Using CBD for Joint Pain and Health

We know quite well by now that cannabidiol (CBD) has powerful anti-inflammatory properties that are incredibly beneficial to the human body. Add to that its anxiolytic properties, and you have one of the most wondrous chemical substances in the world that can help you relax and heal from the stresses of life and whatever you’re focused on.

One of the most intense things most people would ever experience in the modern world is sports, and CBD fits right in with its benefits. It’s a boon for pain management and recovery, which is why athletes all around the world have been advocating its use in recent years. Among those many reasons is the issue of joint health.

Let’s take a look at how CBD can help you relieve joint pain and maintain the health of your joints.

Can CBD Oil Help Relieve Joint Pain?

CBD can help relieve joint pain by significantly reducing inflammation. While CBD oil and tinctures taken orally can help with that joint pain, a more on-target approach to CBD application may be more beneficial to relieving that joint pain.

That means you should use topical CBD rubs and balms to help get more of it on the affected area, letting it seep through the skin and get to the joint and the inflammation within and surrounding it. The science does support the use of topical CBD for pain relief, which can be used with oral CBD for maximum effect and relaxation.

Causes of Joint Pain

There are many causes behind joint pain. It could be from previous injury, current injury, aging, or just wear and tear over time. When a joint starts hurting, it’ll likely keep hurting due to inflammation, which is an immune response that’s supposed to help with healing, but later makes the pain worse if it goes on for too long, in which case it often does.

There are two major kinds of arthritis that most people contend with. There’s osteoarthritis, which is caused by physical wear on the joints, making it the main cause for concern among athletes. Then, there’s inflammatory arthritis, which is caused by inflammation. The root cause of inflammatory arthritis is quite hard to pinpoint, making it a fairly difficult condition to treat without CBD.

Whenever your immune system misidentifies healthy tissue as harmful invading pathogens, it’ll keep attacking it, causing inflammation in and around the joints. This is usually the main cause of inflammatory arthritis, so suppressing that inflammation should be seen as a priority.

Drug Treatments for Joint Pain

In order to prevent such a condition from manifesting and being prolonged, the inflammation must be eliminated to keep the joint from being continually debilitated. There are many drug treatments for relieving inflammation, but they do have undesirable long-term side effects that may make them a bad trade-off if not for the urgent need to relieve the pain.

For instance, the corticosteroid prednisone is used to stop the autoimmune response that causes inflammatory arthritis. However, it has a whole array of side effects such as hypertension, mood swings, anxiety, increased risk of infection, bruising, sleep problems, digestive issues, glaucoma and cataracts, and even osteoporosis, among many others.

Just imagine taking a drug to deal with your joint pain, only for it to weaken the rest of your bones. This shouldn’t be acceptable, but most people with inflammatory arthritis have not had any other choice due to the lack of more effective treatments. When you’re plagued with joint pain every single day in your life, you’ll settle for any relief.

CBD for Joint Pain

It has been found that CBD has tremendous potential in relieving pain and inflammation due to its interaction with the body’s endocannabinoid system. The body experiences various physiological changes due to CBD, most of which are in the nervous system as the CBD interacts with the receptors in the brain.

Receptors are proteins that bind to specific molecules. With endocannabinoid receptors, they specifically bind to CBD and other cannabinoids. The receptors of particular interest with pain and inflammation are the TRPV1 and GPR55 receptors.

CBD has been reported to be especially attractive to TRPV1 receptors, activating them when CBD binds to them. Activated TRPV1 receptors signal the lowering of inflammation, as well as resulting in an analgesic effect that relieves pain in the joints and the rest of the body.

As for the GPR55 receptor, it’s a very common receptor in the brain. When activated, it helps with the natural breakdown of bones, and it can lead to osteoporosis when those receptors become overactive. CBD stops this activity as it’s a GPR55 antagonist, which means that it actually blocks that action. That leads to healthier bones and can even stop the spread of cancer cells.

Fighting that inflammation is important for maintaining healthy bones and joints. Inflammation itself weakens bones as it speeds up the degradation of bones and joints that’s common with chronic inflammatory arthritis.  According to a scientific review, inflammatory disease increases resorption of bones, thus decreasing the strength of bone structures, which then leads to degenerative conditions such as erosive arthritis.

By fighting inflammation as soon as possible, we are able to reduce the possibility of long-term conditions such as osteoporosis. CBD can greatly help with this, thanks to its powerful anti-inflammatory effects. While CBD studies are still quite early when it comes to human trials, animal trials have shown so much promise. It’s safe to assume that CBD definitely helps with inflammation, from what we can tell from tons of anecdotal evidence thus far.

Transdermal CBD Patches for Fighting Inflammation

There are promising studies done on rats that show how transdermal CBD patches alleviate pain and inflammation in knee joints. It makes sense since transdermal patches are known to help make medication seep directly into the affected area much better than CBD rubs and creams, although they can still help.

It’s actually best to put on transdermal patches before physical activity and not after as the increased blood circulation from exercise, especially with an elevated heart rate, helps the CBD seep into the bloodstream more easily.

Conclusion

Aside from just fighting inflammation, CBD also promotes sleep. As you should already know, sleep is the most important thing when it comes to recovery since that’s when the body does most of its repair and recovery. Therefore, taking CBD for your pain attacks the problem in multiple angles, making for the best possible recovery.

Whether you’re an athlete or just someone who has had joint pain over the years, CBD can potentially be your savior. You can use CBD to relieve pain and inflammation in your joints and take back control of your life, perhaps even become active again over time.