Change Your Brain Every Day - Is CBD Good For Your Health? with Dr. Rebecca Siegel

Episode Date: May 2, 2019

CBD oil and medical marijuana is new to the scene, and therefore it doesn’t yet have sufficient research behind it to help you make the decision on whether or not it could help you. Fortunately, we have the next best thing, as brain health specialists Dr. Daniel Amen, Tana Amen, and Dr. Rebecca Siegel are here to answer your questions on medical marijuana and CBD use.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are very excited and grateful to Dr. Rebecca Siegel. This has been such an interesting conversation. We've already got a lot of social

media chatter about this. It's sort of like a religion a little bit. Yeah, I'm so glad I don't care about being popular. And it's like a religion a little bit when it comes to marijuana and CBD because the science has yet to grow up. Let's talk about, Rebecca, some of the most frequently asked questions about CBD. You know, the first one, is it addictive? Well, like you said, is it physiologically addictive or is it psychologically addictive?

That's the question that I do believe more research needs to be done. That's my answer. I think that depending on the person, most likely can be dependence forming. Actually, what I've recently been informed about is that in a user who is doing it very frequently, they may become used to the dose very quickly and they need to increase the dose or they need

to increase the frequency. That's scary. That can definitely lead to dependence and addiction. So here's a statistic that'll just blow your socks off. More than half of THC consumers are affected more than half of their waking hours. More than half of THC consumers are affected more than 50% of their waking hours. Right, and they get the label potheads for a reason because they walk around looking high. Not everyone who smokes pot has that. But a lot of, like when even in school you see these kids, it's something they do to be cool. It's something they do for their anxiety. But they walk around sort of being spaced out.

Well, and this is the Brain Warriors Way podcast. And brain warriors are armed, prepared, and aware to win the fight of their lives. And if you're not cognitively intact, it's really hard to do that. And initially, by legalizing it, state revenues would go up, people would get cleaner, marijuana less likely to be laced with negative chemicals that are more likely to cause psychosis. But that has, in fact, not been shown to be the case with a lot of pesticide use and negative compounds still found. So I want to, since I pushed really hard on the other side, I do want to at least point

something out. I do know some of the kids that I have known, because I have a 15-year-old daughter, that have started smoking pot. Sometimes it's because they really have an excessive, an extraordinary amount of trauma and stress. And they don't know what else to do. I mean, I've known kids that were like,

they were on the verge of suicide, or they were just really did not know how to handle themselves. And that seemed like the only option because no one was guiding them through a better way to do it. So it's not like we don't understand. It's not like I don't, I just think we as parents, as a society need to do a better job of, or need to figure out a better way to help some of these kids or people, adults, especially adolescents, where they're at such a high risk, not only for starting to smoke marijuana, but for having these psychotic breaks, these episodes. We need to do a better job. I mean, what can we do to help them learn to manage their anxiety and that stress so that marijuana doesn't seem like the only option? I think it is a huge,

huge question that you bring up. It is so important as parents that we are able to have conversations with our children. And that can be very, very difficult, certainly with teenagers. But the first thing is to actually acknowledge your child is going through something. You know, if you see a change in their behavior, they seem more anxious or depressed or, you know, things that we know are problematic. If their grades are falling, if they're becoming isolative, if they're not doing the activities that they normally do, time to have a conversation with your child. That is the most important thing. Yes. to have a conversation with your child that is the most important thing yes well and one of the real

problems with what you're saying is it's on average 11 years from the time a child first has their brain health mental health symptoms anxiety depression um ocd pts, it's 11 years before they get their first evaluation. That's the average. And so if children and teenagers are not, um, being paid attention to and getting the help they need, because there's still such stigma around mental health treatment and psychiatric practice that they're going to try and feel better. They're going to try, they're going to drink, they're going to use drugs, they're going to see CBD as potentially innocuous, and they're going to engage in behaviors that make them feel better. The problem, and I write about this in Feel Better Fast and Make It Last,

is they're going to go after short-term solutions that cause long-term problems. I know two teenagers that are, personally, one of them being our niece, who we helped to take out of an extremely traumatic and stressful situation. We helped get them out of foster care and it was just really hard. The whole situation was she's very open with us and she's such a good kid. I mean, an amazing kid, honor student. I don't know how this kid turned out to be so amazing, but both of them. But she's one of those kids that easily would have gone or could have gone the other direction without someone intervening like we did. And I know another kid were the same thing. The parents were smart enough to see it and get

this kid really good therapy and it really prevented a true disaster from happening. So I just want to point out, you know, when you do intervene and you do the right things, it can literally change the trajectory of a kid's life. And so it's important if you're worried about your teenager to talk to them. It's really the relationship can be healing. We also have a poster called Which Brain Do You Want, which has healthy scans surrounded by drug-affected scans, including marijuana. And it's just a discussion. If your brain really does control everything you do and everything you are and every decision you make, don't you really want it to be healthy? And if there's controversy, and clearly there's controversy around marijuana and CBD. There's controversy.

Why not go for the less controversial options first? It takes a village to raise children. It does. Besides the home, the schools, the, you know, people that are involved with your kids have to be aware of what's going on. Kids are going to self-medicate. They don't understand what they're going through, what their feelings are. Their feelings of anxiety, they may not understand. All they understand is they can't tolerate having them,

and they need to figure out a way out of them. And so that's the ultimate is we need to try and identify that and help them to get help. And I do believe that there should be no marijuana use in anyone under the age of 25. That is definitely something that Dr. Amen has. And that's because of the brain not being fully developed yet? Absolutely. Absolutely. We want our children to have the optimal brains that they can have. And no form of self-medication is going to help with that. Right.

And once again, I choose not a popular side. When I went to Expo West, which is the large supplement conference at the Anaheim Convention Center, there are over 2,000 supplement companies there. And people ask, when is BrainMD going to start carrying CBD products? And one company there, they had 17 new CBD products. And one company there, they had 17 new CBD products. And my concern is, we're unleashing this on the population with the chatter being it's innocuous when we don't have the research to actually back that up. And anything that actually decreases seizures at an effective level probably has side effects. And we are just saying, no, it's plant medication. But we know, for example, St. John's wort, which is one of my favorite

natural antidepressants, head-to-head, works as effective as Zoloft, decreases the effectiveness of birth control pills. So we need to know. We need to know before we unleash. But we have the habit in this society to unleash video games and other things on our society, cell phones, where we don't really study the long-term effects on development and we unleash them on a population that may not, at first, like social media, you think it's innocuous. It's definitely not. But now the majority of teenage girls don't think they're enough

because they're comparing themselves to young stars who are totally airbrushed. Well, photoshopped. Correct. And I'm with you. I don't really have much of an opinion on CBD because I just don't know enough about it. I think it's probably better than smoking pot, but who knows? I'm definitely not a fan of legalizing marijuana. So maybe CBD is a better option than marijuana for legalization.

Anyways, I just don't know, but that's the point is I don't know. So. We can't stop it at this point. Gates are open. Yeah. And now it's trying to understand,

you know, what's coming through the floodgates and trying to do the research on it so that we can actually make educated opinions on it. Right. And we will watch closely over the research. And here on the Brain Warriors Way podcast, we'll bring it to you as we continue to help you have better brains and better lives. So, Rebecca, thank you so much.

Dr. Siegel practices in our Manhattan clinic. If you have a child or an adult who's got issues with anxiety, depression, ADHD, you want to know more about medical marijuana and CBD, she'd be a great person to make an appointment with. Our clinic in New York is actually in an awesome place. It's right next to the public library on 40th Avenue between 5th and Madison. It's been there now, goodness, seven years. So I'm very excited, Rebecca, that you have joined our team there. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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