By Jake Towner
As a living being you know without being told that life is full of conflict, strife, and struggle. I bring up the obvious because I want to invite you to meditate upon the concept of homeostasis. What is homeostasis? According to Oxford’s Dictionary homeostasis is defined as “the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes.” Examples of homeostatic functions include thermoregulation, blood glucose regulation, baroreflex in blood pressure, calcium homeostasis, and osmoregulation. In other words, homeostasis is the function that resists the conflict, strife, and struggle. Another way of thinking about homeostasis that sums things up simply is if you’re feeling good you are in homeostasis and if you don’t feel good you are not. This leads to the question of how do you deal with coping when you don’t feel good? The most important things to keep in mind is staying in a solution-oriented frame of mind not a problem-oriented frame of mind. What is the solution to bringing your body, spirit, and world back into balance after years of whatever happened tore it away from the median? In order to answer this question you will have to ask many more questions but the method of asking questions to find solutions will eventually lead you to the relief you need. Now what does any of this have to do with cannabis? Cannabis has the potential to instill a temporary state of homeostasis or at least a perceived state of homeostasis. From this perceived state of balance you can take the first step to actually restoring your body to homeostasis. The point here is to get into a positive state of mind before you make any decisions about your health and well-being. Starting off from a negative frame of reference you may make decisions that could further impact your life poorly. Hard work is important but take care of your head first. Once your coming from a positive “yes I can” perspective on life you need to take the second step. That step is education. Without giving yourself a proper education you will always be stumbling through life without direction stuck living life using a guess and check method. A guess and check method with your health? That’s a really easy way to die. Educate yourself. It will help you. A Google search on homeostasis will reveal the school of thought that there are essential functions required to maintain homeostasis. They are as follows; • Transportation, absorption, distribution, and circulation of material. • Respiration, or release of energy from food or nutrients. • Reproduction, or production of new organisms. • Regulation, or control and coordination of internal processes. • Synthesis. • Excretion. • Nutrition. • Growth. The purpose of this article is merely to introduce you to the pertinent ideas that you should research in order to have a better understanding of your own bodies’ homeostatic functions. Do you know what the difference between a poison and a drug is? The difference is the dosage of the substance in question. Why would I bring that up? It is because you must educate your self about the various compounds that are necessary components of life functioning. Even compounds like arsenic and uranium are vital pieces of the enzymes our bodies use to perform the tasks required by the functions of life. Usually when you hear about a substance like arsenic you think poison, not critical component of life. This is a misnomer because arsenic is not actually a poison except in extreme circumstances. Elimination of dis-homeostatic compounds is the process through which the body eliminates compounds in which it has deemed as toxic. A toxic compound can be thought of as a poison and thus must be excreted in order to return the body to homeostasis. Whenever there is an accumulation of a particular type of molecule the body must remove the excess or else it will lose stability. This can occur for pretty much any molecule even water so when you think about if you should put something in your body for a medical reason, I would always advice you to take it slow with the dosage. Ease into things and listen to your body. It knows what it can handle once it begins to interact with the new novel article of interest. The process through which the body eliminates the excess depends on the molecule of interest. For example, in the previous mentioned case if your body has an excess of water you will eliminates the excess through sweating and urination. For more complicated molecules things can get more complicated and that’s why we have a liver and kidneys. They filter your blood – everything you consume will end up in your blood and eventually end up in them. The liver is filled with enzymes that break larger molecules down into smaller ones which can be eliminated. This can return the body to homeostasis. The liver has other functions as well. The kidneys also “participate in whole-body homeostasis.” The kidneys regulate acid-base balance, electrolyte concentrations, extracellular fluid volume, and overall volume. In layman’s terms they make pee. This is accomplished through a filtration process which removes the nitrogen waste from protein catabolism through urea as well as uric acid which results from nucleic acid metabolism. These are some of the routes that the body will use to excrete wastes of those types through your urine. The thingy ou should remember is that your kidneys and liver filter all of your blood and everything that you put inside of you. It is at this time that I want to inform you that the rates of excretion are rate-dependent based on enzymatic activity which is sensitive to your genome type. Your body can only handle so much environmental stress under a constricted time domain. Don’t over do it with supplementation and that includes using cannabis. I find that sometimes you need to switch up your strains kind of like the changing of seasons. If you stick with one type of bud for a really long time you can get “blind” to its effect. Lets talk about our intestines. Intestines are another primary way that our body eliminates waste. An interesting fact about our bodies is that there are more serotonin receptors in our gut that in our brain. Serotonin is one of the primary ingredients for the production of our cognition so listen to your gut people. Certain molecules or elements even can be troublesome especially when we re talking about heavy metals, plastics, and certain molecules that can be “mutagenic” or perturb your ability to maintain homeostasis. Just because I said there’s a difference between a poison and a drug does not mean it is safe to drink Mercury, don’t do that you would die. It is appropriate however for a conversation about cannabis, cannabinoids and other constituents of sensimilla as well as industrial hemp. One of the reasons I will always personally stand by cannabis is because there is no dose you could force yourself to take that would ever possibly kill you outright. Heavy metals are especially worthy of concern to me personally. Do you remember Linus Pauling? He coined the phrase any disease is from an excess or deficiency of the essential components of life. A very major theme in our country is heavy metal poisoning and this has a historical reason. Since the industrial revolution the deposition of heavy metals in the soils that we grow our crops on has gone up substantially. There is going to be less and less food available in America that is not contaminated with heavy metals to a certain extent. The problem goes deeper because the heavy metals are in the air. Strip mining operations and industrial plant operations and their accidents have expressed a large quantity of heavy metal into our atmosphere. Let us not ignore the environmental impact of all our nuclear weapons testing ideas for this discussion too. Here at this site you can see the data for yourself the amount of heavy metal emissions into the atmosphere and that you are breathing right now while reading this article. https://en.msceast.org/index.php/j-stuff/ content/list-layout/global. Regardless of anything, everybody on this planet should be actively taking the steps to monitor and regulate the amounts of heavy metals their bodies are containing. The ancient Romans famously poisoned themselves with lead-lined aqueducts. Here’s some data about heavy metal cleansing. First off don’t do it without medical supervision and monitoring because it can be lethal to chemically strip your body of heavy metals that are still necessary for cellular metabolism. The process of removing heavy metals from your body is called Chelation. The method of Chelation is of paramount consideration. Drugs like penicillamine and dimercaprol can chelate your body but are for only the most extreme cases and of course must be done under medical supervision. For a lighter touch according to a 2013 review, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC3654245/ you can use dietary fiber, chlorella, sulfur containing foods like garlic and broccoli, and cilantro to slowly chelate your body. For if it was grown right usually one hit at a time is all you really need. There are extenuating circumstances that might call for more though so you must listen to your body, your heart, and trust yourself to know what your limits are around Cannabis or any medicine.
