Dr. Oz on The Benefits of CBD
It’s the latest health trend that everybody is talking about CBD oil now comes from the cannabis plant, and many believe that can help with everything from anxiety and chronic pain like diabetes even cancer.
We’re in the midst of a CBD oil boom with products popping up everywhere. Today dr. Sanjay Gupta is here to investigate what exactly is CBD oil and does it live up to the hype, but first I asked correspondent Mara Schiavocampo to check how big CBD has indeed become. CBD if you haven’t heard of it yeah you probably will soon the natural herb is taking the health world by storm with sales of the new supplement expected to grow 700 percent in the next two years. Wow, you just see great review after great review I mean people seem to love this stuff 4000 reviews for products like CBD Life Link with four and a half stars.
CBD short for cannabidiol CBD is a component of the cannabis plant. Unlike marijuana, CBD does not contain any THC the psychoactive part of the plant, so it doesn’t get you high. Over the last few years, CBD has started popping up in everything from gummies to face cream to toothpaste. There are even CBD treats for your pets. What does it do? Research has been limited, but proponents say CBD has all the benefits of medical marijuana without the intoxicating effects helping with insomnia pain management and anxiety. There’s a revolution, a movement happening now with plant-based wellness which is our primary interest celebrating the power of all plants which have not been adequately represented and the question everyone asks is it legal?
Dr. Sanjay Gupta CNN medical correspondent reported on the latest research behind CBD. I would like to take your thoughts on what it really is so people can get this into their heads what you think about the cannabis plant. It really has lots of different ingredients but two primary ones one is THC that’s the stuff that’s the recreational drug. It’s what gets people high gives them that euphoria. CBD, which is cannabidiol it’s something that doesn’t cause a psychoactive component, and it’s believed to be a medicine. It’s been used as a medicine in decades past, and it’s getting this resurgence as you just heard. To be clear, we’ve talked about medical marijuana in the past this is not that. CBD oil is being sold all over the place. Take the plant, and you can pull out individual components, so you’re just pulling out the CBD component. You’re just using that, and therefore you’re not getting all those other effects that people often associate with marijuana which is why I think 47 states so far have said it’s legal, we’re okay with it. How was the medical community using CBD? Isn’t this is fascinating to me, I mean if you would ask this question five years ago it would have basically been crickets?
Nobody was really talking about it. Within the last five years, you had a medication that was a sort of known colloquially as CBD. It was for the little girl who had seizures that just could not be treated by all these different medicines. It took her mom to essentially start taking CBD herself in her kitchen sink and giving it to her daughter. That was what was known as CBD. Within five years it’s gone from being that idea to now an FDA-approved drug in this country. That’s fast, that’s never really happened. The government has approved CBD oil for one indication, yes, and this is from the plant. This isn’t synthesized in some lab, this is CBD that’s actually coming from the plant from the botanical so that that’s a big deal. You actually now have something that’s been considered illegal at the federal level. Part of an FDA-approved drug that’s what we’re dealing with within this country. The federal government says it’s not legal 47 states say it is. Kids with seizures are being treated. At the federal level, it’s illegal but starting to gain more traction. I think really is what’s happening with opioids in this country is terrible, what they found.
Dr. Oz, in several states where they had approved CBD legislation, saw their opioid prescriptions start to go down so that’s an area the medical communities really focused on. As a neurosurgeon, you’re good at this stuff, explain to me how CBD actually affects the body. Well, we have all these different receptors in our bodies to basically attract you to have these components activate, but because those receptors are everywhere in the body, you could get an impact just about anywhere. I should show this to everybody because I’ve made a little model to demonstrate what Sanjay is saying. CBD produces so many effects throughout the body based on the fact it can bind to receptors in so many of our different organs and the right places as far away as the intestinal tract and your spinal column even up into your brain. That’s why people say it helps them alleviate pain, even help with seizures. It’s a pretty serious problem for a lot of folks. Anxiety is a pretty common problem that we don’t want to treat if we don’t have to. Withdrawal from medications maybe even the opiates and you mentioned but think about the people.
I love your thought that we evolved in a species because we had access to these natural plants and they understandably can affect this. That’s right, the receptor started to evolve in our body as well. We even started making our own form of CBD in our body but sometimes it’s not enough just like other things aren’t enough in our body and that’s why some people seem to get the benefit. The theoretical arguments just made these products pop up everywhere, and some of these are everyday items that you can buy. I have a bunch in front of me here. Again we don’t sell anything in the space but their samples of supplements like gummies, muscles soothing creams and even probably for your pets.
Look at this Sanjay, and you realize as a clinician how complicated CBD could be. How do you decide which of these might work well? You know it’s interesting. I’ll tell you, from a physician’s perspective, first of all, I think that there’s medicine here. I think we’re talking about something that could actually really help people and I worry a little bit when you start to see products like this, but it could minimize the importance of CBD could do for people because I don’t know what these products are. I don’t know what’s in them I don’t know how much of anything is in them I don’t know if they would actually do anything I mean this is CBD shampoo.