Dr. William Courtney Discusses The Importance Of Cannabis For The Body

Dr. William Courtney Discusses The Importance Of Cannabis For The Body

Transcript – video below: Dr. William Courtney, a physician, my practice is soley about cannabis. There was an article in Scientific American December 2004 about the brains own marijuana. And was intrigued by the idea that there were substances that went from the post-synaptic to the pre-synaptic, so a combination of interest in the biochemistry, the idea that the body produces cannabinoids and then obviously the range of effects as I studied it, it became amazingly interesting.

This the one area of medicine where most of what you learn comes from patients and their experience. A lot of my patients, I live and work in Mendocino and Humboldt Counties in Northern California, and individuals have come from around the world to be comfortable there, and develop safe access and use of the medicine.

If someone from Texas notices that it helped their lupus they would kind of gravitate in that direction so they could grow without fear of arrest or imprisoned. And so the patients would bring these stories that were pretty hard to believe from a western medical mind. A western medical mind likes this idea of a silver bullet, like an antibiotic, stops the cell wall from being able to divide, the animal dies and so we, we being western medical docs, had a single effect for a single drug, so they could understand it and control it.

Where cannabis is very unusual in that it has such a breadth of activity. I now know that that’s based on the fact on its very tissue specific effects. So a molecule like cannabidial which is a modulator, which means that it regulates cell function, it can up regulate or down regulate, it has a different effect in a adrenal gland, smooth muscle, connective tissue, secretory tissue or tissue involved in absorbsion, and so you end up with a concept that is very hard for the western medical mind to embrace, and it looks like the very definition of snake oil. But on closer examination it really reflects 34 million years of evolution as a finely honed modulator that compliments the way we modulate our own cellular functions.

It’s a dietary essential, it’s so much more than a medicine. It’s definitely safe.