Natural Awakenings
Brought to you by Earth’s Healing
PLANT MEDICINE
SECTION pages 30-37
NATURE BASICS: MICRODOSING 101
M
icrodosing is the term used for administering very small amounts of a medication several times throughout the day, rather than a larger dose just once or twice a day. This method allows for using the least amount of medication that’s needed to treat illness and disease and the symptoms that go along with them. For natural medicine, cannabis in particular, microdosing is beneficial because the smaller, regular doses can diminish some of the tolerance that is built up over time, and helps to balance some of the intoxicating effects that occur when smoking or by consuming edibles. Unlike some pharmaceutical drugs, determining the microdose needed for marijuana will not be drawn out over weeks and will not have the possible serious side effects that accompany pharmaceutical drugs. Medication is administered to the body in dosages, whether it be in milli-
36
Tucson Edition
grams, two tablets twice a day, a tablespoon before bed or three parts per liter first thing in the morning. Unfortunately, every individual has a unique immune system. People also have different tolerance levels and therapeutic thresholds. Finding the correct dosage for a medication can take time, and with some pharmaceutical products it can take months of trial and error—time which is often accompanied by unpleasant side effects. Oftentimes with pharmaceuticals, too much of the medication is prescribed to treat symptoms, and the smallest workable dose remains unclear. Tolerance levels may increase because of this. With drug tolerance comes higher doses, more side effects and added expenses. Microdosing can help. Medication tolerance is a problem. Doses for many prescription drugs used to treat pain, anxiety and depression need to be adjusted upward because the body becomes tolerant to the medication and more is needed to maintain a level of effec-
NaturalTucson.com
tiveness. Tolerance to medications can be avoided, or lessened, through microdosing. By taking only the amount of the drug that’s needed to treat the patient, the body is not overwhelmed with more medication than it needs, which can cause brain-fog, fatigue and even worsened symptoms. Because the dosages of medication are smaller when microdosing, the chances of building up a tolerance are much diminished. According to a 2019 article in Psychology Today written by Dr. Samoon Ahmad, a professor of psychiatry at NYU, many people who have turned to cannabis as a medication believe that the drug is not working unless the psychoactive effect is being experienced. That is false. The cannabinoids that are released into the body work efficiently with doses that are small enough to hamper the “high”, yet remedy the symptoms. This makes for a clear head, reduced pain and discomfort and offers more energy. More medication is not better, and in some cases it has been shown that a smaller dose works much better when treating pain, anxiety and depression. In order to determine the best microdose of cannabis products, Dr. Dustin Sulak, a cannabis physician in Maine, suggests abstaining from cannabis for a couple of days prior to the process of determining the threshold for one’s own individual symptoms. Stopping the use of cannabis prior to figuring out the smallest and most beneficial dose helps to lessen any tolerance which has built up. Sulak states that just two days of abstinence from marijuana can help determine the therapeutic microdose because the process starts with the smallest possible dose. Tolerance with medications is common, but needing more to reach therapeutic levels has negative effects. Prescription pharmaceuticals will have explicit instructions on how, when and how much medication to take. Prescriptions are normally written with standard dosages based on laboratory trials and research. Again, because everybody has a different immune system, different tolerance levels and specific symptoms with varying degrees of severity, dosing of prescription
Plant Medicine Section Sponsored by Earth’s Healing
