Marie's Story: Fibromyalgia and CBD

Today, Cali Weed is sharing a testimonial we received by email from a 54-year-old woman who wished to share her experience with CBD. As she wishes to remain anonymous, we will not reveal her full identity.

“My name is Marie, I’m 54, I live in Brittany, and I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in 2007. The first pains appeared in 2004, after both my parents fell ill. I was treated by Doctor Baron, in the Côtes d'Armor, who was at the time the specialist in fibromyalgia and chronic pain in France.

Antidepressants, a 6-month course of morphine, then painkillers – I was then lucky enough to spend three weeks on a treatment programme at the Centre de Rééducation et de Réadaptation Fonctionnelles de Trestel, set in a magnificent spot in our region and well known for taking in injured top-level athletes and people severely affected physically after a road accident, a stroke and so on.

This helped me get back on top of this wretched illness a little, but I remained fragile and dependent on medication.

At the time, CBD didn’t exist, and on a friend’s advice, I started using weed. I knew it was illegal; my use was moderate, just a little in the evening before going to sleep, but I wasn’t really comfortable with it from a moral point of view.

Even so, this solution really helped me, and I was even able to gradually wean myself off painkillers, which often cause other health problems in the long term.

Thanks to weed, I was actually able to take up regular physical activity, and so regain my self-confidence, then train in organic market gardening – and this physical work helped me even more to break out of the vicious circle of pain.

But the THC in weed has psychoactive effects (getting high, if you like), which I didn’t enjoy, even though I only felt them in the evening when I used it. The other problem with THC, which works against what people with fibromyalgia need, is that it doesn’t help you achieve psychological balance, and my hypersensitivity remained, which meant that every time life threw a challenge at me, I relapsed.

So I stopped THC, because my pain had really decreased and I thought I was ready to live without medication or any other substitute.

After a few days, the effects wore off and my pain came back. When I talk about my pain, I’m of course including all the symptoms that go with it for me: the feeling that my brain is wrapped in cotton wool, great difficulty with memory and concentration, severe fatigue, sometimes a sense of imbalance, the notorious pain in the cervical spine and shoulders, which causes tension headaches, and so on.

So I went back to using THC, and then CBD arrived in France. I replaced weed with CBD oil taken sublingually – no effect, back to square one. I started looking for more information about CBD: this molecule was being used by people suffering from pain linked to cancer, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain and also fibromyalgia.

So I started taking CBD oil again alongside weed, then gradually reduced the weed each day while increasing the oil. And this time, it worked. In fact, I read online that the brains of THC users don’t initially respond to CBD alone, because they are used to a high concentration of THC and not to CBD, which is only present in tiny amounts in illegal weed – which is why I needed this transition.

My brain is now used to CBD, and goodbye to weed and all the problems that come with it. I use CBD in flower and oil form. I started by taking one drop of 20% Full Spectrum CBD oil (for better results, a tiny amount of THC is recommended), and gradually increased the number of drops until I reached the dose that suits me: 4 drops, in the evening only.

Please feel free to share my story and my experience, which I hope can help people in similar situations, and I wish you all the best with your website: cali-weed.fr”

Marie C.