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CBD (Cannabidiol) with Dr. Austin Quon

6 years ago

Dr. Austin Quon is a doctor of chiropractic out of DeMoss Chiropractic in Newport Beach, California. Today, we’ll be talking about CBD. CBD is a cannabis compound that has significant miracle benefits. It is the non-psychoactive component of cannabis, which means it does not get you high. It has been found to help many people with seizures, anxiety, depression, anti-inflammatory issues and much more. Today on the podcast, Dr. Austin shares the research and talks about how CBD is helping thousands of people worldwide. Please welcome, Dr. Austin Quon.

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Listen To The Episode Here

CBD (Cannabidiol) with Dr. Austin Quon

Austin, where are you from?

Kevin, I am from Orange County, California in the beautiful Costa Mesa. We’re right outside of Newport Beach. I’m born and raised here my whole life. Luckily, I’ve been blessed to get to practice here. It’s sunny 85 degrees out here.

What got you into chiropractic?

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I spent my entire career before I got into chiropractic as a strength conditioning trainer.

I got into chiropractic on a limb actually. I spent my entire career before I got into chiropractic as a strength conditioning trainer. I went to school as a kinesiologist. I knew I wanted to do something related to the human body. I’m really passionate about how we could really unlock this beautiful being that God created and how we can maximize movement potential, strength potential, peak performance in our athletes. That’s something that always triggered my interest. I was a basketball player growing up, so I got to really get hands on with strength conditioning and working out and exercising. I followed that passion at Westmont. I studied there. I finished my Kinesiology degree there. I got into more of the physical therapy spectrum. I was looking to physical therapy. I really truthfully had no idea what chiropractic was. I went just on a limb, hung out with my buddy, Garrison. He was my roommate in undergraduate, so I really trusted a lot of the stuff that he’s doing. He told me about chiropractic and how it works, just the real basic spiel that we give everybody about the nervous system, the spine and how important the brain-body connection is. I was sold. There was no real selling. I just have to know that this is exactly what I need to do. I found a calling basically immediately in chiropractic in how I could use my hands and truly use the two little resources God gave me to get to people.

You were on a little bit of an accelerated program in college. Didn’t you finish college in two years or something?

Yeah, I did the two and a half year track over at Westmont. I invented that one.

Even at chiropractic school, it was very impressive how you were able to just comprehend all that information at once. You’re a brilliant guy.

That’s the thing, when you’re really passionate about a topic and you can really research it, it’s not work to study. It’s not, “I have to study the human body. I have to study neuroscience tonight.” It becomes this thing that you fall in love with. Honestly, I learn more and more about chiropractic every day. We learn more about different subjects of science every day. It’s always a growing field. It’s something that I’m really excited to get to learn continuously from guys like you, from my mentors and people that I’m colleagues with, just sharing experiences and practice and things. It’s awesome. We’re having so much fun.

Austin, out in the Golden State out there, you have a beautiful product called CBD.

We do. It’s not legal in all 50 states though apparently.

That’s crazy to me because I heard miracles happen in all over the world with this.

Miracles have happened. It’s not just here in the States, it’s all over the world. People need to realize that there’s been this really terrible stigma against marijuana. Marijuana is a term that the DEA created and put into the American conscious in 1937 when they passed this Marijuana Tax Act. It effectively deforested hemp worldwide. There’s this propaganda that got created against marijuana. We have medical doctors in America who had been using cannabis for years and years and years as a medicinal supplement. They’ve used different tinctures, different remedies. They’ve used the leaves. They’ve used the actual buds. There are all kinds of different parts of the plant that we’ve used as a medicine. A lot of people don’t know that George Washington talks about how you could pay taxes in hemp. We needed hemp back then to run the business that was going on back then.

Do you know what happened as far as why they shut it down?

Yeah. There’s a big thing about textiles. William Randolph Hearst and some of the guys that were in the textile industries, they were in for paper. The biofuel availability and the things that we can do with hemp not only in the body as medicine but as biofuel potentially, as a textile, as wood products, as paper. A lot of people don’t know, Henry Ford, the guy that made the first Model T, he made a version of the Model T entirely out of hemp. It was powered on hemp biofuel and it was made out of hemp, like plastic. This technology has been around for really long time. These innovative ideas using hemp for different products and using hemp for different things, it’s been going on since forever. It’s been going on since the beginning of the time. Dr. Bill and I talked about it in our CBD workshop. There are these cool hieroglyphics that sometimes we see, palm trees and things.

Truthfully, there are all kinds of history about people using different hemp supplements and different types of herbal remedies throughout history. It makes perfect sense to me why a plant that has such healing capabilities. Potentially, a lot of the research today is talking about there’s anti-epileptic capabilities, anti-tumoral, anti-fungal, anti this, anti that. Eventually, it becomes this anti everything. A pharmaceutical company has a drug for every single one of those symptoms. We’re challenging a trillion-dollar industry potentially with one single plant that’s very renewable. It grows like a weed across the world. It can basically grow in any condition anywhere, it’s a serious issue for our pharmaceutical industry as a multi-billion dollar industry. What we’re seeing nowadays is that especially in areas of California, Colorado, some of these states that started to legalize cannabis, there is a strong revolution, there’s a strong movement towards using these plants as natural remedies for anti-everything basically.

It clearly has a central effect on the nervous system. The fact that you can use chiropractic and that together, the results out there you must be getting has got to be absolutely phenomenal.

It’s a beautiful thing because the CBD hemp goes perfectly aligned with everything that we believe as chiropractors. The emphasis of chiropractic is that we’re allowing the body, we’re allowing the brain to communicate freely with every cell. Everything in the nervous system has to communicate and integrate properly. The CBD, what we’re finding is that there are cannabinoid receptors on every single cell in the body. Every cell has a little receptor for cannabinoids. We’re learning more and more about these receptors every day. There are different receptors for different cannabinoids. The research is constantly being done and constantly changing. What we do know is that every cell has these receptors. Your body was innately created to receive cannabinoids.

Austin, before we go any further, I want to make this clear for all the listeners out here, CBD is non-psychoactive. It doesn’t get you high, right?

Exactly. It doesn’t get you high. Let’s talk about that for a second because that’s a great point.

What does CBD stand for?

CBD stands for cannabidiol. It’s the main non-psychoactive cannabinoid in the hemp plant. Within the cannabis plant, on the buzz there are multiple different types of cannabinoids. There is a huge spectrum of non-psychoactive cannabinoids. There’s a huge spectrum of psychoactive cannabinoids. Each of these cannabinoids reacts to different receptors in the nervous system, the immune system, the integumentary system, all kinds of different systems in the body. These receptors all interact together and help the body maintain a better homeostasis. That’s the big thing that we’re realizing with these receptors. It helps tell the body what to do better. That’s what we’re trying to do with chiropractic. We’re trying to get the body to get the best messaging system from the organs, from its sensory.

We’re finding that the CBD especially in the nervous system specifically there’s what’s called a CB1 receptor. There are more CB1 receptors in the brain than any other neurotransmitters in the body. We’ve got to make sure that if the neurotransmitters are being affected by the way the cannabis is used in the body or the neurotransmitters are being affected by the way that the cannabinoid receptors in your body need to be affected, we need to start investigating that as chiropractors and as a medical field in general. Because if all of these really terrible psychotropic drugs that are for anxiety, anti-seizure, a lot of these psychoactive chemicals are trying to push more dopamine to the system or more serotonin and to flood the body with neurotransmitters falsely.

We can produce a more natural response to help the brain regularly by just using something as simple as a plant-based cannabinoid. Potentially what they’re finding too is that there’s an endogenous system where your body produces its own cannabinoids. A couple of those molecules that are most notable they call it 2AG. 2AG stands for 2-Arachidonoylglycerol. That molecule is most analogous to CBD. That molecule is found in colostrum, in breast milk. It’s a really, really important molecule for babies to have immediately once they start breast feeding. It helps with their modulated immune response. There are all kinds of other really interesting cell physiology that goes on once the cannabinoid receptors are effective.

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Another big human body cannabinoid that we’re finding is what we used to think of as the runner’s high endorphin.

Another big human body cannabinoid that we’re finding is what we used to think of as the runner’s high endorphin. That endorphin is called anandamide. That endorphin is released whenever you exercise. It’s constantly produced at an equilibrium level. Once you start exercising, now that production of the cannabinoid starts spiking, then it’s released into all of your body’s receptors. From where I stand, I would argue that what’s the most common research nowadays is that exercise is basically good for everything. Positive meditation, positive vibes, it’s good for everything. What they’re finding is these states of arousals, these stimuli that cause positive arousal in you to get these runner’s high endorphins, feel-good endorphins triggered were seen that they act more like cannabinoids in the body than anything. When we start releasing these neurotransmitters, these endorphins, they act like cannabis. It’s pretty amazing some of the things we’re doing.

Again, it’s all to regulate the body. All these cannabinoid receptors are helping each cell, each specific organ and tissue regulate better and do whatever its functions is supposed to be better. I’m not going to sit here and say that chiropractic cures anything. CBD, this cannabis isn’t curing anything. What it’s doing is physiologically on a cellular physiologic level, it’s helping your cells heal and communicate better. I’m not parading around saying that cannabis is the cure-all for everything. It’s absolutely an essential nutrient and we’re finding that it’s essential the same way more similarly to vitamin D or vitamin C or some of these vitamins, these essential nutrients that you need to create neurotransmitter in your body, to create hormones. We’re finding that a lot of those come from hemp and from cannabis.

The majority of the time with CBD, you’re ingesting it, you’re not smoking it, right?

Right. There are lots of ways to ingest CBD. As a doctor, I’ve got to say that smoking anything is probably not the best way especially just because it’s hot, it’s heating up with tar. It can be detrimental to your health because of the smoke. As far as ingesting it with the hemp oil supplement that we’re doing, you just put it under your tongue, you eat it just like you would eat any other food supplement. We also do a salve lotion that you can just rub on top of it. There are a lot of different ways to ingest and to get cannabis into your system, but not necessarily the same way that everybody thinks about. It’s not necessarily that you have to get high to get this effect. There are non-psychoactive constituents of this plant that are going to be super effective.

There are different states of cannabis. When it’s raw and it’s the raw nutrient that comes directly from the plant that’s not heated at all, it has different cannabinoids. Once it’s heated, it turns into a different cannabinoid. When you juice cannabis leaves and you juice the buds, there’s no psychoactive proponent to that because the THC never gets activated by the heat. There is a different molecule that becomes produced once you heat it up. There are all kinds of different cannabinoids. There are also cannabinoids where your body, once it’s ingested THC or CBD, it degrades the CBD and the THC into further cannabinoid constituents. The body continues to use the cannabis. It continues to take the first molecule when it was raw and potentially heated and it continues to age it and continues to utilize this cannabinoid plant. It’s a continuous system. It’s a collective, cumulative effect when you use a hemp supplement or when you ingest cannabis when you use CBD. It has a cumulative effect to the body.

It’s pretty amazing how it works with almost everything: pain, seizures, anxiety, depression. I’ve heard countless people taking it strictly for that and it’s regulated their system in that way too. What are some of the things you’ve been seeing in your office with all that?

Especially with seizures, epilepsy, even with some of the kids at our office with autism and some of more psychological and developmental disorders, we’ve had really, really good effects as far as getting the brain to start doing things that it wasn’t doing before. I’m not saying that it’s curing anything or that it’s heals anything but it’s regulating. The cell physiology starts to get what it needs again. Things start happening the way it was supposed to be happening in the way it was designed to happen again. I have a slide that we talked about in the CBD workshop where we talk about the different types of neurotransmitter receptors for dopamine, serotonins, some of these molecules that are very indicated in Parkinson’s Disease, anxieties, depression, disorders. The CBD molecule is able to help regulate the production and the utilization of those neurotransmitters. When a CBD molecule attaches, sometimes it almost acts like a lock and key and it blocks the attachment of a neurotransmitter. Sometimes it can help regulate that way, but again, it’s all about regulation, it’s all about getting the body to do a homeostasis to come back to equilibrium. Sometimes when you have anxiety, there’s either a spike or a really big decline in hormonal levels or neurotransmitter levels. That’s typically where we can get that equilibrium to start matching again.

Since your body has the receptors and your body can regulate it, do you have patients that can take it every day almost like a vitamin?

It all depends on what you got going on, conditions-wise. Obviously, a patient who just wants to be a little bit healthier that doesn’t really have a whole lot of symptoms or anything, somebody who isn’t already a cannabis user, those see benefits from utilizing a hemp oil supplement. One thing that I mentioned about hemp oil is that there’s always a certain amount of THC in the supplements to make sure that you get that entourage effect. It’s a synergistic effect of just the plant being the way that it was created to be on Earth, not removing certain molecules out of it. We try to keep our supplement as pieced together as possible and not try to extract too much out of it. What happens is that the dispensaries in the places that are selling CBD supplements nowadays, they have to physically extract THC out of the supplement to keep it CBD dominant. That can affect the potency sometimes and it’s never like a specific scientific potency. It’s more of that synergistic potency that we’re talking about where some people don’t always get the lasting effect.

It’s being processed a little bit?

Right, it’s the same concept. It’s all being processed but it’s the matter of being the most clean process, the most natural supplement with the most original molecules in it possible. That’s something that I recommend to patients as far as when they use our supplement. We make sure it’s super low THC from the hemp plant. The other thing is that there are different methods of adjusting it. We have salve lotion that if people have a topical pain, low back pain; I personally use it for my low back pain. I’ll have pinching from sitting all day or whatever I’m doing, I rub it on there, move it around a little bit and it feels great within a couple of minutes honestly. It’s amazing that there’s this electrical component to CBD too where it can start working almost immediately.

I’m sure that the listeners have seen some of the videos where some of the patients have seizures, like a kid is having a seizure and they drop a CBD right under the tongue immediately or they take an inhaler of CBD immediately and it stops the seizure instantly. Part of that we think is due to that electrical capability of it. The CBD acts like a neurotransmitter more than anything.

I will say one thing. I broke my elbow last year and I was in California. My cousin ran to the dispensary, got me some CBD. I flew to Florida to get the surgery and that worked a thousand times better than after I had my surgery than I had whatever painkiller it was. It might have been OxyContin or whatever it was. That stuff messes with your head. I was just not right.

Those narcotic pain medications are so toxic. We have an epidemic in America right now. I know you’re aware of it. People are being prescribed pills for all kinds of crazy reasons. A lot of it is that frankly medical doctors are not well-educated on what we do as chiropractors. Part of that is our fault, because we don’t do a great job of explaining to them as a profession what we do and how important it is that these people are having their nervous systems checked regularly. The same as you get your teeth checked out regularly. That’s the problem.

What’s crazy too is you see all these commercials all day long, not to mention half of the commercial is all the side effects you can have from the pharmaceuticals, at the end of the commercial it says, “Check with your doctor to see if you’re a candidate for this drug.” They’re advertising their drug to the doctors. That’s the doctor’s job to tell you which drug you should be on. That doesn’t make any sense to me.

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We’re one of the only countries in the world where it’s legal for pharmaceutical companies to advertise drugs on television the way that we do.

I’m pretty sure we’re one of the only countries in the world where it’s legal for pharmaceutical companies to advertise drugs on television the way that we do. I remember joking around with one of my friends from Europe. The guy didn’t know what a Viagra was because it’s not main staged like it is here in the States. You see a Viagra commercial every Sunday on football because who’s watching football on Sundays? A bunch of old men. That’s not funny to anybody that’s in a different culture. That’s not what we normally see on the TV, it’s not what we see on the media and other places. It’s really interesting to see how the pharmaceutical industry really has a hole on marketing here in the States. There’s a vaccine for freaking everything.

I did my concussion seminar and I was joking that pretty soon they’re going to have a vaccine for concussions. I have never heard of nothing like that. There’s no medication for that right now. They would tell me, “There’s a vaccine for this, vaccine for that. There are pills for this, pills for that.” We’ve got to go out as a community what we can do better and how we can get more natural healing mechanisms into our body. The way that we’re going is not good. So many people are on narcotics. Most people go from OxyContin and now they’re on the streets taking heroine because heroine is cheaper and it’s easier to find them than OxyContin from a doctor.

What we don’t want either is the pharmaceutical companies getting hold of the CBD, right?

Of course, and that’s something that I talked about at the workshop too. They made CBD a Schedule 1 drug on the federal list. The reason for that is not because it’s bad for you. The reason for that is because they don’t want to research it because it might actually show that it’s good for you. We don’t research that meth is good for you. We don’t try to prove that meth is good for you or that cocaine or crack or any of these hard drugs are good for you. We don’t want to know that cannabis can help us for the reason that a lot of the pills that we take because this symptom occurs, that symptom occurs. We can get one supplement, one plant that grows like a weed. It’s easily ingested. It’s easily consumable. Literally, you can just pick it up a plant, grind it up and use it as medicine. That challenges the pharmaceutical industry. That challenges the paradigm of how we understand health.

We can move from this reactive system of healthcare that we live in where doctors wait until you’re sick. The only time health insurance will pay for any of your stuff is if you’re sick and dying. We need to get people out of this understanding of care and into proactive healthcare. That’s got to be our goal. It could be CBD, it could things like turmeric, ginger, all of these natural food supplements that just grow in the ground that were created for us to be here. We can use these things as remedies, as nutrients that we need for life. That goes with all the things in America with diet and lack of exercise, lack of good diet.

It’s sad too because I’ve even been a victim of this. It’s completely backwards on the way we get our healthcare. There is a place for the medication and everything. But a lot of people get pumped with all these medication for five, ten years, and then they come to us and then the system detoxes, they start getting better and they said they wish they did this ten, twenty years ago. Sometimes by the time it gets to us, it’s almost too late, with people with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. We have very high success rates with early onset Alzheimer’s and everything because we catch it early enough. The people would get their nervous in check and corrected and they start to get better rather than going down the road twenty years with that medication. By that time, hopefully we can help but it might be too late.

Heidi Haavik is a great researcher out there in New Zealand. All of her research right now is done on brain and how the brain is communicating with the spinal cord to all of the organs. If you just go on PubMed, a lot of her research talks about cortical drive. Cortical drive is your brain’s nerve impulses to your limbs and to your organs. That’s what we’re talking about with chiropractic. This is cortical drive. It’s brain power, brain energy, brain chemically powering your body, electrically powering your body. That’s where all the research is being done right now, that your brain is physically changing. Physiologically, I can change your brain with the cervical adjustment or with Blair technique adjustment or with a lumbar spine adjustment even. All of these things are affecting your brain because the brain is intimately connected with the spine. It’s amazing that this organ is constantly integrating all these things. To your point though, it’s all the research right now in chiropractic is how we are changing the brain. It totally makes how if you change somebody’s brain, you’re going to affect Alzheimer’s. You can affect things like CTE. I know you did an episode about concussions. I’m really passionate about that topic too right now. Brain function is where we’re at in chiropractic right now.

If you get a proper nerve flow to the affected area, anything can happen, it can change. If it’s cut-off and it’s like that for a while, it’s tough to get somebody better. You release all that pressure around the brain stem, you see miracles happen.

You’re talking biblical miracles sometimes. I see some crazy stuff with this chiropractic thing that we’re doing. You and I are both really young in this profession, but just in our short time I know you and I have both seen some crazy, crazy unexplainable miracles happen. It’s such a beautiful process that we get to see every day in our offices. This thing that I’m doing with CBD, hopefully we all start doing with CBD, there are biblical-like miracles going on in this field. It’s just something that we’ve got to get out to the world and tell people about it.

We have to let the people know the stories and some of these testimonials of patients that have had cancer, autoimmune conditions, Parkinson’s, these detrimental, devastating neurological disorders and different types of disorders that take families, take really, really good people on Earth. We’ve got to make sure that we can start changing it for the better. Truthfully on my watch, it perfectly makes sense to me why if you have a molecule that helps your cells keep replicating all over the place and replicating too many cells in one time, if you have a molecule that can keep healthy immune cells from attacking its own healthy tissue in an autoimmune diseases and stuff, that molecule is CBD.

Austin, where are you located and what’s the name of the practice you’re working on? Where can people find you?

I’m in Newport Beach, California. I work at DeMoss Chiropractic with world-renowned, Dr. Billy DeMoss. He is a super legend. I’ve learned all of the fun speaking antics and tactics that I have from him. I’m learning from an old Yoda. I’m over near John Wayne Airport. I love to have new patients. I’m trying to keep myself really busy over here with talks. One thing that I love that you’re doing, Kev, is doing seminars, doing little podcasts, just getting information and stuff for people to view, see, hear and just frankly to do their own research and get out there. I always tell my patients, as a doctor, we’re completely worthless if our patients don’t use the tools, they don’t take accountability for their healthcare and go out and use the tools that we give them; whether it would be about diet, nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress relief, whatever it might be, all the things that we talk to about every day.

We’ve got to make sure we can give it and deliver it to them in a way that’s loving, deliver it to them in a way that they’ll receive it the best and ultimately for us in a way that it’s affordable and that they’re willing to pay for it. We put a value on what we’re doing. Nobody goes into a dentist and asks for a discount. Nobody goes into a cardiothoracic surgeon and ask them for a discount on your heart surgery. Chiropractic is like that. People need to know that we’re not just this BS healthcare field that cracks and cracks and get out. We’re changing lives bone by bone, nervous system by nervous system.

Austin, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. I learned a lot today myself. I love to have you back on anytime.

I love to be a part of it. God bless you. Thanks for having me on. I can’t wait to see what we do here in the future with CBD, chiropractic and some of the crazy stuff that’s going on our field. It’s going to be awesome.

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