Not too long ago, regulations on CBD changed in Germany leading to a plethora of products containing it. As someone who occasionally needs pain medication, I tried some of the products to avoid regular pain killers (ibu). Especially on days with lighter pain, I wished for an alternative to the sledgehammer meds. But I was left standing in the rain. I didn’t feel any effect. That’s why I would love to hear from your experiments and experience.
You’re getting a lot of answers from Americans. Be aware that CBD oil sold in Germany (Dm, Rossmann, etc.) almost certainly doesn’t contain significant levels of THC.
The evidence doesn’t seem to suggest CBD alone is effective in pain management:
Cannabis oil that contains THC is almost certainly a different matter.
Thank you for the heads up! Half way through the answers I asked myself if a German community would have been a better pace to ask in terms of obtaining the substances, but the effect should be globally available I guess.
Are you informed if the latter is legally available in Germany?
THC is illegal, at least for now. That’s what they’re aiming to change at the moment.
Medical marijuana is legal in Germany. If OP needs it for health reasons he could go through legitimate process.
Only with CBD products bought at a marijuana dispensary. The crap they have at gas stations and the like does absolutely nothing.
My favorite has been Mary Jane’s subliminal tincture. It’s CBD oil in a 1:16 ratio of THC and unlike the other subliminals I’ve tried, they put some flavor in it so it’s like butterscotch and not gross fish oil like flavor that gives me heartburn.
There’s been some research and basically those products are unregulated and a good amount of them have zero or negligible actual CBD in them.
Some claim like, grams of CBD and they have zero in them it’s just oil. It’s basically homeopathic CBD.
My wife and I both have lives now because of it. In my case, I have body aches from a bad car wreck, and after ten years of only getting maybe 3 hours of good sleep each night, followed by prescribed meds that left me dopey all day long, marijuana was legalized here. My wife makes CBD cookies for me and after a bit of experimenting to get the right amount, I now generally wake up feeling refreshed and have even been needing less sleep for the last several years.
On the other hand, my wife lives with chronic pain from childhood accidents including one where she was partially paralyzed for a few years (spine injuries suck!). She is now on permanent disability because she wasn’t able to sit at a desk for 8 hours a day. Since mj was legalized, she got off the opioids, smokes throughout the day to manage the pain as needed, but is able to get things done around the house when she’s having good days (which is most of the time).
If you want to go down this road, you will definitely get a better experience than you have with doctor-prescribed medications, however because there’s still not a lot of data on the subject you will want to find what works for YOU. If you do any cooking, learn how to make oil and butter from mj, and use that to bake your own cookies, cakes, or whatever. This way you have control over what strains go in to what you are eating, and you can control how much of it is used. You can get instruments to be more scientific with it, but really once you have some experience with CBD/mj it won’t really matter. It also tends to be quite a lot cheaper than buying pre-made edibles from the store.
Now, for what to expect… For my use, the right amount is something that I barely feel, if at all. What I do notice is once it starts to kick in (which is right before bed anyway), I start to drift off and have to make an effort to get up and go to bed. If I eat too much then yeah, things can start to get a bit crazy, and I don’t get as good of sleep that night. For my wife managing her pain, she describes it by saying the pain doesn’t really go away, she just stops caring about it so it doesn’t control her life. Again, the right amount isn’t so much that she acts like a stoner all the time (and she consumes a LOT more than I do), but rather it’s enough that she can start to function again despite the pain. So it’s not unusual for you to not feel anything, but it’s also possible you’re simply not getting enough.
Hope that helps?
Yeah, thank you! As far as I understand what you describe, your therapy is not solely based on CBD but also a not irrelevant fraction of THC, am I getting that right? Honestly I’m a little scared to go that route, but I’m really happy it held you so much!
Really it depends on the results you are looking for. I think the THC portion helps my wife with the “forget about the pain” part, but what she makes for me is substantially higher CBD. Technically all of it has some percentage of CBD and some percentage of THC, it’s a sliding scale depending on the strain, and what I use is nothing like what she uses. So you probably want to start out with strains that are much higher in CBD, especially if you have to go to work while medicating, and see what effect that has for you. What worked for me was taking more and more until I felt the effects, then backing off and realizing I didn’t really need that much. It’s probably similar to diabetics, knowing where their blood-sugar is at and if they eat a certain thing it will balance them out without needing a shot, you just figure out over time what helps you, and just like any other medication taking too much has negative side effects. Luckily with THIS medication you can’t take enough to actually kill you.
Oh, one other thing I forgot to mention… If you are taking edibles, then already having food in your stomach will have an effect on the results, most notably taking longer to do anything. And different strains can also kick in at different speeds. Since I eat my cookie after dinner, it takes around two hours before it actually starts to do anything. If I ate one on an empty stomach it could be 30 minutes or less. Previous food also makes it ramp up slower, meaning that I might start to feel some effects from the THC portion, but I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep yet because the CBD portion hasn’t really started working yet. Hope that makes sense? You may not have noticed the effects when you tried CBD before because maybe it took longer than you expected to start working so you weren’t paying any attention by that time?
Of course if you don’t already have some decent experience with it, then it’s best to start on the weekend so you don’t have to do something crazy like drive to work the next morning. It’s possible to get to the point where you can take higher THC strains later in the day – there are telltale signs that let you know when it’s not safe to do things that might be dangerous, but again this takes a lot of experience and the ability to stop and honestly evaluate your current state. The problem here is that it will literally sneak up on you without any warning. I can be sitting at my computer for hours after eating a cookie, writing code or doing something else that requires some pretty focused thought, and have no idea the cookie ever kicked in… Then I stand up to go to the bathroom and realize I can’t keep my balance without hanging on to the wall! Even with mine, while I was learning the effects there were a couple mornings I had to call in sick because I could feel that off-balance still nagging at me and didn’t want to take any risks. Sorry I keep mentioning this but you definitely want to be careful so nobody gets hurt.
CBD’s apparently not really effective for general pain relief, but there’s some data that suggest that it’s effective for neuropathic pain.
I take a full spectrum extract specifically for neuropathic pain and it’s been moderately helpful, and since it’s also immunomodulatory it seems to help some with flare-ups of my autoimmune disease. Not a miracle cure or anything, but it’s been better than nothing and definitely doesn’t make me feel as terrible as the more, uh, pharmaceutical options for treating neuropathic pain such as gabapentin, so I’ve stuck with it.
After consulting my favorite search engine for what neuropathic pain is (not your fault, but language barrier of a non-native speaker) I guess this is what I’m looking for! How do you obtain your CBD? Pharmacy or online?
Online store. It’s Finnish and CBD’s not strictly speaking legal here, but it’s not exactly illegal either and authorities have outright said they don’t know wtf they should be doing with this stuff – so they have the label “small batch collectible product, not for consumption” on their products to cover their asses 😄
Is it funny or sad that a finish collectible affects you positively health-wise? Sounds weird but hey. Sometimes laws are lagging behind so much it’s annoying…
I’m having trouble finding it, but I ran across a study a few months ago whose results pointed to greater pain relief gains when CBD was consumed with THC, and that both substances alone do less to “relieve” pain.
I wouldn’t say it helps relieve pain as much as it lets you be distracted from pain.
Also, personally, when I have used CBD on it’s own, it never did anything for me at all. It only ever worked in combination with THC.
Finally, people taking other medications need to be careful about taking CBD.
The vast majority of medications are broken down by enzyme CYP3A4, an enzyme that CBD inhibits.
I am taking a life-saving/life-altering medication to manage a severe disease. It is handled in my body by CYP3A4. Meaning I can really fuck up my medication dosage by taking CBD on its own, because it will inhibit the ability of CYP3A4 to ingest the drug.
User pizza_rolls@kbin.social helpfully pointed out that grapefruit inhibits CYP3A4 as well, so if you’re not supposed to eat grapefruit, you should probably also avoid CBD. I hadn’t even made that connection myself, very astute, pizza_rolls!
Thank you for pointing that out! In I’m in the happy place of not having to take anything else on a regular basis, but it sure makes sense to keep the heads up of required.
Absolutely. I am glad I did the research myself and stumbled across this fact, because when I was prescribed this drug I bought a lot of CBD chocolates, thinking they would help. I was surprised that sooooooooo many prescribed medications use CYP3A4 as a pathway to enter the body, and how this isn’t discussed more often. I really haven’t seen very much discussion at all about how CBD can inhibit the effectiveness of a whole host of prescription drugs.
Anyway, cheers, glad to be sharing the info!
I used to take CBD every day for anxiety and I only found this out after a couple years so thanks for bringing it up. If your medication says to avoid grapefruit, then you probably should not take CBD
