated pain, having a rub that is higher in THC that is supported by other plant extracts seems to give more relief to some of the more medically challenging types of pain. So although CBD is known to absorb more easily through the skin, THC with plant extracts, because the plants can absorb well through the skin as well, can accomplish that same task. Yet the additional THC together with the plant extracts seem to accomplish more pain relief from more of the complicated causes of pain. So if you would like to learn more about topicals made with plant extracts and cannabis, you can just call our office for that information. Our phone number is in the description in the video and someone can assist you. So what is the downside of topicals? You must reapply the topical. It does give relief relatively quickly, but for more complicated types of pain, it could take several applications before you experience the complete pain relief that you want. So you might get a little the first time, but then once you start applying it the second and third time, you'll get more of the benefits and the relief. So it's an excellent method if you don't want any intoxicating effects from cannabis and if you're looking for relatively immediate results. So there you have it. Oral tinctures to aid in decreasing pain and promoting healing and inhalation and topicals for more immediate pain. And I have one last thing. If you are taking cannabis along with conventional medicine and you are not in a state where you need to be followed by a doctor, I urge you to find a good cannabis physician. And please discuss with your doctor how to best manage the dosing of your conventional pain medicine as you are using your medical cannabis. And the reason being that cannabis can enhance the effects of the pain medication. And you will want your doctor to work along with you in order to safely and effectively balance the two together or decrease one while you're increasing the other. So I hope you found this information to be helpful. If you did, please like our video and subscribe to our channel. And remember, cannabis is a life changing medicine, but only you can change your life.
