Marijuana used to be a popular herbal medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries and was common in U.S. pharmacies of the time. Yet, during the Nixon administration it was declared a Schedule 1 controlled substance and labeled as a drug with "no accepted medical use." Despite it being the most reviled plant on Earth, marijuana -- or cannabis -- has many medical uses that have long been known by science. There are over 100 active cannabinoids in cannabis with the non-psychoactive cannabidiol (CBD) accounting for 40% of the plant's extract.

CBD in the form of oils, tinctures, creams and sprays, ingested or applied topically, has been proven very efficacious in treating a wide range of disorders and maladies. Seizures, chronic pain, cancers of all types, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, GI disturbances and psoriasis are just a few of the illnesses that this weed is known to treat and it's high time cannabis medicine regained its rightful place in pharmacology.

Join us for this episode of The Health and Wellness Show where we explore the abundant medical applications and actions of CBD.

And stay tuned for Zoya's Pet Health Segment where the topic is animal news and facts, including "can animals see invisible things", or "can they see themselves in the mirror"?

Running Time: 01:20:37

Download: MP3

Here's the transcript of the show:

Jonathan: Welcome to the Health and Wellness Show everybody. Today is Friday, December 1, 2017. My name is Jonathan. I'll be your host for today. Joining me in our virtual studio from all over the planet we have Tiffany, Doug, Gaby and we're hoping Elliot will make it. He's having some technical difficulties so we're working that out. And we have a very special guest host today, Tim. Welcome Tim.

Tim: Thanks Jonathan.

Tiffany: Welcome back Erica.

Erica: Thank you.

Jonathan: And Erica. Welcome back Erica.

Tiffany: We missed you.

Erica: Great to be back.

Jonathan: Yeah, it's been a while. That's awesome. For today's show we are going to talk about the highs and lows of cannabis as medicine, a little bit of tongue-in-cheek there. Just a disclaimer right off the top of the bat. We're not addressing morality issues or legal issues per se. Obviously we can talk about it, but we're not debating the legality. We want to talk about this as a medicine and what is the evidence that has come out, either through "valid medical studies" or anecdotal evidence, what can it be used for. There's some real promising things here.

Tiffany: And we're not endorsing it's recreational use.

Jonathan: Yes, to be clear about that. Yes. We also want to emphasize that this is a really important, powerful medicine that has applications that appear to be being hamstrung by these legal situations that various countries around the world have. So that's certainly going to be a part of our discussion but as Tiff said, we are not endorsing recreational use. We want to talk about this as a medicine.
So I think to start off, one of the promising compounds in cannabis is called CBD, cannabidiol and Tim has some information that he has learned recently about CBD that he came on today to share with us. So Tim if you don't mind - I don't want to put you on the spot but just to get us started, do you want to tell us what your experience was and just give us an overview of what you understand CBD to be?

Tim: Absolutely. I'd also like to add a rider to that, to that disclaimer in the beginning, that if any of you out there are interested in trying the medicine, it's always wise to consult with a physician beforehand and be aware of the legal state in your respective area because there are certain districts in the US where it's more or less legal and the same in Europe. Some countries are more or less restrictive so just be aware of the legal situation and also before you try anything, make sure you discuss it with a doctor.

Jonathan: Yes.

Tim: A couple of weeks ago I was in Prague and I happened to attend an international cannabis business conference and there were speakers from all over the world, from the states, a couple from Canada, my home country, and several from the Middle East and other parts of the world. A word that came up quite frequently during the talks - because they were talking about finance and talking about laws - but pretty much every speaker without exception mentioned CBD. At the time I'd probably seen it in passing in reading SOTT articles but they never really looked into it in great depth so I was curious; why are they talking about this CBD?

So at lunch time during the conference we were outside having cigarettes and was talking to a couple of the Canadian speakers, Chad Cook and Vin Maru who are activists from Toronto and they told me about the CBD as a molecule. From what I understand at present, the cannabis plant has up to 111 different alkaloids or active chemicals that do things to the body, the two most prevalent being CBD and THC. I think probably most people will be aware of THC because that is the chemical that a lot of recreational users use to get high. Before CBD was even looked into it wasn't even considered an active ingredient. Scientists and growers and breeders always looked at THC, trying to get more THC out of these strains. It was only quite a bit later they realized that CBD has equal to or even more medical applications than THC but it has none of the psychoactive effects.

So a lot of the research is still in its infancy, five-to-ten years old. It's a really new and interesting market. From what I understand, it can be used for a myriad of different applications in the body. There's an endocannabinoid system in the body. So basically the body has receptors for its own cannabinoid molecules. There are two of them, one called anandamide and another one called...I wrote it down...

Erica: It's a long one.

Tim: 2-Arachidonoylglycerol, 2-AG is what is shortens out to. {laughter} Because it's so prevalent in the body, CBD or the endocannabinoid system can be related to almost virtually any disease state so that's what scientists are looking for and that's what I started researching when I got back. I bought a book. I'm no expert by any means. I was just introduced to this three or four weeks ago and I just started looking into it, which made me interested in the topic and they asked me to come on.

Jonathan: It's a really fascinating area of research and the benefits that have been shown from CBD are pretty substantial. Some of the most interesting to me, aside from cancer - and we can get into that a little bit later - is epilepsy, especially child epilepsy. Some of the cases are really, really dramatic, where they're having seizures all day, like every minute, every 30 seconds, just completely plagued with seizures. And after a few drops of this CBD extract it literally stops and they're like "Where has this been my whole life?!"

Doug: Yeah. It's pretty amazing. A couple of the articles we looked at had cases where children were even put into forced comas just because they were having so many seizures that they just had to be put into a coma to stop the seizures until they can figure it out. Then they would start with the CBD treatment and come out of the coma and be maybe not 100%, but significantly, significantly better.

Tim: Yeah, that's another interesting thing about the science of it right now, because the cannabis plant has so many active ingredients that it's hard to isolate just one effect. It's really interesting how it tracks all over the body.

Jonathan: That's one point of debate that I find interesting too that's coming up too, that in the world of medical application on cannabis there's a whole host of terpenes as well that exist in the plant that interact in different ways and those can have medicinal effects too but we don't have the research behind it.

Tim: No, a lot of it is anecdotal. Like you say, there are people coming out with stories, mothers with children and people with various different diseases have used different types of either THC rich, or CBD-rich cannabis oil and had amazing effects, but not a lot of studies yet. There's a few but not as many as personal histories, people testifying to the fact that it's quite an amazing molecule.

Jonathan: Yeah. I guess since we did bring it up, and just to touch briefly on the legality thing, it's so frustrating, not from a "Hey man, stay out of my business" kind of thing, although to be fair, that's a part of it, just the medical applications of this and the fact that it's so restricted from its legal status all around the world, from being researched. In this plant exists the cures; not just treatments but cures for many conditions. And that's where it's frustrating that it has been secreted away for so long in the medical community specifically. I think the oldest thing that I can remember hearing about it is Marinol. There was a pharmaceutical company that came up with a product called Marinol but it was only for pain relief.

Erica: And cancer patients, advanced stages of cancer.

Tim: Yeah, there's Marinol and Sativex and Nabilone are three synthetic-type THCs.

Tiffany: And Dronabinol.

Tim: The problem with drugs like that is it appears, from the literature I've read, that there's a synergistic effect with the cannabis plant, so all those terpenes, as you mentioned, and the other alkaloids, tend to work in concert. They call it the entourage effect. You're sourcing your CBD, for example, you want to get drops. You want to make sure it's sourced from the actual plant and not just isolated to be CBD alone. It tends to be not as effective as to be sourced from the actual whole plant variety, if I understand correctly.

Doug: That's interesting because that's the case in a lot of herbal supplements and things like that. They will filate an extract and start using that. Not always, but it often turns out to not be as effective as taking the different compounds in concert in the whole plant.

Tim: Yes. Standalone molecules just don't seem to work as well.

Doug: Exactly! I think it does have a lot to do with that concert, the different synergistic effects that a lot of those compounds have.

Elliot: (inaudible) molecule from some specific plant or something. The effects that that isolated substance can have, can have side effects as well. So when you take it...

Jonathan: Oh-oh.

Gaby: I think we lost him.

Doug: Did we lose him?

Jonathan: Yeah. Elliot, I think we're cutting out a little bit again.

Gaby: I think what he meant to say was that if you take the molecule in isolation it's not quite the same. For example with tobacco and nicotine, nicotine has been isolated for its medical properties in a lot of diseases but it has a lot of adverse effects. It's not quite the same.

Doug: Another good example is aspirin. They isolate aspirin from the white willow bark and when you've isolated the acetylsalicylic acid it can have negative consequences on the digestive tract as well as other ones, but if you take the whole plant, white willow bark, it doesn't have those effects.

Tim: Oh, I didn't know that. That's amazing.

Jonathan: It's a similar thing with food-sourced vitamin C, where normally if you just get a big bag of ascorbic acid it's actually extracted from oil but if you get food-sourced vitamin C and you look at it with a microscope it's kind of chunky. It's crystalline but it's not a perfect crystal and it's just ascorbic acid taken out of a food source so it has the other compounds integrated with it and that's supposed to be more effective than just ascorbic acid.

Tim: You were talking about the legal aspect of it earlier. If I understand correctly cannabis is still Schedule 1 in the US. Is that correct?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Erica: Yeah.

Tim: Which means by law it has no medical application whatsoever.

Jonathan: Yes.

Tim: But yet each state individually can make its own laws but federal law supersedes those so even in a cannabis-friendly state like Colorado, they're still essentially breaking the federal law. Is that correct?

Jonathan: Yes.

Erica: Yes. And they can't take any sort of payment other than cash at dispensaries.

Jonathan: Banks will not deal with money from the sale of medical or recreational marijuana. But the federal government can supersede the states' laws if they so choose. Right now there's a "gentlemen's agreement" but the feds have come into various states, California, Colorado and Washington, and busted people for operating outside of those states' laws. They're trying to flex and say "Obey the states' laws. Let's just try to keep this under wraps" but the whole thing is really chaotic too. It's such a touchy subject but let's be frank. This should never have been made illegal in the first place.

So all of the problems that we have stemming from this, we're backtracking I think. It's a really interesting moral and legal debate. I'm trying not to get into that {laughter} but what you're talking about specifically as far as people having access to it in various countries or in the states, I just want to hammer that point home that you made earlier, that we are not endorsing that you try to find this medicine. Basically your first point of contact should be your doctor. Ask them what they think about whatever condition you're experiencing.

But legally, in some states it's available in the United States, other states it's available medicinally but not recreationally. In other countries in the world, you'd be in prison for the rest of your life if you have it.

Tiffany: Right now in the US medical cannabis is only legal in 28 states. And the drug enforcement agency, or the DEA, are wanting to reclassify the component of CBD itself.

Tim: That's what I wondered about.

Tiffany: They want to put that on par with THC and make it all the same.

Tim: Couldn't they separate it?

Jonathan: They do currently. CBD is legal in the United States. You can get the CBD isolated extract off of Amazon.

Erica: If it's grown with hemp.

Tim: With hemp.

Erica: Yeah.

Tim: In order for it to be classified as hemp it has to have less than .4% THC, right?

Erica: Yes.

Tim: For fibre, paper, building materials, that kind of thing.

Tiffany: But even on the Amazon, doing a search, I can't find any CBD oil or any hemp oil that contains CBD. They have plenty of hemp oil but none of it, that I've seen, contains CBD.

Doug: Yeah, just an omega 6 supplement.

Tim: Maybe inquire directly to the people who make it I guess.

Jonathan: I know that it's not illegal federally in the United States to possess CBD extract but again, you get into the issues of the source and where it comes from, not only the quality issues but the legality issues. So it might be legal for you to possess CBD but how are you getting it and where are you getting it from. And that's where you get into "Just talk to your doctor". Don't dip your toes in the black market or anything like that. Please, please, please don't do that.

Erica: On that note, it's interesting that in the state of California with the medical laws for medicinal purposes, there is a rigorous testing that needs to happen because with any mono-cropping you're going to have the use of pesticides, herbicides.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Doug: Exactly.

Erica: So there are corporations now or like you were saying Tim, hedge fund investors that are starting businesses that solely focus on testing for quality control. Also terpene levels and things like that. So when you think about cancer patients taking cannabis, you want to make sure that you have a high quality product. One of the things we've talked about in the past is mycotoxins, plants mold. So those are really bad for a failing a immune system. But it seems like the industry is shifting radically to be more compliant on the health aspects.

Tim: So preferably you'd want to source something from an organic farmer I'm guessing.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Tim: Someone who doesn't use any of those chemicals for example.

Erica: And now with...

Tim: I read somewhere recently...

Erica: Oh, go on.

Tim: I read somewhere recently that a lot of the CBD available on the internet is coming from China, Chinese hemp and they are notorious for using some of these chemicals. So I think when you're doing research, try and get to know who the supplier is, what kind of conditions the plant is grown in. Do your research beforehand and then make an intelligent choice when you order.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Erica: And a lot of good, legitimate dispensaries have all that information actually on the label. It will tell you the THC count, the CBD 1 and 2 in addition to any toxic elements in it. I'm pretty sure it can't be sold if it has a high level of mycotoxins.

Tiffany: Does anybody know how they actually get the CBD out of the plant? What parts of the plant do they use? What is it about the parts of the plant that they use that makes the CBD non-psychoactive versus having THC in it?

Tim: From what I understood and what I read, both CBD and THC are in the resin of the plant, so the flowering part. Now in hemp for example, which doesn't have very many flowers at all, they have to use a tonne of the leaves to make one ounce. I'm exaggerating but it's a big ratio. They're also doing strains now where they're called CBD retro or CBD dominant strains so growers basically take two plants and they cross-pollinate them so they have strains now that have 20 or 40-to-1 ratio of CBD to THC. There are different extraction methods from what I understand. Some of them use petrochemicals but apparently the best one is called a CO2 extraction which uses some carbon dioxide to extract the CBD from the CBD-dominant plant or from industrial hemp so there's no THC in it and that's how it's extracted.

Doug: Interesting.

Erica: And it seems that's what doctors support if they're actually going to write you a prescription because a lot of doctors will not write a prescription. Kaiser Permanente's doctors will not give somebody a prescription in the state of California because they don't want to have anything to do with it. But other doctors will and they will, like you said Tim, recommend high-CBD/low THC for people.

Tim: Yup. I think a lot people just don't want to deal with the psychoactive effects of THC.

Erica: Yeah.

Tim: They're suffering an illness, they have pain, they have anxiety, they're having trouble sleeping, they have epilepsy, cancer, whatever, they want to be able to function. They're not doing it as a recreational thing to just change their perception of reality, they're actually looking for a plant that heals them.

Doug: And I think that unfortunately the stigma exists there though.

Tim: Because they're tied together.

Doug: Any time anybody's talking about using cannabis as a medicine it's like "Oh yeah, as a medicine. Sure." {laughter}

Tim: "Sure." Wink, wink.

Doug: Yeah. But I think you're absolutely right. A lot of these people are dealing with debilitating diseases. They're not looking to get high. They're just looking for relief. I think unfortunately that stigma still exists and that's probably what's driving a lot of the regulations that are still blocking the way to actually having this plant available.

Tim: Available, yeah, to people.

Jonathan: The part of that debate that frustrates me too is when it comes up and people use that against cannabis as medicine. It's like "Well what do you think that painkillers do?" They're much more narcotically potent and addictive.

Erica: Especially opioids.

Tiffany: Plus the fact that people use cannabis to actually wean themselves off of benzodiazepines and opioid pain medicines says a lot.

Tim: Yeah, there's a lot of research out there on that too.

Gaby: That's a big thing I want to highlight because it is incredibly difficult to withdraw from benzodiazepines. It's incredibly addictive and some people are just completely unable to withdraw from it. My first experience with CBD oil was from someone who was corresponding about her benzo addiction. She said that she finally managed to remove the benzo when she started CBD oil. She's in Mexico.

Doug: Wow. I've read of other accounts too of people being able to get off of benzodiazepines. That includes things like valium.

Tim: Valium, Xanax, Respiril.

Doug: Yeah, which came to popularity in the '80s if I'm not mistaken. There's an epidemic of people who are completely addicted to them but I have found a few different anecdotal stories of people actually being able to kick their benzo addiction which is pretty impressive because nothing else seems to work for that.

Jonathan: There's some success with Kratom which we had discussed previously with helping to get off benzos. There's been some success with that and with kava as well.

Tim: Does it help with the fentanyl problem? I don't know how it is in the states but in Canada it's a huge issue. Fentanyl's opioid based.

Jonathan: Yeah. And people have used...

Tim: I wonder if CBD would help with that.

Jonathan: I think it would. What I see a lot and having dipped my toes into the kava world, that a lot of people who are interested in kava are using it to get off opiates and mentos and what is commonly seen as a process of titration. Say they're on - what's a common opioid? I'm blanking on the name.

Tiffany: Percocet, OxyContin.

Jonathan: There you go. So say they're trying to get off that. So they'll taper into suboxone or something similar like that, that's a little bit less potent, and then they'll go from that and try kava or kratom and then they'll finish off with an Ibogaine session and then they find themselves clear of their addiction. It's really fascinating but this is all very anecdotal. Ibogaine is also technically illegal. It can be accessed through doctors, so again, that's a disclaimer. You need to talk to your doctor if you're going to do anything like this. But that has promising effects regarding addiction.
So there's a lot of these drugs that we find are very helpful with various conditions. In fact this is something that we talked about doing the show about, which was all the illegal drugs that are medically applicable.

Tim: It's a broad topic.

Jonathan: You have MDMA...

Doug: It's a six-part series. {laughter}

Jonathan: MDMA has been used for PTSD quite effectively. Psilocybin has been used to rewrite neurons to cure nerve pain, all sorts of stuff like that. It's a giant world. But going back to the tapering off benzos and opiates, I see that a lot where it's a chain of different substances that are helping them to taper into a state of sobriety and I think that CBD would supplement that. It would probably shorten the entire process.

Doug: I read an account by one doctor who actually said that. It did significantly shorten the amount of time that it took to get off of benzos.

Tim: I'll just read a little bit from a book I'm reading here called CBD-Patient's Guide to Medicinal Cannabis-Healing Without the High in regard to addiction.

Cannabidiol is (bad audio) various neuro-circuits involved in drug addiction. A number of studies suggest that CBD may have therapeutic properties to treat opioid, cocaine and psychostimulant addiction and data suggests that it may be beneficial in others as well.

But what is interesting is the CBD also counteracts the effects of THC. So people who smoke regular cannabis and get to a point where they're paranoid or they can't deal with reality, CBD can actually mitigate that. It works in a different way. Apparently with the receptors in the body CBD doesn't really interact with the receptor directly like THC does. It interacts with an enzyme that stops the breakdown of the endogenous cannabinoids in the body, so that's interesting.

Doug: Yeah.

Jonathan: That kind of brings me to another point that I did want to cover a little bit today. We're talking about the various compounds and CBD being very powerful and THC itself is also very powerful. I think that it gets less coverage because people want - I don't know how to say this simplistically - people want the medicinal aspects of this plant without having to mess with its legal status. So they're like, what can we extract that's currently legal so we don't have to mess with the law at all and then use that? I think that's actually preventing us from looking into other aspects of this. Our listeners may be familiar with the term "Rick Simpson Oil". That is a highly potent extract of THC itself from the plant and that's been used to great effect against cancer; hundreds and hundreds of cases of people coming back from all the way up to stage 4 cancer.

One testimonial I watched the other day, this guy had two weeks left. The doctor told him he had two weeks. He said "Wrap it up" and he started taking this cannabis oil and he was completely in remission in six months. So there's a lot of cases like this and I think there's some research that shows that THC itself actually shreds the mitochondria around cancer cells because it sees them as dying cells and so it basically helps them along and it kills them off. The cases are overwhelming.

So that's where I find the legality aspect interesting because I do think CBD should be investigated, extracted, used, and it's cool because it can be brought back and forth between the United States and Europe and Asia, Eastern Europe, and a lot of people can gain benefits from that because it's not psychoactive so the law is not messing with it. But when you take into account cancer patients and how many there are, we essentially have a cancer epidemic right now. In this extracted oil is what I think is the cure. It's not 100% but it's 90%. It's really, really incredible.

Doug: That's amazing.

Elliot: There was one of the stories that we read, it was in one of the articles, and it was about a mother in the UK. It was a really tragic story where her son had come down with a one-in-seven-billion chance cancer. I can't remember what it was called.

Tiffany: Langerhans' Sarcoma.

Elliot: Yeah. The child was in a hospice and he was told that he had four days to live. He was in lots of pain and he was planning his funeral and he was ready to die. So his mom decided to get some of either cannabis oil or just CBD oil, I can't remember which but it was one of the two and she thought it would help him deal with the pain in his last days. She gave him this without the nurses knowing about it. She did it on the sly basically. She gave him the oil and then the next day she noticed that his white blood cells had rapidly shot up. She wasn't sure whether this was due to the oil so she stopped giving him the oil and then his white blood cell count went back down again. So she assumed that it was because of what she was giving him that his immune system was starting to ramp up. So she gave him a lot more of this oil and he cured his cancer! He was told that he had four days to live and then all of a sudden she gives him some of this oil and he rapidly, miraculously recovers.

She was interviewed on one of the mainstream news channels in the UK because she broke the law by doing this but now her son is in a healthy state. So how can anyone argue against that? I read that and I was absolutely astonished that something so basic could have such amazing effects.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Elliot: Before this show I hadn't spent much time extensively researching cannabis oil but from all of the research that I've done for this show specifically, I'm tending toward thinking that if I had a friend or a relative who came down with some sort of cancer, I really think that CBD oil or cannabis oil would be one thing that I would recommend now.

Tim: Yeah.

Jonathan: Totally.

Tiffany: Well the thing that makes it so effective against cancer is that it prevents formation of new blood vessels to the certain tumours and cancer cells have this kind of stem-like property where they can just self-renew on and on. Cancer cells do that. And they can break off and they can form new colonies of cancerous tumours so CBD oil or the components in marijuana - I'm sure there's probably lots of components that haven't even been discovered yet - can stop that. It can stop the cells from renewing themselves and it can also induce autophagy, the clean-up system of your body.

Jonathan: There's a lot of those cases where it stopped metastasis in its tracks. What I was saying about the testimonials being overwhelming, if you do some of your own reading and look up cannabis oil cancer testimonials it really is incredible and it's one of those things where you don't want to get your hopes up too much because there's been all this talk of a cure. That's why I think that film is so interesting, the name Run From the Cure because for years I've been seeing all the cure stuff everywhere and knowing that it's - pardon my French - it's bullshit...

Doug: Yeah.

Jonathan: ...when you see a gumball machine with the Cure sign on it! Those gumballs give you cancer.

Doug: Kentucky Fried Chicken with pink ribbons on it. {laughter}

Jonathan: But when you read these cases you see "melanoma gone in 30 days", "stage 3 prostate cancer full remission in 6 months", "anal cancer full remission in 4 months". It goes on and on and on and on. One of the guys told this story. He had had such bad melanoma that they actually carved out chunks of his face and he was very badly disfigured. As you might imagine, the story goes, cannabis oil, full remission and when he discovered that he was in full remission his doctor he said, was kind of deadpan, "Yeah, okay. Well that's cool." And he was like "We should be on CNN right now telling people that this works!!" He said that he had noticed that the doctor got a phone call before their appointment while he was waiting and he had overheard and it was one of his superiors at the hospital. He couldn't prove this, but he supposed that they were like "Don't get too excited. This is something we can't address" which is incredible.

There are even other cases of people calling child protective services to get medical custody over their children in order to give them chemo.

Doug: Yeah.

Jonathan: So you want to poison my child!

Doug: There was a specific case where that was in a state where CBD was actually legal and was being used by the doctors but because in this particular case the mother refused the drug, I don't know if it was chemo, or some other treatment like that, refused the drug, whatever it was, because they wanted to try the CBD and the doctor called child protective services on them.

Jonathan: Yeah, it's incredible. In all the cases that I've read, none of the timeframes are longer than a year, if you can believe that. So we have available to us this compound that apparently, allegedly, completely kills off cancer in less than 12 months, in all various stages. And how is it not the most important thing in the country right now?! Honestly!

Tiffany: Well considering what we know about the medical industrial complex it makes perfect sense that they would try to block something that cures people of their ailments because they're in the business of making, if not lifelong patients, they want to make as much money off of people as they can by selling their medicines and treatments and surgeries and whatever else they want to offer.

Tim: It's not about health at all, is it.

Tiffany: But it's not about curing people at all. No.

Tim: It's about keeping their wallets fat.

Elliot: What's a shame is that it was used as a medicine at one point in time not too long ago. In one of the articles it spoke about the brief history of how it all came about and how you often had female herbal medical practitioners who used to prescribe this stuff, among other botanicals. Then when you started to have the so-called regular doctors which were not very well educated and then the whole report which basically said that any herbal medicine or any alternative therapy that is not scientifically studied is outlawed, all of these well-known treatments that clearly worked and they were passed down probably over hundreds, if not thousands of years by word of mouth, were all of a sudden abolished and you could only use pharmaceutical drugs.

Gaby: All in the name of science.

Tiffany: People's personal experiences with getting better with using an herb doesn't count for anything.

Jonathan: Right.

Tim: So I wanted to go back Jonathan a bit, to what you were talking about with the CBD versus THC, CBD sometimes being preferable because it doesn't have the psychoactive aspect, but it seems that in certain severe diseased states, THC might also be necessary. Doug sent me a video earlier about juicing raw cannabis and from what I understand, in the raw cannabis THC and CBD exist as a carboxylic acid, which means it's a precursor to the actual active ingredient so when you're consuming it as a raw juice, there are no psychoactive effects with that either. But I don't know whether the acids are as effective in treating the disease states as the later molecule.

Doug: Certainly the testimonials seem to say that they are. I'm not entirely sure. It was something like you needed to apply heat...

Tim: You had to apply heat.

Doug: convert it from THCA...

Tim: By smoking, by vapourizing or cooking. That converts it from TCA or CBDA, the acid and it de-carboxylizes that molecule and turns it into the active ingredient.

Doug: Right.

Tim: So there is some evidence to suggest that the acids actually are effective as well.

Doug: Yeah.

Jonathan: I've heard some of that too, about juicing the raw plants, that they need to be harvested before they're 18 inches or some certain height and then they should be juiced raw at that point. That's when the ideal combination of all the compounds exist. But what you're talking about is true. It's call decarboxylation so heat and time removes a carbon atom from the carboxyl group and that turns THCA into THC which is bio-available. If you were to take a bud off of a marijuana plant and just eat it, nothing would happen because the active compound that's bio-available which is THC is actually on 2% or something very small. So that's why historically people have smoked marijuana because when you apply heat it converts that to a bioavailable form. So what Rick Simpson has done...

Doug: Sorry, I was just going to ask is it that it's not bio-available or is it just that it doesn't get you high?

Jonathan: Right. It's not processed by the liver. I'm a little bit fuzzy on it. THCA is not metabolized.

Doug: Oh. So I wonder how they were managing to use it medicinally then.

Jonathan: That's the thing. The process of making this oil extract is applying heat and time to convert THCA to THC so that when you ingest it your liver metabolizes the full medicinal dosage of actual THC. That's the idea, so that's what the decarboxylation is. But you're right in that when you apply heat for a longer amount of time, it then begins to convert the THC itself into CBD.

Doug: Ah!

Jonathan: So it goes from THCA to THC to CBD.

Tim: I'm looking at an article now online about THCA, the acid and it says "There isn't enough research on THCA to definitively state what it can treat and what degree of efficacy. Preliminary research and anecdotal evidence suggests that THCA will play a pivotal role in cannabis medicine as the industry propels forward. Some of the potential benefits from studies include anti-inflammatory properties, neuro-protective properties, anti-emetic properties and anti-proliferative properties for prostate cancer."
So that's interesting. That's the THCA. The precursor in the raw plant has some medicinal value it seems.

Jonathan: I think that should be looked into, for sure because then you have even more efficacy regarding harvest times and stuff like that if you're looking at producing on an industrial scale for medicine and you were to juice raw plants it would be much more effective. You could turn it around more quickly.

Tiffany: Don't we have a clip about juicing raw plants?

Doug: Yeah.

Jonathan: We have a clip, yeah. Let's go to that.

Tim: That might have been the video you sent me.
Dr. William Courtney, MD: Cannabis actually goes up and provides feedback from the postsynaptic nerve to the presynaptic nerve which was unheard of in neurochemistry. All neurotransmissions were unidirectional and all of a sudden, swimming against the force of that are these little cannabinoid molecules that tie the whole system together. The phytocannabinoids in this plant augment the body's attempt to restore and increase function to a normal level.

So it mimics the regulatory system of cellular physiology and recently the Food and Drug Administration has approved of CBD which is a cannabinoid like THC, one of 80 cannabinoids. The federal patent compares vitamin C, vitamin E and CBD or cannabidiol. CBD turns out to be more potent than either of those two.

Speaker: The thing that I warn my patients of is if you're going to be juicing this flower and this leaf and you're going to be doing this high dose non-psychoactive cannabinoid dietary approach, please do not heat it.

Dr. Courtney: When you heat cannabis you make it psychoactive which for a large part of the community, the psychoactivity of a plant is the measure of its medical quality but it's really quite the inverse.

Daughter: If you heat or age cannabis in any way you're destroying some of the medicinal properties of it.

Speaker: To use the plant effectively we have to use it the way it evolved over 34 million years which is raw because when it's raw the THC is bound up as THC acid. It requiring aging, drying, so as a hunter-gatherer we gather this plant, we know this well. As this plant ages it changes character. It suddenly has a psychoactive effect.

Dr. Courtney: I think that's the most exciting area of cannabis research, is looking at non-psychoactive cannabinoids.

Speaker: Because if you do heat it you'll decarboxylate the THC acid and you're going to have 600 milligrams of THC acid with the CBD acid, you would be unconscious, probably for the better part of the week.

Dr. Courtney: Between heating the plant, whether that's in a sucker, a cookie, a baked good, butter, vapourized, smoked, all of those techniques convert THC acid, which is non-psychoactive, into THC and provide you with that 10 milligram dose. But if you eat the plant raw then THC acid is the way it's found in the plant. It's not psychoactive. The juicing allows you to get up to the 500 to 600 milligrams, which is 60 times more than you could tolerate if it was heated.

Daughter: This treatment is not psychoactive. People don't have to be stoned when they take it. They can take it and go to work. They can take it and play with their kids. It's hard for me to understand laws against something like green leaf therapy and think that prednisone is legal.

Keith Failder: We're still fighting the stigma of marijuana back from the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s.
Jonathan: I certainly think that's promising because Tim, like you mentioned, a lot of people who are patients, whether they're suffering from anywhere from arthritis to really severe cancers, depending on what their jobs are or whether they live with their family and things like that, they don't want to be incapacitated all the time. And that's the problem with any narcotic medicine. So if we do have a way to apply the medicinal aspects of the plant and allow people to choose not to have that experience, I think that's pretty powerful.

Tim: Absolutely.

Jonathan: I want to come back to what I mentioned earlier. I stand by my opinion that when you do bring in cases of, for instance, extreme cancer, something where your life is on the line, that "getting high" shouldn't really be in the debate.

Doug: No.

Tim: No.

Jonathan: You know what I mean?

Doug: Yes, I totally agree.

Jonathan: But when you're talking about pain management, arthritis or eczema skin conditions, stuff like that, then that comes into the debate, because you don't really need to save your life, per se.

Doug: I was reading about Montel Williams. I don't know how many people are familiar with him, but he's a talk show host from the 80s/90s I guess, and he has MS and apparently controls it by smoking marijuana and was saying that this is something that actually makes me better. In some interview where the guy was coming down on him a bit hard for smoking marijuana, he was like "No! Listen! Without it I'm completely - I can't function whereas with it I can." So again, you've got that stigma of "You just want to get high." No. This is actually helping me!

Jonathan: Right.

Doug: It is a slippery slope. Well I'm just going to finish my thought. {laughter}

Jonathan: It's case-by-case, right? There's another case similar to what you said that I had seen and this wasn't about oil extracts or anything, it was just talking about smoking cannabis. He had early onset Parkinson's and he was shaking uncontrollably and in this interview on CNN or something, he lit a joint and when he hit it he immediately stopped shaking and he was like "This is how I can live". That's just a very simple, smoking a plant. That alone should be a clue that we need to look into the more powerful medicinal applications to where you actually apply a laboratory setting and you can extract these compounds and use them to actually cure diseases.

I keep coming back to the cancer, not just all of the other conditions that can be helped. I've read testimonials about eczema, all sorts of other conditions, arthritis.

Doug: Schizophrenia.

Jonathan: Yeah. Anxiety even which is weird because a lot of people report getting anxiety from cannabis but there are certain applications that can reduce anxiety or eliminate it. But the cancer keeps coming up for me as one of the most potent and powerful applications of this, especially since it's just ravaging its way through our society right now. I know five people in the last three years that have died from cancer.

Doug: Jeez!

Jonathan: I'm sure a lot of people know even more than that.

Elliot: On the topic of cancer, I was doing a little bit of research and I found out something really fascinating about the effect that CBD has on the cancer cell. Typically a cancer cell, if you look at how it survives it will do all that it can to avoid free radicals or the precursor to free radicals which are called reactive oxygen species (ROS). So it'll do all sorts of cool stuff with its metabolism to avoid having these reactive oxygen species produced in the cell because if there's too many the cell will die. So that is how your body will kill a cancer cell, by producing ROS.

So people who have metastatic cancer, typically their body cannot produce sufficient quantities of ROS and get them into the cancer cell to kill it off. Whereas what CBD does, it directly produces ROS in the cancer cell and causes something called apoptosis, which is cell death. So when you read all of these accounts of people miraculously recovering from cancers in such a short period of time and then you take this into consideration, along with a lot of the other effects that CBD has, it's pure anti-cancer.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Elliot: Do you know what I mean?! I didn't know this stuff before and it's absolutely just fascinating.

Doug: Do you know, Elliot, does it select specifically for cancer cells?

Elliot: I don't know.

Jonathan: The way I understood it, what I had read was that it shreds the mitochondria, which is what you're talking about with apoptosis, right?

Elliot: Yeah.

Jonathan: That would be the similar concept?

Elliot: Yeah.

Jonathan: It doesn't actually target cancer cells. What it does is go through and says "Is this cell dying? Yes. Okay, kill it." To put it super simplistically that was what I read, that it identifies dying cells and then kills them off, since cancer cells are - I don't know. Elliot, does that ring true?

Elliot: Yeah, yeah. It seems like there's some sort of intelligence there. I guess there's some signalling molecules and stuff that cancer produces and it picks up on that, but whatever it is, I guess if you were to look at it from a naturopathic perspective, it approaches things with the idea that all plants have their own innate intelligence and that they carry some sort of information and when you consume those plants, that information is integrated into your system and it can be used intelligently almost. So I guess to understand CBD and cannabis I think taking that approach would help us.

Jonathan: Again, coming at this from a lay perspective, regarding the process too, another thing that I had read - and forgive me if I mash this up - but all cells have endocannabinoid receptors on them.

Tim: Pretty much, yes, all throughout the whole body.

Jonathan: Right, including cancer cells because they're mutated cells and that when cannabis compounds, whether it's THC or CBD gets into that cell, it increases the number of endocannabinoid receptors on the cell thus allowing more in. And when it gets in it produces an enzyme which causes apoptosis. I may be butchering that.

Tim: Well I also read that some cancer cells - don't have it in front of me - but some cancer cells are able to cloak their appearance to ward off against attack from the body's own immune system and that CBD somehow causes them to uncloak and be recognizable by the body's own immune system. I'm not sure exactly how it works but I remember thinking that was quite interesting.

Doug: Well maybe that's the mechanism then.

Jonathan: I think that's one of the main keys. Everybody gets cancer in their life here and there, just most of the time your immune system kills it right away. So we all have cancerous cells that are coming up and the immune system kills them off. And from my understanding, the endocannabinoid system is part of the immune system and what these compounds do is supercharge your immune system to the point where it enables you to kill off the cancer.

Tim: It augments the body's own endocannabinoid system. CBD helps the body's natural cannabinoids work and stay in the system longer.

Jonathan: What I find interesting is the dosages and how normal people may not be able to function because, for example, Rick Simpson oil, the "cancer killing dosage" is a thousand milligrams of THC per day for 60 days.

Tim: That's a lot!

Jonathan: Which is quite a lot, yeah. They were saying in that film 10 mg. I would think that the average for a painkilling does would be somewhere in the order of 50 mg. So when you're going up to 1,000 mg. it's quite a bit. But I wonder if CBD would be able to mitigate that.

Tim: I think it does.

Jonathan: So that if you were a stage 3 or 4 cancer patient you could take that high, high dose and not be completely wrecked.

Tim: Not feel so woozy in your head, exactly.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Tim: Yeah, I think CBD helps synergistically to work in that respect.

Jonathan: Because there have been some complaints too in testimonials that I've read. One was from an older woman who was in her 80s suffering from cancer taking it. She was like "It's killing my cancer but I feel so weird all day. I just don't like it." The person who was writing this was their caregiver. They were saying "It's just part of it. I'm sorry. But if we're going to do this we've got to get through it and then we can get past it later." But what you've mentioned about CBD, I've not read anything about that mitigating the effects of THC which I think is very interesting.

Tim: It is. Actually I'm going to read a list here of things from this book I'm reading. They've aggregated a bunch of studies on CBD and cannabis in general. "For the following health issues, CBD has been shown to be either possibly to demonstrably effective in ADHD, addition (which we talked about before) ALS which is Lou Gehrig's disease, Alzheimer's, some antibiotic-resistant infections, stress and anxiety, arthritis, asthma, autism, autoimmune disease, cancer (as we talked about before), concussions and brain injury, depression and mood disorders, diabetes. It's very, very strong actually; eating disorders, IBS, migraines, MS, nausea and vomiting, Huntington's and Parkinson's disease, pain relief, PTSD, schizophrenia, seizure disorders, skin conditions-all kinds of dermatitis-acne, psoriasis, and sleep disorders.

So CBD can be put into creams, lotions, lozenges. I saw CBD coffee, CBD beer, all kinds of things.

Doug: Yeah. The antimicrobial effect is actually really interesting. I was reading about that recently and that it is effective against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Tim: That's the strong superbugs.

Doug: Yeah! Even MRSA. They were talking about how it can actually kill it, like really effectively kill it which is unbelievable.

Gaby: I think I'm actually more fascinated by its neuro-protective effects and the cancer stuff is really fascinating too but the neuro-protective effects is just mind boggling because apparently cannabis works at the autonomic nervous system level...

Tim: Yes.

Gaby: ...but it increases cognitive functions. I'm talking about CBD oil. You won't think about stoned people being that dumb. It increases cognitive functions. Autistic children have taken it that never spoke before or hardly, they will start speaking, even at the age of 12 which is a very bad prognosis of autism. What?! What's happening here with this?!

Tiffany: Even with Alzheimer's there's some research that CBD can get rid of those pesky beta amyloid plaques entanglements that are in brains of patients with Alzheimer's.

Tim: So is there justification for using CBD as a general supplement; if you don't have any specific disease state, can you just take it once a day? If it's as effective as Gaby was saying?

Jonathan: Yeah, I think so in that context. And it props up your immune system and like you said, you're not looking at any psychoactive effects it makes sense as a daily supplement.

Gaby: What I was surprised at was that some schizophrenic patients have a previous history of being marijuana consumers, that actually precipitate psychotic reactions, psychotic episodes, and they ended up with this label of schizophrenia. But with the CBD oil, which is non-psychoactive, it is actually being used to treat psychotic episodes and actually diminish or eliminate them, which is a pretty big deal.

Tim: The opposite, yeah.

Gaby: All these medications for schizophrenia with so many side-effects!

Doug: Talking about the CBD used on a daily basis or something, I do have some anecdotal evidence here. I knew some people who, when it was first gaining popularity, were using it topically. There was a CBD balm of some kind that they got their hands on and they were using it and they said that it was really good. I was in a very high stress job at the time and they were co-workers and they said it was really good with helping them to chill out and get a better perspective on things and not lose themselves.

Tim: They used it as a cream.

Doug: Yeah. And they said that it was like you just get this nice feeling of well-being. It didn't seem to let the stress just take over and start running around like a chicken with your head cut off.

Tim: Would it help for sore muscles too, as a cream?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Tim: Like if you have a sore shoulder or neck cramps.

Jonathan: I've heard of real cases of that.

Tiffany: It's anti-inflammatory.

Erica: There are creams being made that way too, for that particular purpose.

Jonathan: Yeah. I've read cases too of combining it with DMSO to treat muscle pain.

Tim: Ah! To help it get into the skin. Interesting.

Tiffany: Well a funny thing that I remember reading is there's a whole story about marijuana giving people the munchies but there was this researcher that looked at marijuana uses and he noticed that most of them were thin. There were some studies run and I think it was mostly on rats through, but they found that CBD specifically converts white fat to brown fat and actually speeds up the metabolism.

Doug: Wow! I'm sold now! I'm sold! {laughter}

Tim: Order me some of that!

Doug: Needing some of that brown fat.

Tiffany: But you should use it in low doses, like 15, 18 mg a day. But if you use a lot of it, it can actually cause you to gain weight. That's why it's good for people with cancer who lose a lot of weight and become cachectic or anorexic.

Jonathan: Yeah. In prepping for this show I was watching a bunch of testimonials on YouTube, There was a guy who had come back from prostate cancer who had actually had a problem in the inverse with gaining weight. I forget what you call that - endomorph? Somebody who naturally has a propensity to gain weight.

Doug: Yeah.

Jonathan: And he was using the Rick Simpson oil as a treatment for his cancer. It cured his cancer and leveled out his body weight. He said that his doctor told him that it had essentially righted his entire body.

Tiffany: Wow!

Elliot: There also seems to be a connection with the gut bacteria as well. It could probably help with gut disorders. I haven't looked at any specific research on whether it is being used for Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis but I would imagine that it probably could be as well. There's an interesting article on SOTT this week. It was talking about how both the gut bacteria and the endocannabinoid system regulate how leaky the gut is. We all know that leaky gut can facilitate all (bad audio)

Tiffany: You're breaking up.

Doug: We're losing you.

Jonathan: Oh shoot. We're losing you.

Doug: We're losing you Elliot.

Gaby: Well I think he was talking about the endocannabinoid system interacts with the microbiome, the gut flora. They're talking already about gut/endocannabinoid axis, pretty much like the gut/brain axis. A lot the effects of lactobacillus probiotics actually touch or lock in, into the receptors of the intestinal cannabinoid receptors and reduces abdominal pain. It's kind of fascinating, the studies that are coming out more and more.

Doug: That makes me wonder if it has something to do with its ability to help with autism because I know in autism, they find the gut microbiota is completely disordered and that correcting that a lot of times has very beneficial effects on autism. So I wonder if the reason that using CBD to help with autism has something to do with that gut endocannabinoid axis.

Jonathan: Sure.

Erica: They're also starting to create cannabis-based suppositories. There's an article called You want me to put that where? {laughter} It's discussing how the applications are ideal for anyone whose oral route is impaired, like someone who's fasting before a surgery or someone who has esophageal illness. It's great for those who can't eat due to vomiting because it's antiemetic. So it says:
"Cannabis therapy can be administered rectally to an unconscious person or one who has just suffered a stroke or heart attack. It's neuro-protective and a powerful antioxidant even in the brain. It's excellent therapy for treating ischemic events like Tiffany shared, heart attack or stroke, and it will also slow and heal damage in the brain from Alzheimer's. This method often brings the medicine much closer to the target. In the case of haemorrhoids, vaginal infections, uterine cramps or diseases of the cervix, prostate, rectum or colon, sending medicine through the digestive system or inhaling it is clearly a less direct route to these regions."
This backdoor method activates faster than oral ingestion, somewhere in the range of 10-15 minutes versus 45-90 minutes. And it's much more subtle and less intense.

Jonathan: I had read that two. One of the testimonials read was this woman with anal canal cancer and she had used suppositories and said that it had mitigated some of the psychoactive effects, that it was not completely gone but that it wasn't as potent as it would have been orally.

Tiffany: That's a good way to really boost up your dose if you have a really severe ailment that you want to treat.

Jonathan: What gets me about this is I think about the people that I knew. I had a friend named Greg who died from colon cancer and this was not on my radar when that happened. It makes me feel a little bit sick, even thinking about "I wish I had been". But you can't change the past.

Tiffany: I wish I could have tried it on my cat that passed away earlier this year and seen if it would have helped her. Because they use it on pets for the same things that they use it on humans for.

Tim: Just dosed differently, depending on body weight.

Doug: Tim, we have a question in the chat here about a recommended book on it. Can you just say the title of that book again?

Tim: The book I ordered from Amazon is called CBD-Patient's Guide to Medicinal Cannabis-Healing Without the High by Leonard Leinow and Juliana Birnbaum. I'm looking at the chapter now on IBS and different inflammatory bowel things and it says here, "Based on the cannabis health index" - which is where they take all the studies that have been done for inflammatory bowel disease and put them all together and out of a 5 rating CBD has been shown to have a 3.5 efficacy in things like Crohn's disease and things like that. So that's interesting. And it talks about suppositories here too.

Jonathan: I hope it keeps going. It seems like it will. The attitude is changing, but it really is just so incredible, the effects that it has. My point being your quality of life is a big aspect of this and almost all of the drugs that are used to treat current chronic conditions like Crohn's or MS or things like that, they harm your quality of life. They have really, really bad side-effects and here we have a medicine available - which I would say is already understood, but it's currently being researched - that literally has no side-effects. It just blows my mind that...

Tim: Yeah, no overdose profile, no addiction.

Tiffany: While thousands of people die of opiates a year and there's no deaths from cannabis.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Tim: I'm a pharmacist, or I used to be back in the day. It's a rigged game. It's a real monopoly. It's almost like an orthodox religion, in a sense. We were never taught about cannabis as medicine at all and we were always taught that the pharmaceutical giant drug makers were the key to health; but when you're working in a pharmacy you see all the people on multiple, multiple medicines. There's a book called the Compendium of Pharmaceutical Sciences and this is the insert you get when you get the patient info that the pharmacist gives you. This is the stuff that we read from the manufacturer and they're so full of side-effects and so full of warnings and precautions and adverse drug reactions, it's just horrible. Ninety percent of the stuff that we give out in the pharmacy is useless-to-harmful. That's why I got out of it.

Doug: Yeah.

Tim: I couldn't do it anymore.

Doug: Good move!

Tim: Everything is backwards. What we know about diet, everything is backwards to what we're told. It's just like that in pharmacy as well.

Doug: No kidding.

Tim: And I'm pretty sure doctors are in the same boat. Gaby did you ever learn about cannabis medicine when you were in school?

Gaby: Only on the illegal drugs lecture. {laughter}

Tim: I've been there. Oh yeah.

Jonathan: Well, it seems like we're ready for a lot of things as a society, but we're ready for a revised, adult relationship with cannabis I think, as a culture. Yes, stoners exist, but can we quit talking about them and just talk about the actual applications of this?

Doug: And let's be honest here. Out of all the different drug users out there, I think cannabis users are probably the most harmless. Maybe it could be argued differently but I would certainly rather run into someone who's high in a back alley than somebody who's drunk; not that I'm advocating it by any sense, but these things aren't really a threat.

Jonathan: No. We're adults. We can speak reasonably about it and at the same time, emphasize that we're not encouraging anybody to do anything illegal. We're talking about this in an adult, reasonable way. That's what I think needs to happen. You have doctors reacting to this in such ways as "Oh well what about the psychoactivity?" Or "What about the legal issues?" It's like, look at the drugs that you're currently prescribing for people. Those are all worse than what you're worried about.

Elliot: It's hypocrisy.

Jonathan: It's not like maybe they compare; they're demonstrably worse. It's frustrating.

Tim: Concerning the psychoactive aspect, people who don't necessarily have a severe state or whatever, can easily take CBD. But if you're going to just smoke marijuana for that effect, that's a form of a dissociation. There's problems with that as well. So unless you have cancer or something really serious, like liver disease or severe epilepsy, probably CBD will do the job for you because you have to be able to maintain a certain groundedness in reality.

Gaby: I hear the dissociation aspect.

Erica: The juicing of it raw had so many neuro-protective aspects.

Tim: Exactly.

Tiffany: And just as an example, I know a person who has MS who smokes copious amounts of pot and it helps them with their pain but they're still getting worse. So I wouldn't say that it's a panacea for any disease. There are other factors that come into play whenever you get sick. There's emotional and psychological factors. There's dietary factors. Unless you are addressing everything, throwing a bunch of CBD oil down your throat - maybe that's a good thing, it'll help you - but everything needs to be addressed.

Jonathan: One of the testimonials I was watching about the Rick Simpson oil was this guy talking about how he was getting his appetite back, saying "I'm so looking forward to having a coke again!" And I was like, "No! No dude!" {laughter} "Don't do it!" But I think that's a really important point. The holistic approach needs to be taken into account. If you're thinking "I'm just going to pop cannabis oil and cure everything" it doesn't work that way.

Tim: Do your research. They recommend a titration form of dosing so you basically start with the lowest amount that has any effect and you slowly, gradually increase the dose until you have a demonstrable effect. You keep a journal. Then there's a point where adding more gives you diminishing returns, so there's a sweet spot in the middle. So if you get to the point where you're taking more CBD oil and it's not having the same effect, then you've got to back off, that kind of thing. So be aware of it. Be aware of your body. Read, do research. Be smart I guess.

Jonathan: And as we've harped on, over and over on this show, the number one thing is your diet. Look at what you're ingesting and how your body is reacting to it, especially if you're treating a condition like cancer or something that's potentially terminal, then you really need to clean everything up. But everybody should be doing that in their daily life anyway, just for quality of life, clarity of mind.

Tim: Absolutely. You can't take CBD oil and then go to McDonald's. {laughter}

Jonathan: Right.

Tiffany: CBD oils can be very expensive so you don't want to be throwing your money down the drain.

Jonathan: Right. Before we start wrapping up, just to re-emphasize that we are officially not recommending that anybody try to track this down on their own. Go talk to your doctor. Find out what the laws are in your country, in your state, wherever you might be and then if you don't have a practitioner you talk to, find one, talk to them, because when it comes to that, you don't want to mess around with things. You need an expert opinion. As much as we talk down on doctors, a lot of them know a lot of things, so you really need that input.

Tim: Yeah. And there's some articles on SOTT as well. Do your research, read as much as you can about it.

Jonathan: Alright, let's go to Zoya's pet health segment for today and then when we come back we'll wrap up the show.

Zoya: Hello and welcome to the pet health segment of the Health and Wellness Show. My name is Zoya and today I would like to share with you two recordings that attempt to answer questions such as 'Can dogs and cats see invisible things?' and 'Can they see and recognize themselves in the mirror?' Listen up and learn the answer to that one. Enjoy.

Katie Wayne: Hi guys, I'm Katie Wayne and this is Animalist News. So you know how cats and dogs get spooked over nothing sometimes and then you get worried that there's a ghost or something in your house? Well now researchers at the City University of London have discovered that cats and dogs actually do have a sixth sense; the ability to see ultraviolet light.

Until now it was believed that all mammals could only see from red to violet on the colour spectrum. However a select few now join reptiles, bees and fish in being able to see ultraviolet. For humans this ultraviolet spectrum does not pass through the ocular media or the clear parts of our eyes and therefore appears to be invisible.

Although scientists know that bees use it to indicate where nectar is and mice are able to follow invisible trails of urine, no one is quite sure why certain animals are able to see ultraviolet versus others. I want to be able to see invisible stuff too. Or do I? However, scientists have a theory that animals without ultraviolet sensors have the highest resolution vision although the ability to see a wide range of light frequencies can help an animal's eyesight in low light conditions. It also creates slightly fuzzy images. Just like how ultraviolet rays can damage our skin over time they also affect the eyes of animals who can see them.

This might be why so many cats and dogs get cataracts and other eye problems as they get older. So next time you think your pet is seeing something you're not, you're probably right.


Alex Farnham: Hey, what's up guys. I'm Alex Farnham and this is Animalist News. One of the most common and well known pests of animal intelligence may not be as reliable as we think. Since 1969 scientists have placed animals in front of a mirror to see if they recognize themselves. Some researchers even drew dots on animals' bodies before giving them a mirror. If an animal tried to get the dot off after seeing themselves it was determined that they could tell the difference between their reflection and another being.

Those who passed the test are deemed self-aware. Because these animals could recognize themselves researchers believed that they could also contemplate thoughts as well as imagine new ideas.

Besides us humans, orcas, bottle-nosed dolphins, gorillas and elephants are among some of the only species who are thought to have this level of intelligence. But do they really? Let's go to the mirror.

Okay, so now I'm standing in front of a mirror. When I start to shave here, if I'm self-aware, I won't cut myself. Alright, seems pretty good. Well, now I can safely say that that's not another person in there, that's me and I'm self-aware.

Although most scientists agree that the mirror test proves self-awareness, others say that it had nothing to do with it. In the case of gorillas, some scientists don't even believe they truly recognize themselves because they show aggressive signs like avoiding eye contact.

Some animals may simply notice that the body in the mirror moves the same way as its own. These animals might assume that if the body in the mirror has a dot on it, they might too. In this case, it would be less about self-awareness and more about reasoning.


Jonathan: Self-aware goats. They see the dot. Thank you Zoya. That was really interesting. I wondered if my cat that I used to have would see - for lack of a better word - ghosts because they would just run around and look around the air and then run to another spot and look around like they were chasing something.

Doug: Orbs.

Jonathan: Yeah. Alright, I thought that was a pretty good show today. I think that our listeners have some stuff to go on. Do some research. If you yourself are suffering from a condition, like cancer or a debilitating chronic condition or you have a friend who is, it's worth at least discussing and saying "Hey, how can we learn more about this to apply it in a positive way?" There are some really promising things there. With that said, I think we'll wrap it up. So be sure to check out the SOTT Radio Show on Sunday at noon eastern time and we'll be back next Friday with another show. So thanks everybody, and thanks Tim for being with us.

Tiffany: Yeah, thanks Tim.

Tim: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

All: Byes.