Healing with Cannabis by Cheryl Pellerin

Author:Cheryl Pellerin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510751903
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2020-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

Cannabinoids and Contact Sports

During a February 20, 2019, webinar hosted by Dr. Dustin Sulak’s medical cannabis Healer Training and Certification Program at healer.com,17 Dr. Greg Gerdeman, a neuroscientist chief scientific officer with Colorado-based United Cannabis Corporation, was a guest speaker.

During the webinar’s question and answer segment, one attendee asked about using cannabinoids to treat people who already have injuries like post-concussive syndrome or TBI and who have recently started using cannabis, and about the prophylactic use of CBD for people who play contact sports.

“I’m not a clinician,” Gerdeman said, “but I certainly have been around a number of clinical success stories of people taking CBD and getting at least some rapid recovery from brain injury that was better than their initial prognosis. I don’t know that we know enough to say one thing or another, but CBD and THC are both neuroprotective for brain injury in many different ways. It’s a pleiotropic [having multiple effects] kind of mechanism and all these receptor targets protect against ischemic damage and glial infiltration and so many other aspects that lead to TBI.”

There are no clinical studies to discuss, Sulak said, “but as I say in these webinars and in the [healer.com] training material, ‘treat the patient, not the diagnosis.’ What’s the patient having trouble with? Is it sleep, cognition, focus, awareness? And we could tailor the treatment using THC and CBD and possibly acidic cannabinoids [for example like the nonintoxicating THCA and CDBA], so I wouldn’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer for that.” To the next part of the question—can CBD be used preventively in contact sports?— Sulak said, “I hear that a lot of NFL players use CBD before practices and games, and I think there’s very little downside to that.”

“I think they should all do it,” Gerdeman added. “I think CBD should be on the sidelines of all of those football and contact sports.” He said he was recently part of a panel discussion about sports and cannabis at the Emerald Cup (an annual organic cannabis competition in Santa Rosa, California), and he’d spoken with a National Football League player and with a former National Basketball Association player.

“It was a really illuminating conversation,” Gerdeman said. “The NFL player . . . was telling me it’s not football players using CBD alone. He’s like, you wouldn’t believe the number of playmaker NFL players who are on the field and they’re hitting vape pens at halftime. And not just CBD—a lot of guys are using THC before games in the NFL.”

Look at people like Junior Seau, Gerdeman added, “who had such a tragic story from chronic head injury.” Seau was a gifted NFL linebacker (1990–2009) who killed himself in 2012 and whose family, after a postmortem of his brain, learned that he’d had chronic traumatic encephalopathy—concussion-related brain damage—that may have contributed to his suicide.

Gerdeman added, “If he’d been taking CBD before and after games, would that have happened to him? We can’t really say we know, but it would not have hurt one bit to try, and I think all those athletes should be taking CBD and low-dose THC.

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