Cannabis’ Role in Maintaining Emotional Homeostasis
We often talk about the role of cannabis in maintaining homeostasis in the body – however, cannabis plays a significant role in maintaining our emotional homeostasis as well. It makes sense considering that the mind and body are interdependent and often maladies in one body will manifest in another.
Researchers like Jan Roberts, Director of Transnational Research – an International Research Center on Cannabis & Mental Health – is currently utilizing cannabis in a wide array of mental health disorders with favorable results.
During a lecture in September 2019 at CannaTech in Israel (Video Here), Roberts spoke about the challenges, accomplishments and possibilities of cannabis as an additional tool for clinicians helping patients deal with mental health issues.
I highly recommend watching the entire video to get the information unfiltered from Roberts herself. For those who would much rather prefer to skim lazily through the rest of this article – I’ll attempt to convey the information in an easy to follow format.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the major points discussed within her exposé.
How Cannabis Helps Maintain Emotional Homeostasis
There is a lot of the endocannabinoid system we still do not understand. However, it is safe to say that the ECS is responsible for maintaining balance within our organism. This is not only true for our physical bodies, but it also seems to be true for the mind.
In order to keep the mind healthy, the brain needs to be able to “rest, sleep and forget” certain things that hinder natural processes. In many cases, emotional distress arises from dysfunction within these processes. The endocannabinoid system (CB1 receptors located in the brain) help identify dysfunction and helps remediate problematic function of neural pathways and restores them.
“The endocannabinoid system modulates virtually every brain region and thereby contributes nearly every function of the central nervous system” -Source
This in turn means that when the endocannabinoid system is “off” or “dysfunctional”, it causes a ripple effect in various other systems of the body – including our emotions.
According to Roberts, by identifying the dysfunction and utilizing cannabis in a clinical setting, patients with different mental health disorders may find relief with cannabis-assisted therapy.
Granted, there aren’t many therapists that have a firm understanding of cannabis or the endocannabinoid system. Roberts explained this as well throughout her talk.
Why the Medical World is Lagging behind?
One of the main reasons why the medical world is not jumping on the cannabis bandwagon as of yet is – because they don’t know about it. Some of you at home might be scratching your head thinking, “If I know that cannabis heals – how can doctors not know?”
There’s a couple of reasons for this according to Roberts.
The vast majority of medical schools do not teach about the Endocannabinoid system
Irrespective of cannabis, the failure to teach inform our future healers about our endocannabinoid system is a lack in medical diligence. It turns out that only about 9% of medical schools teach about the endocannabinoid system according to Roberts.
When it comes to mental health, there are currently not a single institution that officially teaches about the endocannabinoid system (or at least to my knowledge).
This leaves medical professionals to rely on websites like cannabis.net to report on studies and findings to help inform their medical opinion about cannabis. Obviously, doctors will be skeptical about the “results” published on these websites irrespective of how diligent the reporting is.
They require “peer-reviewed journals” and “FDA sign-off” to be able to recommend it to their patients. However, if they only understood their very own endocannabinoid system – it would be quite simple to see how cannabis helps our organism.
Yet this is only one side of the problem – The other comes down to the standardization of cannabis medicine.
In Health – Consistency is Key!
One of the biggest issues with cannabis is that it is a “compound” meaning, it is comprised of different “things” such as cannabinoids, flavonoids, terpenoids and so forth. This means that on a molecular level, there is no consistency between one strain and another. They are all 100% unique.
For the purest cannabis consumer – organic is the only way to consume cannabis and this is quite okay. However, when we’re talking about making cannabis-derived medication – we need consistency in doses, quality, purity and composition.
Without a baseline – it would become infinitely more difficult to understand exactly how cannabis interacts with our organism with a particular cannabinoid or combination of cannabinoids. This would also allow us to establish medical ratios/dosage which would legitimize cannabis as a medicine within the medical world.
Of course, we still need to first get cannabis completely legal and remove all the political red-tape, however, after listening to people like Dr. Roberts – it’s safe to say that we’re on the verge of opening up a whole new world of cannabis-based therapies.
CANNABIS FOR MENTAL HEALTH AND BALANCE, READ MORE...
CANNABIS FOR MENTAL HEALTH WITH DR. MICHELE ROSS
OR..
