Hemp & CBD for Horses
Watch this webinar on Hemp & CBD for horses. Dr. Joyce Harman, DVM. Many important slides and references.
Transcription
CBD & Hemp
[00:00:00] Announcer: Welcome to our webinar, hemp versus CBD. What's all the hype about with Dr. Joyce Harmon. Today's webinar is brought to you by doc's hemp hemp with CBD that can support your horses immune system and keep him or her calm and relaxed. Doc's hemp is veterinarian approved, available in powder or. Docs hemp, your leading source of CBD for horses and pets.
Now here's your host, Stephanie Bradley.
[00:00:34] Steph Bradley: Um, if you're ready, Joyce. Yes, we'll get onto what is all a hint? The hype
[00:00:39] Dr. Joyce Harman: about him hemp is kind of the buzzword these days. It is a plant that has thousands, literally thousands of years. Um, at one point there was at least an estimate of 7,000 potential uses for him.
Um, it can be used as clothing, fuel paper, food, protein source of oil, source of fats, um, source of calories. It can be used as medicine. It, uh, in 1940 Henry Ford had a car made from hemp, a fiberglass that was lighter than a much lighter than steel and stronger. And the list goes on and on literally you can look up thousands of uses
the hemp plant itself is a weed and people often refer to it as weed. The beauty of it is it is a plant that is capable of growing in many, many different conditions. So it can grow in the north. They can grow in the south, it can grow in the mountains. It can grow in old toxic soil. Like, um, a lot of the tobacco farmers have, you don't need to put a lot of fertilizer into it to grow it.
Um, you certainly can, especially if you're trying to make medicine. But, um, you don't have to, hemp will grow without a lot of costly inputs, which makes it a plant that people can't afford to grow. It is very nutritious and we're going to talk more about the nutritional aspects of it. Um, as we, as we go through.
It also has a lot of medicinal properties that are being talked about and touted, um, all over the internet. And even as you drive by the seven 11, we have CBD, it will cure everything that ails you. So we're going to try and put all of these myths to rest and tell you about the plant and its benefits in the horse world.
So the plant name, scientific name is cannabis, and it can be, the species can be cannabis Endeca or cannabis sativa. And you will have some people who will say you have to have one, you have one species or the other, truthfully what has happened is that the plants, the indican sativa have been. Interbred and cross-bred, and there really is not a true botanical difference between them.
At this point in time, we have incredible science being applied to the genetics of, um, growing hemp in all of its different forms. The real differences between the plants is this THC content and the THC. That's the psychoactive portion of the plant. And that's the portion that makes people or animals high.
And that's not what we're really trying to achieve here. We're, we're looking for healthy benefits and we'll save the, the highs for, um, recreational use, which is not what we're doing here today. The other thing is really good to know about THC is the. We don't know anything really about it in the horse world, but we do know that THC can be very toxic to dogs.
And so it is very important to know that your plants have low THC. So in the technical and legal world, a hemp plant has less than 0.3% THC and marijuana has. Over 0.3% THC and some of the marijuana plants can have very, very high quantities of THC. So legally anything that's called hemp has to be less than 0.3%.
THC. Most of the medicinal plants are going to be more like 0.03. Or 0.06. So even way, way less than 0.1% THC.
[00:05:36] Steph Bradley: So Joyce let's break it down, help me to understand all the terminology.
[00:05:42] Dr. Joyce Harman: So that's a really good thing to do because we need, we need to understand when people throw around all of these new terms, And in many cases, they are thrown around in a very inaccurate way. So medicinal hemp is grown to enhance the leaf growth and the bud growth because the leaf of the plant, and these are mostly the tiny leaves and the buds, the flower bud.
Are the ones that have the high levels of CBD and they do not have any omega three or omega six fatty acids. And we're going to learn about where those fit in a little bit later. So medicinal hemp has high levels of CBD and it comes from the leaf and the bud industrial hemp is generally. Referred to, as the hemp, that's grown more for this fiber and stems and the seeds.
So once the flour has gone to seed, then there is very little, if any CBD left and we have good omega-3 and six fatty acids, which we'll talk about a little bit. So this industrial hemp, this fiber can be made into all kinds of, of products. The seeds we'll find out can be made into varieties of foods, and they also have some medicinal benefits, but it's different than our CBD medicinal hemp.
So the fiber and stems and seeds contain essentially no CBD. The leaf and the flower bud have the CBD and THC, if that's present in a marijuana plant cannabinoids, and this is a term that, that one of the reasons we call it CBD is because cannabinoid is hard to say, so it's okay to call it CBD, but cannabinoids are a whole class of compounds.
Of which CBD is actually only one of these cannabinoids. And these are medically useful for lots of conditions. And we will talk about that. They have an action on our body, and again, these are only going to be in the leaf and the buds of the plant, the endocannabinoid system. Is a receptor system that's found in all the mammals.
And we'll talk about that in a little bit more detail, but that's the reason that the CBDs work in the, in any mammal. The other thing that's good to know is that him is what's called a bio accumulator and as a bio accumulator, it will. Take up contaminants, toxins, anything like that, that is in the soil.
It will go up into the plant. So in some ways that's a good thing because we can actually clean up some of our toxic soil soil. That's had either chemicals sprayed on it for years or has had, um, uh, Pesticides herbicides, anything like that? The plant will take it up, that cleans up the soil, but the plant then has those compounds in it.
So if we're going to feed it to an animal or to a human or to a dog or to anything, we want to be very sure that we are only feeding, organically grown. Because we don't want any of these contaminants or toxins in our product that we're actually going to give to somebody to take internally. You can use this hemp plant that's grown in toxic soil for all kinds of stuff.
You can use it for fuel. You can use it for paper. You can use it for clothing. There's lots of ways that you can use that, where the toxins don't end up being a problem.
So the chemistry that's behind cannabis and believe me, we could do an entire hour easily on just what all these cannabinoids are. So we're not going to do that here. Your brain would really hurt by the end of it, but there are many different cannabinoids. The one that has been studied the most is our CBD.
And that's the one you hear everybody talk about? The CBG is another cannabinoid that is starting to get a lot of research being done on it. Many of these others don't have a lot of research, but as we actually start doing the research, we will find out what they do and what their benefits. Because CBG is starting to get researched.
Now people are breeding plants to be higher in CBG than they are in CBD. One particular thing that CBG can do, um, is to reduce pressures, um, in an eye that has Gluck. And that's just one of the many benefits, but that's different than a CBD, which doesn't have nearly the effect and a glaucoma case. And THC is one of the cannabinoids.
It just happens to be the one that's psychoactive. And that, that makes, that makes our animals or ourselves. we have, Terpenes the aromatic, the part of the plant that makes it smell. And they actually have many beneficial actions. If you are taking any herbal product at all, there are Terpenes in every plant.
They have different smells. If anybody has done any work with a Roma therapy, you know that the different. Um, aroma therapy compounds smell very, very differently. Those are turpines and there's very different. Turpines in each plant. They also give the oils, the flavor. So as we extract the compounds from the leaves and the flowers, then any flavor that you have is not the CBD itself.
It's the Turkey. We really would like to have the turpines in our final product, if we're going to use this medicinally because the turpines have their own synergistic effect. So in herbal medicine, we're actually trying to have an enteroscopy effect or an effect where we have all the benefits of all the compounds.
In our final product and herbs are really a mixture of a hundred, 200 or more different compounds per herbs. And they often work very well with other herbs. Drugs tend to be one compound taken out of a plant. If it is a plant-based drug and you don't have that synergistic effect. So, what we really want to have is to have some, terpenes in our product, flavonoids are another compound in cannabis and those are antioxidants.
So if you've been trying to take your antioxidants to make yourself healthy, a complete. CBD mixture or a complete cannabis mixture is going to have some flavanoids in them. And those have their antioxidant affects. And we currently know about 29 different flavanoids in about 200 different terpenes. And the reality is, is that we are still in the very early days.
They probably identified about a hundred different cannabinoids. And they know that there is more there to be discovered.
[00:15:14] Steph Bradley: So how about the food value? You touched on it?
[00:15:17] Dr. Joyce Harman: The food value of him, him as a food is one of the more amazing, amazing plants out there. The seeds themselves are the most nutritious part for sure. And they contain 20% protein. 6% carbohydrates and 73% healthy fats. So if you're reading much about health, these days, you've read that we'll need our horses.
Need humans, need dogs, cats, everybody needs more. Omega-3 fatty acids, but what we need is actually a balance of fatty acids. So a mega three, omega six and omega nine fatty acids are our common ones. And again, there are many, many other fatty acids that are minor and we're not going to discuss all of them.
But, um, these are our primary fatty acids and omega threes in particular, we cannot manufacture in our body. So we have to take them in externally as nutrition, as food. So. Here is a seed that is 73% healthy fats with an excellent balance of the omega-3 to the omega sixes. And we also have this GLA or conjugated linoleic acid that is not often found in other products.
And that in itself has anti-inflammatory properties. As do the omega-3 fatty acids. We have anti-inflammatory properties, we have cancer-fighting properties. And interestingly enough, we have support for horses that are insulin resistance. So your omega three fatty acids, and your GLA can actually help horses that have insulin resistance in this little seed that we have a nice spoonful of over here.
We have calcium, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, vitamins, a and D and probably some other trace nutrients that we have not. Um, haven't, haven't dived into. These are all the major things that are in there, and we can feed this hemp seed to horses. I usually feed horses about two to two to four ounces twice a day, or.
Four to six ounces, eight ounces once a day, and you will get all of the nutrition. And sometimes people worry about feeding our fat horses, some more fabs, but these are actually fats that help the insulin resistance and they actually can help them lose weight. We have hemp oil and the hemp oil is just concentrated from.
The seeds. We have the same benefits as the oils with the omega-3, the omega six and the CLA. But, um, we don't have our things like calcium, our actual nutrients and the oil itself. We actually should refrigerate in hot weather because. It will oxidize. It's a, it's a very healthy product, but it's sensitive to heat.
So in the bar and that's something to take into consideration because it, that can be a nuisance, unless you have a fridge in your barn or you can keep it in the house and take it with you when you go. And I'll usually use two to three ounces of the oil per day, and then we have him protein. So remember.
I said that the hemp seed has a lot of protein in it. It's a highly bioavailable, bioavailable protein. It is not a complete protein that contains every amino acid that we need, but it is an excellent source of protein. So one ounce of seed contains 9.2 grams of protein, approximately. And with a little bit of processing, just minimal processing, we can concentrate that protein into a fairly small scoop.
To me, one of the beauties of the protein is that as we try to increase our protein levels, that we're feeding our horses. Most of the time we're doing that with genetically modified corn and soybean and soybeans in particular are high and oh, Amino acids and, um, and in protein levels. And so we're feeding a genetically modified food that has, that's a, another talk sometime, but the GMOs are not necessarily very helpful to our horses, digestive tracks.
They're not necessarily the most helpful products to feed and soybean meal is processing. And the oil is removed from it. And so it really is an incomplete food. Whereas hemp and hemp protein powders are complete foods.
[00:20:52] Steph Bradley: So let's go back a little bit to the CBD and the endocannabinoid
[00:20:58] Dr. Joyce Harman: system.
That's the, that's a good place to start trying to understand the CBD side of things, because why do we have this endocannabinoid system and why didn't we hear about this 10 years ago or 20 years ago, or back when way many of us were in college? I certainly didn't learn about the endocannabinoid system when I was in vet school.
And that's because it really was not. Studied until much more recently. So we ha we know about our fight and flight system and particularly around the horses flight is a, um, is a common occurrence. So the endocannabinoid system is sort of the opposite of the fight and flight. So it's the forgive and forget system.
It's the relax, the eat, the sleep, the protect, the forget. And as we go through, some of the things we might use cannabinoids for these items will become more important and more apparent. So forgive and forget and fight and flight two opposite systems that actually kind of balanced each other.
Cannabinoid receptors are in most body parts. So it means that since they're in most body parts in most mammals that a cannabinoid or CBD type of a product will have an effect on many different systems. So we have these CB one receptors and CB two receptors, and there's a bunch more too, if you really want to get into science.
The CB one receptors are the primary receptors for cannabinoids CB one cannabinoid, one receptor, and those are usually found in the brain and the nervous system. So any condition that affects the brain or the nervous system might be responsive to some CBD, the CB D two receptors. Are found in the immune system and in some of the organs.
So our digestive track our spleen, our stomach, and that can be tell you what other body systems can be affected by a cannabinoid type product. The interesting thing about this endocannabinoid system is that it really is about balance. It's about increasing function. If it needs to be increased and decreasing function, if it needs to be decreased.
And so we end up with a healthy, a healthy body rather than trying to stimulate one system. Or suppress another system. We're just trying to find that balance point.
So CBD in horses, that's where, that's where my experience has been. And I started feeding. Started feeding him to horses back in the 1990s, feeding hemp seeds and hemp oil. But at that point, it was very difficult to obtain in large quantities and the small little tiny bottle of, um, of hemp oil in the grocery store.
Didn't go very far in the barn nor did the little tiny packet of hemp seed. Now that the world is starting to grow hemp, hemp seeds and hemp oil are, are very easy to obtain. And I always have those available on my harmony equine.com website. The CBD portion. I've started feeding CBD to horses about three and a half, four years ago, working out what kind of quantities we needed to feed to get responses.
And what formats are the easiest to feed it to horses. So horses in general seem to be very responsive to CBD. Most species of animals that I have fed CBD to horses, cattle, sheep, cats, dogs, goats, all seem to have perfectly good endocannabinoid receptors. Most of the time we see CBD as an oil and it works great as an oil and it's easy to absorb and for our smaller animals, it's the easiest way to dose it because we can, we can give the quantity that we want and measure it precisely.
With the large animals it's generally or often more economical to actually feed it as a powder. And sometimes you can even obtain it as in a pellet form, pure CBD left on the leaf has been extracted, and we're going to talk about extraction in a minute, but we leave it behind on the leaf. And so it makes an economical easy to feed type of product for the horses to get.
It's usually fed with meals because most of our supplements in the horse world are fed with meals. And you will hear people say, you can maybe get a better result if you feed it. Put it directly on the horses, mucous membranes or, or feed it without food. But the reality is that some of the absorption studies are actually showing that it's better absorbed if you're feeding it with some form of fat.
So many of our horse feeds these days, we are feeding some fat. So the bottom line is that you can feed it in any format that your horse appreciates,
[00:27:25] Steph Bradley: how much CBD should
[00:27:27] Dr. Joyce Harman: a horse. So this is a, this is a really good question because there are differences in quality, sometimes major differences in quality and in concentration, but in feeding a high quality CBD product around 25 milligrams of CBD content is what really seems to be the average standard dose for.
But if horses are sensitive, if they're normally very sensitive to either herbs or even drugs that you give them, you can start with a very low dose and work your way up. If you're actually seeing results at a very low dose, there may not be any need at all to go home. CBD is a very interesting product in that way.
And that many times the best responses are at a very low dose and you don't need to go high. On the other side of that coin, it's very, very safe and there are some animals that need much higher doses, much higher quantities. So we can double it to 50 milligrams twice a day. And there is some research being done on some cancer patients and some of the seizure dogs and some of the human cancer patients where they're using extremely high doses, very, very safely.
Unfortunately this time it would be very hard for many of us to afford some of those research doses, but we're finding out that there are some cases where you actually need to go to that highest. But I would say that that's going to be very rare and you would only be doing that, working with a veterinarian.
So I'm familiar with working with high levels of CBD and I would say 95 to 98% of the horses that I have worked with don't need much more than 25 milligrams. Usually starting out. I'm giving it twice a day. Once you have sort of a good response, you may only need it once a day, which would be cutting the overall dose down.
Many times, you can just decrease the dose, the amount that you give. So it's a very flexible herbs and you can increase it or decrease it as needed. I usually make the changes 10 to 14 days after I've made a change. Decide if that's appropriate or not, and then make another change if I need to.
[00:30:14] Steph Bradley: And you mentioned there's CBD on every street corner.
How do you know if you can trust a product? What's the criteria. Yeah,
[00:30:22] Dr. Joyce Harman: that is one of the most important things in the CBD world these days, and really in any hemp product that you're feeding, because remember I said, it's a bio accumulator, so. If you're feeding hemp seeds, you want to know that they're grown organically.
If you're feeding hemp protein, the same thing. If you're feeding a CBD product, you definitely want to have third party testing and whoops,
there we go. Um,
Somebody is changing my slides. It's not me honest. Okay. So for third party testing, that means that the product, the end product that you're going to purchase has gone out to a laboratory that's not associated with the company. That means it's an independent laboratory and they're going to test it for cannabinoids cannabinoid content.
So you know what you're getting, they're going to test it for THC to make sure that you have a, a low THC virtually undetectable, and they also need to test it for molds or bacteria to make sure that it's a clean. Kim is a little bit temperamental to grow. If you're looking at it for its CBD. And so molds and bacteria can certainly become a problem.
We also want it to be pesticides, pesticide free and solvent free. So remember I said that the legal limit of THC is below 0.3% and, um, If you can find it at zero to 0.7 0.9 or virtually undetectable, that will be the best. What each company, a company that's doing. A good job is going to have a certificate of analysis of each bag.
Posted on the website and that's become standard in the industry. And it's a good idea to check and make sure that there is a COA of each batch on the website and the good websites will have it somewhere on there in the horse world and animal world. If you can use a company that is a member of the NAFC national animal supplement council.
Then you're assured that there has been third-party testing. You're assured that the dose that they say on the label or the amount that you need to feed is accurate. One of the biggest problems is in deciding the, is, is in the way the labels are made, because sometimes it can look like. There's lots of product in there.
And yet the actual active amount of CBD is not that high. Other times, I've seen some products label that, you know, you're going to give a thousand milligrams of CBD and a thousand milligrams for a single serving of CBD probably should cost you a small fortune, much less giving it all month. And so you have to question, how did they get that much CBD into a product and why do you need a thousand milligrams?
So you want to learn as much as you can.
And
[00:34:26] Steph Bradley: part of that is all the buzzwords out there, full spectrum, broad spectrum. How do I know? What's what,
[00:34:33] Dr. Joyce Harman: um, unfortunately there's no industry standard actually. So. Um, these terms are all out there. The one term that's probably fairly consistent is the isolate and the isolate means that the CBD has been extracted and it's usually just one it's CBD or maybe CBG.
It will only have a few ingredients and those they can extract out and they can claim to be completely free of THC, most full spectrum or broad spectrum plants are going to have a trace of that 0.05 or something like that. THC, because it is a plant. So the isolate is a little bit more like a drug or a little bit more.
It's more processed. The people selling the full spectrum and broad spectrum feel that and the herbalists and I'm an herbalist myself feel that we have a better effect on the whole body when we have this enteroscopy or broad. Rather than an isolate, but there has been some research done with the isolates and they're not bad things, but you want to make sure how they're extracted and how they're processed full spectrum and broad spectrum.
Get to be a little bit grayer because there is no regulation. Generally the full spectrum means that. It will have some of those turpines and it will have more than one type of the cannabinoids. And so that is a complete herbal effect or this entourage effect with the trace of THC, potentially the broad spectrum is really very similar to full spectrum and different companies use these words interchangeably.
And some companies have a very set definition, but being no industry standards, we know what that can mean. It means whatever the company tells you. It means not necessarily a regulated word, but the broad spectrum also can contain most of the cannabinoids and the turpines and plus, or minus a little bit of the THC.
So it's a little bit of a wild west on terminology, but our best herbal effects usually come from the full spectrum or broad spectrum.
[00:37:34] Steph Bradley: And you mentioned the importance of labels. Can you help us understand what the
[00:37:40] Dr. Joyce Harman: label I can try to help us understand? Um, because that can be confusing. So as an example, We'll take our, this is just one example.
We have 50 milligrams of hemp extract listed on a label. So that sounds like a lot. Right. But hemp extract is also hemp oil. Just like the hemp oil that we talked about early on, which is nutritious, but does not contain any CBD. So 50 milligrams of hemp oil. Containing 15 milligrams of actual active CBD.
So that's a big difference, but if you're not reading carefully, you might say, oh, 50 milligrams. Well, I only need a half of a, a half of a dropper full here for my horse to get 25 milligrams. Well, you'll actually only be giving seven and a half milligrams of CBD and you'll wonder why it doesn't. So that same bottle might say you have 3,600 milligrams of him, which is probably accurate, but that's hemp oil.
So you can get hemp oil at the grocery store. In reality, in this example, you only have 10 80 milligrams of CBD in that same. So the hemp oil is a perfectly good thing to dilute the CBD and we have to dilate the CBD in something so that we can measure it accurately. And so that it tastes reasonable, but we just have to understand what is on the label.
And so you weren't really liked to have companies that show you up front, the actual company. And so, um, if you need to, and you're not sure what you have call up the company and say, is this hemp oil or is this actual CBD content?
And
[00:40:00] Steph Bradley: how is the, how has CBD made?
[00:40:05] Dr. Joyce Harman: So CBD is made, can be made in many ways, the healthy ways that we want to actually be using.
The, the plant itself, the turpines can be removed easily with an ethanol type of mixture. And ethanol is alcohol and many herbalists can make an ethanol extract, um, at their, you know, in a small herbal, um, compounding facility. Or it can be made on a giant scale and ethanol is a standard way of extracting an herbal product.
So if you go into the health food store, you'll see on the shelf a little bottle of say milk thistle, and it's extracted an ethanol. So you can do that with organic ethanol and you probably have a little bit more of a natural balance of your cannabinoids and your terpene. It's a little bit, um, let's say messier process, but it definitely, it leaves behind a wet or moist, um, product that then if you're going to make use of it for something else has to be dried usual.
And the nice thing about hemp is you can use the entire plant. So the waste product of doing an extraction can go on and become something else. Whether even if it's just really healthy compost, the CO2 or carbon dioxide extraction, and you'll often see the words super critical, and that has that's a scientific term as to how the actual machine.
Is actually a very environmentally friendly way of extracting the oils and the, the CBD from the plant. And it leaves behind a nice dry product. The equipment is more expensive and more complicated and it's, it takes several steps, but it gives you a very good quality, healthy product. And you have less waste product because you're not using the ethanol in truth.
They are both valid and both good. What happens though? Especially the inexpensive stuff that's being sold on the corner store and only costs $10 a bottle either doesn't have much CBD in it or they've extracted it with common cheap extract. Chemicals like butane or petrochemicals. And these are the sorts of things that oils in general are extracted with.
So if you go to the grocery store and you buy corn oil, they've used benzene, or they've used some kind of a, of a solvent to take the oil out of the plant and then they boil off or, or remove chemicals. The toxic compound, but there are still going to be traces of that left. You do not want to be feeding that.
And so, um, we want to avoid anything that has been extracted using toxic compounds, and that's going to be common in your cheap products.
The organic certification is ideal. The USDA organic certification in of hemp really only started last year. And so there are not that many growers that are certified and. To the USDA certification. And in reality, to qualify for USDA certification, not only does it have to be grown certified, it has to be processed certified.
So there are some, especially some of the small companies that are growing to organic standards and doing a great job. So if you know about a company, you can certainly, at this time, you don't have to see the USDA organic if you know how they're growing it, but. If it has the USDA organic certification, you know, that it's been well grown and that it's been extracted safely.
And I hear
[00:44:47] Steph Bradley: in different states, there are different rules as to whether or not it's
[00:44:50] Dr. Joyce Harman: legal. Yes. Technically it's legal to grow hemp everywhere in. As far as CBD and even the hemp seeds and the hemp protein, you're not allowed to sell it in certain states. And this changes every day. So what's legal today might be illegal tomorrow or vice versa.
And so it's important that, you know, what is legal in your state? And legal to purchase and the good ethical websites will actually say, cannot be sold in XYZ state and they'll change it and update it as those states change. Some of the many of the veterinarians in some states are not allowed to actually discuss cannabinoids.
And so if you ask your veterinarian about it and they're reluctant to talk about it, or they don't know about. Part of that is because they're not supposed to be the laws just haven't caught up to the veterinarians, unfortunately. So it's not your, it's not your veterinarian's fault. If they are uncomfortable talking about it.
Other states you're allowed to in the state of Virginia, I'm allowed to, to educate about it. So check and see what's happening and keep up with the laws in each state. The legal side of this though, is during competition. Can you use hemp products? And there's a big N O for CBD that is actively outlawed by both the FBI and the U S um, the F or whatever USA, EA, or whatever the latest acronym for that is.
And so. If you are using a CBD product in your horse, we're recommending that you stops at least five days out. Seven days is totally safe so that they can't can't test you positive hemp seeds and hemp, protein contain nutrients and things like the omega-3 fatty acids you can get from flax. You can get from fish oil, you can get from chia seeds, you can get from all kinds of things.
That's a normal. Um, feed ingredient that is found, um, in lots of things, there is no CBD in your hemp seeds. So yes, you can compete on hemp seeds and protein, and nobody will know. So in your local competitions, if there's no drug testing, there's no reason for you to worry about it. It's in your competition.
That's done. Under-regulated.
And how
[00:47:51] Steph Bradley: will I know if this will benefit my
[00:47:54] Dr. Joyce Harman: horse, ah, the real reason that you're listening to this talk, which is really not for all of the science, but, um, it's a good thing to know all the background. Remember I said that this endocannabinoid system is all throughout your horse, so. Many of the things that we treat commonly are arthritis, musculoskeletal pain, back pain.
I call it CBD a great old horse tonic. It's like sort of one stop shopping. You get anti-inflammatory in the joints. You get some liver support, you get some nervous system support. You get some digestive support all in one package. The seeds themselves are anti-inflammatory. They support the immune system.
CBD supports the immune system. We use a lot of it in tumors and cancers and the research that's coming out in cancer treatment with CBD is excellent. It's also can be very supportive if the animals are undergoing some kind of chemotherapy, which we don't see too often in the horse world, but we do see in the veterinary world with the dogs and cats, I use a lot of CBD in Lyme disease horses because of the pain and discomfort they're in, but also for its immune system support for its digestive support.
There was a new paper out recently that showed how CBD actually helps support the microbiome, the good bacteria of the gut. It can be useful in laminitis and then the pain that's associated with laminitis, and it can help protect the gut from some of the drugs that may be used at the same time. Some of the coolest things that I have seen happen are in the anxiety and sort of the post-traumatic stress horses, horses that really have been through a hard time in their life.
Remember I said the forgive and forget system, so it literally helps them forget all of the traumatic stress that they've been through. Forgive it not worry about it. And, um, sometimes they're just grumpy from pain. Other times they are very worried that something's going to hurt them. Again, certainly isn't the cure for every single horse with mental issues.
But I have found that it's beneficial for very many of them.
[00:50:50] Steph Bradley: And while we're talking about conditions, uh, Janice asks is hemp powder for horses and CBD liquid for dogs. Something that you recommend is a lifetime immune support.
[00:51:03] Dr. Joyce Harman: Um, it can absolutely be used for, I, I take my CBD every day for my own immune system support. And feed it to my old dogs. It's um, as with any plant, sometimes it's a useful thing to give them a little break.
You run out for a week or two. That's fine. But the research is actually showing that there is a condition called endocannabinoid deficiency disease, and I don't think they have totally worked. Y we are seeing this, but we have lots of deficiency diseases. Now from our general, the diet, the toxins in the, in the environment.
I mean, we could go on and on about all the things that, um, that are contributing to our being less healthy, but the support that we get for the whole body from. Both the seeds from the omega-3 standpoint and the CBD for the endocannabinoid system and it's whole body support, it makes it a really useful tonic for most of us.
[00:52:32] Steph Bradley: Great. And, um, I know you have some cases, Joyce, we've only got about five minutes. Uh, do you want to show one or two of them? And then Karen said she can send those to all the participants if they're interested.
[00:52:47] Dr. Joyce Harman: Okay. And this is just a slide. That's got a little plug for our monthly webinars series, our good health men ships series that we're working with.
Hosting up onto our YouTube site and this will be posted within a week up on the YouTube site for everybody to share. And the, the hemp CBD one is one that we're also encouraging people to. Um, if you need a zoom webinar for your horse club or something like that, I'm happy to do that. Alive showing of that.
So we talked about arthritis and musculoskeletal and back pain being one of the most common things that I treat. And this is not a single specific case, but a lot of old horses that have multiple joints involved. You're not going to go and inject every joint. And so you have the anti-inflammatory effect, but you also have an interesting, positive effect on bone metabolism.
So we use a lot of things like us FOSS and in the human world, those are called by phosphonates and those actually can have a negative effect on the bone metabolism itself. And. CBD actually has receptors in the bone. And we think about bone as being kind of a dead thing, but it's actually a very living structure.
So CBD can actually help bone metabolism. It definitely helps on our positive effects on pain and movement and gait. We don't yet know all of our long-term effects on bone metabolism because the research is in such early days. This is one of my coolest PTSD cases was an Arabian mayor. She had serious ongoing abuse issues because not only had she been picked on and abused by humans, but the pasture that she was turned out in, um, some of the horses were actually abusive to her and would get her into a corner.
They seem to just want to pick up. So it was, it had gotten almost impossible for me to touch her much less. Do anybody work on her? And she tended to pace the field. She was actually getting worse and worse. Um, and we were not able to get her comfortable. She was hardly resting anytime she saw the other horses, she would just start walking and walking and walking.
And she was actually losing weight and this was becoming quite a concern. So we started her on 25 milligrams twice a day. And literally in two weeks I was able to go up to her, not only touch her, but to do a chiropractic treatment on her, her neck and spine and upper legs, lower legs took a little bit long.
But she had never been very good with her lower legs. She actually started to gain weight and she would relax in the field and she was starting to, to graze normally. And, um, you know, you could look out there and say, oh, she looks like a normal horse. And that was a really, really neat case. And she continued to improve.
[00:56:31] Steph Bradley: Well, thank you, Joyce. It looks like we're running out of time. Uh, thank you everybody for listening. We really appreciate it. Uh, and as Joyce mentioned, please remember that she's available to do live webinars for your horse club and I've put in the chat box, her the harmony, uh, how to reach your info@harmonyequine.com.
Thanks everyone. And have a great night.
[00:56:58] Dr. Joyce Harman: Thanks for coming. It's lots of fun to share this information.