Episode Transcript

Reefer MEDness_E187_InspiredPetPart2.mp3

Rene: Hey, welcome back. It's Rene here back in the studio. This episode is part two of a conversation that Kirk had with Sandi Krusik von Bommel. And she's a vet tech, a veterinarian technician. Her consulting business is called Inspired Pet Wellness. And the conversation has really been quite interesting about how cannabis fits into veterinarian care. And so we're going to. Listen to the rest of that conversation, and then Trevor and Kirk are going to give their usual insights and feedback right after. So here we go.

Kirk: So, let's talk about the cautionary tales. Are there any concerns with using cannabis with pets?

Sandi Krucik van Bommel: Do you know, I would say there's more concerns using pharmaceuticals than there is with cannabis, in summary. There are some things that we look for as side effects, but they're really very few and far between when we're doing it responsibly and when I'm guiding my clients through product selection and dosing. In a way that is scientifically supported. Plus we're doing journaling observation methods where we're checking in to be sure that the client is supported. Any concerns we get on top of right away. I can probably list on one hand in my hundreds of clients that I have a time when we've had what I would call more of an adverse reaction. So accidental ingestion becomes a concern primarily when we look at what exactly did they eat. So if, for example, it's an edible or there's, of course, vaping, there's all of these different products that aren't just pure THC. Those turn into cautionary experiences because of the code toxicity that might incur from the other ingredients in those products. There could be xylitol in the gummies, which is toxic to dogs. There could high levels of cacao in it, which theobromine is a toxic ingredient for dogs. We've got other considerations that happen, but the reason why THC becomes a concern when it comes to accidental ingestion is because dogs actually have higher more dense concentration of CB1 receptors which are the ones that attach to the THC so they get those psychotropic effects where they're you know people say my dog is high it will be that they are acting like they are intoxicated. Most of the time, these are limiting timelines that this will occur for. But if we're concerned that we have those other type of products that they've ingested, that is now something that should be addressed by a veterinarian because we have other concerns that might be viable. THC can be toxic to dogs, but lethal and toxic are not synonymous. So there has been no LD50 established for THC in dogs. And so LD50 is a toxicology term. So what ends up happening is, you know, they do these studies where they give dogs high high doses of THC and The assumption is what is that dose that would kill 50% of them and that has never been established. I hate to say that there are studies out there where they've given these enormous doses to dogs and still that hasn't killed them. So when we think about people saying, and I have clients that come to me thinking this as well, like I don't wanna have any THC for my dog cause it's gonna kill them. THC can be extremely therapeutic, extremely therapeutic when we're using it in responsible ways and in responsible concentrations. It's good for pain modulation, cancers. We can use it for different things that are synonymous to working with CBD or CBG. So there's definitely times when I'm selecting products that have THC in them for considerations. So it really is something that you have to be using it in a way that is going to be medicinal and therapeutic, not psychotropic and not overextending to a toxic level. So they will have symptomology that would be almost like they're drunk or they're high. So, for example, they get static ataxia. So it's like they are standing still, but they're weaving back and forth just like people, you know, when they're intoxicated from alcohol, dilated pupils, sensitivity to light and sound, vomiting and diarrhea. Sometimes there's urinary incontinence And as well, they can be very hyper aware. So any little thing, you know, you might see them ducking and being quite dysphoric. So those are what I consider like toxic effects to THC.

Kirk:  Sandi, is there any question I didn't ask you that you want to expand upon?

Sandi Krucik van Bommel: You know what I would love to just talk a little bit about is when pet parents are looking to navigate through this space, just being aware that, of course, for myself to be there for them, to be supporting them through this journey, to not be feeling alone, and just to understand that this can be done scientifically, responsibly, and in a way that can be absolutely life-changing. Have really, really been blessed with clients that have had such amazing experiences with us working together in ways that I will say that 98 percent of the time clients are coming to me with cannabis or CBD not being their first line of defense. It's usually one of the last. So for example, they'll say they've tried all of these other things and I'll try this just as one last thing that I can, I can try or do. And a lot of times what ends up happening is that is a pivotal turning point for us to be making a difference in a way that they they have their life changed. They have their pets life changed and for me like that's the gift, you know being able to be that resource and being able to help them to find another tool in the toolbox that actually can turn their entire pet situation around.

Trevor:  So Kirk, as we've had so many times in the past, we have someone who had, I wasn't against cannabis, but really had no cannabis interest and then had a big event happen in our life that sort of brought cannabis in. So we have a car accident.

Kirk:  Yeah, no, it's very interesting how, with lots of our guests, how they have brought into cannabis. And so she grew up on a farm, got a farming background. I've heard that lots from aggie type people. A lot of aggie people, you know, grew up in a farm. She became a veterinarian technologist, technician. She never touched cannabis before. Right and then like you said earlier an event happens and it happens to her family and what I what I found interesting is how she explains how her pet is actually part of her family and.

Trevor:  She does. And I think that's very important for her practice and not to take away from that at all, but it is interesting remember, I am a pet parent. I'll proudly say I'm a pet parents. It's really changed over the last, I don't know, 50, 60 years. Like I remember my grandmother being confused that we were feeding our dog at the time its own special food that we bought from a store instead of just, you know, leftovers off the plate. Because you know. 50, 60, 70 years ago, you know, everyone, there was animals around, especially if you live somewhere rural, but they were not members of your family, necessarily. They were there to do a job, they were there make things easier, you, know. Yeah, the whole pet as member of your families is a newish thing, which again, I'm fully embracing, but yes, she definitely thinks of her animals and her clients' animals as part of the family.

Kirk:  Well, it's urban versus rural. I mean, obviously, you know, her farm background, more than likely, you know, she was in 4-H, again, hypothesizing here, but more likely 4-h to learn to care for farm animals. And dogs and cats, usually now on farms, they work. Cats take care of the rodents, and dogs take care the larger people that come into properties. And of course, the last 56, I mean when we had pets as a kid, we fed them scraps off the table. And now, you can buy specialized dog food and you can choose between, you know, Old Roy which is what ten dollars for a hundred pound bag or you can buy a you know 40 pound bag for a 100 bucks presumably you're getting better nutrition but there's so many I mean the pet industry is huge right so we spend a lot of money on our dogs and um in this case what I find interesting is um is how she brings cannabis into the care of a member of the family.

Trevor:  Sure. Uh so Kirk, kind of like a nurse, you know we're excluding nurse practitioners here, uh nurses don't write prescriptions for medications. So a vet tech, my understanding, is does not write a prescription for anything including cannabis. Is that sort of what where we're how Sandi's practice goes?

Kirk:  I think so. This is sort of where the analogy sort of takes apart in the road. There are different levels of nursing. You've got the nurse's aide that works at the bedside with the patient who takes care of the ADLs. You got the licensed practical nurse that tends to be a hospitalist. A lot of licensed practical nurses work within a hospital environment. Some of them have their own businesses and foot care is a big path licensed practical nurses or in other provinces they go by other names. A registered nurse, there are three levels of registered nursing. There's the level that I'm at, I'm a regular registered nurse. I'm specializing with my own business. I am off doing my own business as a registered nurse in cannabis but I can't prescribe cannabis. But you know, you can become a prescriber nurse where there are this list of medications and I think it resembles the list that I was dealing with in the North. When I worked for the federal government, I prescribed medications following a list that i was allowed to prescribe from and I think now the provincial system allows that but you have to get another layer of education. Then you have your nurse practitioner. So vet techs do not have any prescription viability at all. But then she also you know discusses the fact that cannabis isn't even on the prescription list so she's working in a gray area you know we've been looking, I've been looking for a pet story for a long time and obviously I've been looking in the wrong places because there are actually associations that she belongs to that promote and educate people for cannabinoid science with pets so so Trevor um So do all mammals have endocannabinoid systems?

Trevor:  Yes and because your background with the with the improv yes and it's not just mammals and we we've done little presentations out there best as i can tell all vertebrates everything with the spine has an endocannabinoid system and if you look a little farther some invertebrates have some endocannabinoid receptors and stuff, but you know, they're different than vertebrate. Endocannabinoid system. So yes, all mammals have one, but actually everything with a spine, everything that all vertebrates seem to have a endocannabinoids system.

Kirk:  Yeah, so Trevor, this is where you know, we've had episode 176. We had a veterinarian explain seizures, pain relief, and THC myths with Dr. Kevin Tolman. Way back when we first started this podcast, back in September 30th, 2018, before legalization, we went to the Winnipeg Cannabis Expo, and we talked to Brad Patterson. That was episode, season two, episode seven. And you know, in a lot of these stories, we talk about CBD, like Brad was really big on CBD. He was actually selling pet wellness CBD products before legalization, which I always thought was an interesting business model. But again, as Sandi says, the whole pet wellness is a gray area.

Trevor:  Okay, so I loved this chicken soup analogy.

Sandi Krucik van Bommel: For example, if you're making chicken soup, you can do a very simple recipe where it's chicken meat and chicken broth, and that would be considered an isolate type approach. So meaning that, you know, when we go ourselves to ingest this chicken soup recipe, it's okay, and it tastes okay, and it still has some nutritional value. However, if we now took that same recipe and we added herbs and spices, vegetables, noodles, let it simmer over time. Not only is it now more nutritionally viable, but it actually has more potential to be nutrition as nutritional. So what I do is I say to my pet parents, we have this approach where in most cases, when we're looking at their goals or the specific reason that they're using cannabis or wanting to use cannabis for their pet. If we take that approach of doing a deluxe chicken soup recipe, we're going to have more potential for the therapeutics to be even more beneficial than going with that basic recipe.

Trevor:  We talk about, you know, an isolate, we talk about blends, we've talked about full spectrum. It can be confusing what all these terms mean. So one of the things she's come up with to talk to her clients to try to explain it is chicken soup. So she said if you have a really simple chicken soup, literally chicken meat and some chicken broth, that's akin to an isolate. You've got one ingredient in there but you know you you can put other stuff in chicken soup. You famously say you put dill in there but you can have potatoes, carrots, just about anything you can else you can think of you could put in your chicken soup and they'll all have their own effect and they work well together. I missed an obvious one, noodles, you know there's chicken broth versus chicken noodle soup so they all if you put them more things together you have more effects affecting more parts of your stomach or parts of your nutrition. And I like that as an analogy for isolates versus blends versus full spectrum.

Kirk:  Completely agree. It's it's um, it's the art of cannabinoid science opposed to the You know do X and you get Y no no in cannabis You have to do X add a couple other things and maybe you get why until you figure it out and you know, and if if and if you're using you know a lot of home, home remedies like myself, you know, I I use cannabis medicinally and I use a cookie in the morning to deal with my aches and pains. I find that cannabis works for me but if you change the recipe of the cookie you have to relearn to use that the next recipe

Trevor:  Well, let me talk about my couple. So as usual, I made a bunch of notes and I'm getting to about half of them. So again, I thought she did a really good job of talking about lethal versus toxic because, you know, in everyday language, people think about them being the same. Really, if something is toxic to you, it's gonna kill you, right? And in medical and pharmacy world, they're not the same. And I know it sounds like splitting hairs, but you know, if I give you a medication and it causes your left arm to go numb, that is a toxic effect. That is a side effect. That's an adverse effect from that medication. But you know if your left arms stops being numb, you know two days after you take it and never has caused you the problem again. That was in the annoying but not that bad category. And I thought she made a really good point. And this is when we're talking about sort of accidental ingestion of THC, mostly among dogs, that they can have toxic effects. Like they can look like they're drunk. They can feel like they are having a really bad day. But that is different from other medications. Most medications have, and she talked about it a little bit, an LD50, an amount that if you gave a bunch of animals, this dose, 50% of them will die, so that is a lethal dose, 50%. There hasn't been an established LD50 for dogs, so even though, and again, be careful around your pets, you should always be careful round your pets. You know, don't leave the roach out for them to eat, don't leave the infused cookie out for him to eat. Don't leave edible for them But, on the other hand, if you're veterinary cannabis consultant says you know some THC might be helpful to your dog consider it because even though there could be toxic effects you know side effects there is no lethal dose so i just want i thought she said that really well and i don't know if i made that more clear but i thought i thought you worded that very well

Kirk:  No, I completely agree with you and I was sitting there listening to you and thinking about in my world as an emergency nurse, an overdose means something different than what it means to you as a pharmacist, you know, and I think it's the same. What we're trying to tell our listeners is if someone has a toxic dose of in our world, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to die, right? And one thing Sandi wants to make sure here is I've talked to her a couple of times since the interview, and she wants to always encourage her pet parents to seek veterinarian advice if they have any concerns. And the other thing is to consider when we're talking about the adverse effects of a medication, and in this case, cannabis. We usually talk about a normal healthy individual. So if your dog is normally a healthy dog and he gets into your cookies, he's going to have a very bad evening and day. But if you have a dog that has congestive heart failure, you know, he has got some problems with his hips or he's got some digestive issues and he gets into you cookies, it might be a different presentation that may need some fluid replacement, it may need some veterinarian assistance. So, you know, the whole thing about one of the myths of cannabis is that it won't kill vertebrates. As you know, there's no lethal dose of cannabis as we know it in any part of the animal kingdom. In this case,

Trevor:  I don't know, that might be stretching a little bit. We know, in dogs and people, we're pretty sure.

Kirk:  Okay, I mean, who's going to give their lizard a cookie, I guess? Lizards have vertebrae?

Trevor:  I am pretty sure.

Kirk:  Yeah, so, yes, people, be responsible, know your pet, and, you know, this is, it's kind of cool, it is kind of cool that we found Sandi, I love the way she discusses it, and I love that fact that there are pathways for pet caregivers to go with cannabis therapies. I think this was fascinating to me that there were these associations out there and you can specialize as Sandi has.

Trevor:  Yeah, no, I really appreciate you spent time with me and I don't know if you were going to have us talk about it now or later, but where are they getting their medication? Because I was a little-

Kirk:  This is a very good question.

Trevor:  Because i was a little confused i'll tell you what i got i sounded like some of them were at least at least some of them were going to like a human rec shop and buying their stuff is that a thing?

Kirk:  Well, yes, yes. And this is how we ended the conversation, basically that she recommends the pet parents go to a dispensary. And I guess, I guess what, and I didn't have a chance to ask her about this and it wasn't until I started reading the transcript and preparing for this conversation that I was saying to myself, huh. What about the ratios? I mean, we've heard over and over again how difficult it is for medicinal users of cannabis to get low THC blends and higher CBD blends because, you know, in the medicinal field, CBD is used more often than the THC component. So I never got to ask you that. Maybe the pet parents are medical consumers of cannabis also and they're getting those stuff from the medical dispensary. So I guess in every episode we have to have one hanging question.

Trevor:  If it's just one, then we're doing well, usually we have a half a dozen.

Kirk: Have we said it all?

Trevor:  So are we still, Reefer Medness the podcast. I'm still Trevor Shewfelt, the pharmacist.

Kirk: Oh, gosh, have we not introduced ourselves again? I'm Kirk Nyquist. I'm the registered nurse and we are Reefer Medness, the podcast. You can find us at reefermed.ca I always recommend people go to our website. The site is academically organized. It's like going into a library. You can find the episodes you want in various search ways. Once you find us, then I've added, Trevor, I don't know if you've noticed this, but on the bottom of our webpage now, I've put in a listen here and all of the podcast platforms that we are on will pop up for you. So now you can choose the podcast platform you want to go to from our webpage and then you know on your mobile device. The other thing I want people to encourage is once again we got a notice from Meta. You're doing a great job by the way with keeping our social media alive and relevant. It's just so sad that Meta doesn't support it. And we need our listeners to help us. You know, we know that there's a strong group of listeners out there. We follow you as much as you follow us. We need to get more people listening. So it's gotta be a word of mouth campaign. Reefer  Medness to podcast. The best cannabis podcast out there! I just said it.

Trevor:  The best cannabis podcast out of Dauphin on Labor Day.

Kirk: The pharmacist wants to know the exact dose, right?

Trevor:  So, yeah, please recommend it to a friend. You tell two friends, they'll tell two friend. But it has been another good one. Thank you very much, Sandi. Thanks, Kirk, for bringing us, Sandi, I really enjoyed this one.

Kirk: Cheers, mate.