Promising new research findings from Syracuse University has shed some light on CBD’s pain relieving effects. Many claim CBD to be a miracle compound, and anecdotal that holds up. However up until very recently solid published studies have been tough to find and verify, a result of outdated federal restrictions and taboo in the scientific community.
This new study, conducted by Martin De Vita and Stephen Maisto, set out to answer this very popular and necessary question: “Is the pain relief that CBD users claim to experience due to pharmacological effects or placebo effects?”. Studies have shown CBD to have pain relieving and anti-inflammatory effects, but actually isolating those effects to prove that they are the result of the compound itself and not some outside force, like placebo, has been difficult to accomplish. The pair of researchers used high-tech equipment that safely induces heat pain, allowing them to measure how the recipient’s nervous system reacts and responds to it. “Then we administer a drug, like pure CBD, or a placebo and then re-assess their pain responses and see how they change based on which substance was administered,” De Vita clarifies. In his own words, De Vita summarizes the findings, “What we found though after measuring several different pain outcomes is that it’s actually a little bit of both. That is, we found improvements in pain measures caused by the pharmacological effects of CBD and the psychological effects of just expecting that they had gotten CBD. It was pretty remarkable and surprising.”
Basically, they found that CBD doesn’t reduce the intensity of pain actually being felt, but it makes the pain less bothersome by tweaking our awareness and attentiveness to it. In that way, it’s an effective relief mechanism.