Is CBD oil really a MEDICAL MIRACLE?
When Miss Catherine Jacobson, first heard about all the promises of CBD oil, she was at wits’ end. Miss Jacobson’s 3-year-old son, Ben, had suffered from epileptic seizures, beginning at 3 months old, a result of a malformation of the brain. Over the years, Miss Jacobson and her husband, Aaron Jacobson, had tried giving him over 15 different drugs, however, none of them took care of the problem. They lived with the grim prognosis that their son Ben-whose cognitive abilities never advanced any farther than a 1-year-old-would likely continue to endure seizures until the cumulative brain injuries led to Ben’s death.
In early 2012, when Mr and Miss Jacobson learned about CBD oil, (Cannabis) at a conference that was organized by the Epilepsy Therapy Project, Miss Jacobson, embrace a flicker of hope. The meeting, that was held in downtown San Francisco, was unlike any others she had attended, which were usually geared toward lab scientists and not being directly focused on helping patients. However, this gathering focus was to get new treatments into the patients’ hands as quickly as humanly possible, and it absolutely included the families of patients with epilepsy.
This tip came from a father by the name of Jason David, with whom Jacobson began talking by chance outside a presentation hall. David, wasn’t a presenter and was not very interested in any of the goings-on at the conference. He had lost faith in conventional medicine during his own family’s medical ordeal. However, David claimed that he had successfully treated his own son’s seizures with CBD oil, and now he was out to spread the word to anyone who would listen.
This idea to try CBD oil came to David after he had found out that our federal government held a patent on cannabidiol, which is a molecule derived from the cannabis plant that is commonly referred to as CBD. But unlike the better-marijuana molecule delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, CBD is not psychoactive: it will not get the users high. However, in the late 1990s, the scientists at the National Institutes of Health discovered that it could produce some remarkable medicinal effects. In test tubes, the molecule shielded neurons from oxidative stress, which is a damaging process that is common in many neurological disorders, and yes, including epilepsy. Jacobson had a Ph.D. in neuroscience. She was doing post-doctoral research involving epilepsy at Stanford, however, after her meeting with David and reading through the small body of published work concerning CBD oil, Miss Catherine Jacobson changed her directions, from primary research to the study of this community of parents who were treating their epileptic children with CBD oil.
In 1980, in Brazil scientists treated eight epileptic patients with CBD oil, and eight other patients with sugar pills as a placebo. The eight patients that received CBD oil, the seizures almost totally disappeared: another three experienced a reduction in the intensity of their seizures. There was only one person in the placebo group that believes their condition got better. The epilepsy drugs that had been approved to date, not one had helped Ben very much, typically targeted the same few channels. But my friends, CBD oil worked differently and still somewhat mysterious pathways. If Jacobson, could find a suitable CBD oil, she thought, she might have a truly new class of drug for little Ben.
Seven years later, CBD oil is everywhere. We are now bombarded by a dizzying variety of CBD- infused products: gummies, marshmallows, beers and chocolates: oils to swallow, lotions to rub on the aching joints. With many of these products being vague about what exactly CBD can do. (Our dear F.D.A. prohibits unproven health claims). Yet promises abound on the internet, where they are numerous testimonials and articles that suggest that CBD oil can effectively treat not only epilepsy, but also arthritis (CBD OIL GOT RID OF MY ARTHRITIS), Crohn’s disease, anxiety, sleeplessness, pain, and even anger. Amid the deluge of products, it almost seems quaint that back in 2012, after deciding to try treating little Ben with CBD oil, the Jacobson’s couldn’t find the stuff. Other parents with epileptic children were using D.I.Y. techniques to treat their children- tinctures: cannabis-infused butter in the baked goods. There were some that reported positive results over the years, Miss Jacobson has had many of these products tested at different labs: (now this is going to make your eyebrows go up) almost invariably they CONTAINED VERY LITTLE OR NOT ANY CBD, AND TOO MUCH THC. It has psychoactive effects, and there wasn’t much science suggesting THC could treat seizures.
Catherine Jacobson describes her family’s existence as akin to living under the dark threat of terrorism. Little Ben’s seizures could strike at any given time. Ben was at high risk of what epileptologists call SUDEP, or in other words, sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. “I would have done anything and everything to save my son Ben,- Jacobson says. So one day back in 2012 she found herself driving her black S.U.V. to a very run-down neighborhood in Oakland, passing a local police car, to acquire a kilo of what she had been told was indeed CBD-rich cannabis.
Back in the early 1960, there was a Bulgarian-born Israeli chemist by the name, Raphael Mechoulam, exploring how marijuana can make you high, became the first scientist to map the chemical structure of both delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, (THC) and cannabidiol. Two decades later, a scientist by the name of Allyn Howlett, then at St Louis University Medical School, used a radioactive THC equivalent to trace where cannabinoids ended up in our brain and discovered what she would later name the CBI receptors. However, they were subsequently found in the liver, lungs, and kidneys as well. White blood cells of the immune system, the spleen, and the gut also have another type of cannabinoid receptor, which is known as CB2.
Raphael Mechoulam, concluded that the body must produce its own cannabinoids-endogenous molecules that, like the native opioids and nicotine-like molecules our bodies also make, engage the cannabinoid receptors throughout the human body. In 1992, was the first one he identified. Mechoulam, the godfather of cannabis research, who he is often called, and his colleagues christened it “anandamide,- after the Sanskrit word for “supreme joy.- However, they do suspected that the molecule played a role in the formation of our emotions.
The native network of cannabinoid receptors and transmitters described by Mechoulam and Howlett is now known as the endocannabinoid system. It is central to homeostatic regulation, which is, how the body maintains, and returns to its baseline state after being disturbed. If an individual is injured, to give an example, native cannabinoids increase, presumably in order to resolve the inflammation and other damage signals associated with the injury. They will also increase after strenuous exercise, and there are some scientists that have argued, that they, not the better-known endorphins, are really responsible for the pleasant post-exercise feeling that are known as runner’s high.
Cannabis my friends has been used medicinally in Asia for thousands of years, where it was probably first domesticated before traveling to Africa. It was almost certainly introduced time after time to the Americas, first from Africa to South America through the terrible slave trade-in Brazil cannabis is still known by an African name, diamba-but also to the Caribbean. Indian indentured laborers more than likely introduce it to Jamaica, where it is now called by an ancient Indian name, ganja.
Also, white Americans had some history of using cannabis in tinctures. In the early 19th century, in India an Irish doctor, by the name of William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, observed that cannabis was being used extensively in Indian medicine. O’Shaughnessy began experimenting and he found it quite efficacious not only for infantile seizures but also for spasms caused by tetanus and rheumatism. Once he published treatises on the plant, and it uses spread rapidly among well-known physicians. By the late 19th century, cannabis was indeed, an important component of American and British physicians’ pharmacopeia.
Yet soon, our beautiful ancient relationship with this very important plant began to fray away. In 1930, Harry Anslinger, who was a former official at the Bureau of prohibition, assumed his new job controlling the Bureau of Narcotics. The well-known Mexican Revolution that began in 1910 had led to waves of immigrants that were crossing into the United States. Whereat the time most Americans took their cannabis orally in the form of tinctures, our new arrivals were smoking it, a new custom that was also moving north from New Orleans and other port cities from which African-Americans were beginning their own migration.
Anslinger disdained African-Americans and Mexican-Americans. He Loathed jazz. Some modern-day scholars argue that his demonizing cannabis both justified his position and provided a way for him to only gain legal leverage over peoples that he despised. The very high cost paid by the people of color, once he had begun what we all now call “the war on drugs,- may not have actually been an incidental byproduct of his efforts but an unstated, evil goal from the start.
However, in spite of opposition from members of the American Medical Association, the hysteria Anslinger helped stir up worked politically. In early 1937, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act, which cause cannabis to be much more expensive and very difficult to obtain. A plant that so many people had used medicinally for thousands of years was now unfortunately driven underground.
Catherine Jacobson’s dealer in Oakland California seemed to be selling the harder drugs as well, which made her extremely nervous. However, her impression was that the dealer was having a difficult time selling this particular product-kilos of California-grown cannabis-precisely because it just was not doing the job of getting anyone very high. With her illegal underground stash in hand, Jacobson entered what she describes as her R&D phase. She set up a small lab in her garage and proceeded to fail miserably over and over for months. But then, under the tutelage of two University of California, Davis, scientists, Jacobson developed and yes, perfected an extraction process, and within a year my friends she had an extract that was high in CBD and low in THC.
Little Ben, improved only somewhat after taking it, however, it was Sam Vogelstein another boy that was 11-year-old with severe epilepsy, who responded most significantly. Jacobson and the mother of Sam, Evelyn Nussenbaum, had met and become close friends as they sought a reliable and safe source of CBD for their epilepsy children. But now Jacobson was feeling a different sort of pressure. Making this medicine was very difficult. Despite all that she had learned, there were some batches of her extract that were unusable. And who really knew if the source material that she was buying illegally would remain available? However, if this was to become their sons’ medicine, Jacobson wasted to have a pharmaceutical-grade product that she could always be able to obtain.
Around this time, Evelyn Nussenbaum was introduced to a British doctor by the name of Geoffrey Guy who had developed a cannabis-derived medicine, Sativex, in order to treat the symptoms of spasticity. Sativex contained both THC and CBD, Nussenbaum asked if Guy would treat Sam her son. Guy agreed, in December 2012, son and mother flew to London to try the purified CBD drug that was created just for her son Sam. He started only with a small dose: as it was gradually increased, her son seizures had faded.
Before the trip to London, Sam was taking three conventional medications and he was still having dozens of seizures every day. However, after Sam reached a daily dose of 250mg of CBD, his seizures stopped for almost entirely for a week. Sam became more articulate and coherent than he had been since he was 5 years old. In Hyde Park, he rode a zip line, Sam even road the subway and did a lot of other things that Nussenbaum had always avoided because of the fear that her son would seize and hurt himself. After Evelyn and her son Sam returned to the United States, it was almost six months before her son could take Guy’s CBD extract again. Medical marijuana was still illegal under federal law, but Her son Sam was giving access to Guy’s CBD extract through the F.D.A.’s compassionate-use program, which makes still-unapproved drugs available to the patients with conditions that are serious. Nussenbaum and Jacobson knew many other struggling families with epilepsy.
They were very aware of all the desperation and suffering of those who belonged to this “club that absolutely no one wanted to be a member of”,- as Evelyn Nussenbaum puts it. Many parents lacked the necessary connections and resources that Nussenbaum and Jacobson had. Everyone should have access to the drug that had helped Sam, they thought. However, that meant the almighty F.D.A. would have to approve CBD oil for epilepsy. My God, for that to happen, some real trials had to take place. And given the fraught political history of cannabis in the U.S.A. and all the skepticism they would most likely face, Jacobson knew that she would need the top epilepsy experts to conduct those trials.
After the dangerous D.E.A. classified cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug and placing it side by side with LSD, heroin, peyote, and Ecstasy in 1970, it became totally difficult for most American scientists to study. Much of the research into its therapeutic potential come from many other countries, including Brazil. It was in the 1970s, that Antonio Zuardi, a neuroscientist at the University of Sao Paulo, began examining how cannabinoids affect mental states. Large quantities of THC could cause paranoia and anxiety in volunteers, Zuardi, discovered, however, CBD could attenuate the psychotic-like effects of THC and the anxiety-provoking. Later studies by Zuardi and his colleagues, showed that a large dose of CBD when it was given to volunteers who feared public speaking, blunter the flight-or-fight response prompted by having to address others. But these were only small studies, also the amount of CBD that was involved, which was 600mg in the social-phobia study, was greater than what most users might consume these days in some CBD gummies, for example, yet relieving anxiety is nonetheless one of the most widely reported reasons that CBD oil is used by people.
It is reasonable to ask why the CBD naturally present in cannabis does not protect recreational users from any negative effects of THC. In older varieties, where the THC-to CBD ratio was closer to 1 to 1, just maybe it did. However, today’s strains typically contain around three times as much THC as the marijuana smoked recreationally even as recently as the early 1990s, while CBD concentrations have fallen by as much as half in the same period of time, according to a University of Mississippi study on marijuana in the black-market. Precisely, because the proportions that is between the two cannabinoids have become so skewed-the ratio of CBD to THC has risen to 80 to 1 from 14 to 1 in two decades-lots of the modern cannabis is potentially much more toxic for our brain, Yasmin Hurd says, who is the director of the Addiction Institute, at the Mount Sinai Hospital, that is in New York City.
Some years ago, Yasmin Hurd, discovered that THC could very well prompt heroin-seeking behavior in rodents, acting as a proverbial “A SO-CALLED GATEWAY DRUG.- However, Hurd also found that CBD helps to reduce drug-seeking behavior, which was the gateway of her changing the focus of her work. Now Hurd studies how CBD oil can help opioid addicts to kick this horrible habit. THC may have therapeutic uses in a big way, particularly in treating with the pain that often puts individuals on the path leading toward opioid addiction. Several studies have found that patients of cancer need fewer opioid painkillers if they are engaged in the use of cannabis. Opioid-related deaths have declined in the states that have legalized medical marijuana, suggesting that individuals who have access to less-addictive options for their pain management may not be as likely to become addicted on opioids.
Other possible applications of plant-derived cannabinoids could be just as groundbreaking, At, the New York University scientists are studying CBD as a possible treatment for autism spectrum disorders. Also, Spanish researchers are now testing both CBD and THC on an aggressive brain cancer. The Israeli scientists have that CBD oil can lessen the incidence of graftversus-host disease in the bone-marrow transplant patients, presumably because the cannabinoid calms the immune system and, also deters it frome attacking the patient.
How could one family of molecules be the hero for so many maladies? The most obvious response is, they just may not be; all this research is only preliminary and it may not pan out. However, scientists often propose a counter-explanation: Many chronic disorders, even when they seem distinct, are characterized by dysfunction in the very same few pathways. Oxidative stress and inflammation, for our example, occur in schizophrenia, metabolic disorders, disease of the heart and other ailments. The therapeutic magic of CBD and THC in some cases, and maybe some of the more than 100, other cannabinoids in marijuana may come from the ways that, tweaking the endocannabinoid system, they push our bodies away from disease toward the unruffled state, that scientists call homeostasis.
In early 2013, a Few weeks after Sam Vogelstein had returned from Britain, Catherine Jacobson at N.Y.U. organized a brain-storming session, which included Geoffrey Guy, epilepsy researchers and a consultant with a D.E.A. background, in order to create some sort of leverage to make the F.D.A.-sanctioned trials actually happen. What followed this meeting surpassed Jacobson’s expectations. The powerful F.D.A. first expanded the ability of doctors to prescribe CBD oil and then fast-tracked the approval process. The neurologists who controlled the trials included Eric Marsh who was from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, and Elizabeth Thiele from Harvard.
In June 2018, only five years after that extraordinary meeting, the F.D.A. approved Guy’s CBD oil as a treatment for two rare forms of epilepsy. But, three months later, the D.E.A. rescheduled this first CBD drug (but not THC) to Schedule 5, meaning it was now considered to have a low potential for any abuse. The drug, that is called Epidiolex, is the very first drug that contains only CBD and the very first one derived directly from the cannabis plant itself. As a brand new class of medicine, it is important for the reasons Catherine Jacobson recognized years ago: It hits different pathways than the current epilepsy drugs that are available, thereby expanding the treatments that are available for difficult-to-treat childhood epilepsies.
If there is a Patient Zero in the vernacular cannabis movement she is Charlotte Figi, a little baby girl in Colorado whose seizures began at only 3 months, just like Ben Jacobson’s had. The Doctors diagnosed Dravet syndrome, in her case caused by a spontaneous genetic mutation. By the time she became 5, little Charlotte was wheelchair-bound, receiving sustenance through a tube for feeding, experiencing about 350 seizures per week. The Doctors once recommended a medically induced coma just so Charlotte little body could rest.
In 2011, as a last resort, Charlotte’s mother, Paige, gave her some CBD oil, (CBD-rich extract), that was acquired from a local pot grower, via feeding tube. Like a miracle from heaven, the seizures almost entirely disappeared. The word of this success spread through the medical-marijuana professionals networks, and in early 2013, this family was contacted by CNN’s medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, who had with all of his heart previously argued against the legalization of medical marijuana (cannabis). However, now he wanted to do a show on it. (a new song and dance).
After much discussion, Paige Figi and Joel Stanley, the Boulder-based pot grower who had produced the CBD oil (extract) for little Charlotte, agreed to speak to Sanjay Gupta. He visited the home of Figi, watched some old videos of Charlotte seizing, and then look at some family photos, and saw the Charlotte before him as a playful little beautiful 6 years old girl. At one point, Gupta, who does have daughters of his own, put his head down, requested the cameras to be turned off, and began crying.
Yes indeed CBD oil is changing lives throughout our planet, it is indeed a miracle drug of our time. Some say, it is Heaven sent, and I for one must agree. There is one company in the fiood lights for having some of the best, top grade CBD oil on Earth, and that company is My Daily Choice, (HempWorx) who mission is to empower families around the world through good health. A mission to change the world and that’s exactly what My Daily Choice is doing. For all of your CBD oil needs and its off-springs, click the link below, this is a company that you can trust.
May you be always in good health. Humbly yours, Paul Earl.
www.Beautiflworid.com
Very well written and super informative! You’ve gone through great trouble to be so extensive in your research and it really makes for a great article with tons of useful information. I have read vaguely about the benefits of CBD oil before but hadn’t seen any information so detailed about it being used for epileptic seizures; that is definitely a great feat and one that wholly legitimizes the use of CBD oils to me.
Good evening Sonia Karel, thank you for visiting weightlifting for a beautiful world, thank you so much for your kind words. My team and I, does everything in our power so that our readers completely understand what CBD oil can do for their bodies, and what it has done in the past, and why it took so long to get to us. So yes, we put a great deal of research in order to have this sort of article for mankind. We are committed to do whatever we must so that mankind can live a long quality life. Once again thank you for visiting us, and if it’s anything at all that we can do for you please reach out to us. May you be always in good health, humbly yours Paul Earl.
Well detailed information, and worth reading every bit of it, I have been looking out for reviews relating to CBD oil.as I have heard of how magic it works, I have to to learn more about it and mostly the advantages, but am still in surprise how my government restricts any products relating to the cbd, I wish they would read your article and be informed on how other nations are taking advantage of products like cbd oil, it’s evident that it really works well. I will have to share this article with some of my friends who are more close to the government officials maybe your article could change our country. I am sure to subscribe to your newsfeed to learn more about this and other related articles. Thank you for sharing such a wonderful article.
Good evening Joy Gateru, we thank you for visiting weightlifting for a beautiful world, and it is so nice to see you once again. Thank you very much for your beautiful kind words, by all means you’re welcome to use any of my articles for any purpose that you might see fit. On my website there is all the information that you could desire, there are many articles that my team and I have researched and wrote, to prove the case for CBD oil so that mankind can live a long quality life. We are committed to this from our very Hearts and Spirits, you are very welcome and please if it’s anything that my team and I can do for you reach out to us. May you be always in good health, humbly yours Paul Earl.