Since the FDA doesn't regulate CBD, you don't have the convenience of official dosage recommendations. It can take some effort to arrive at the number of drops you need to consume to adequately address a health complaint.
Calculating The Correct Dose
The size of the dose you should take can be influenced by a variety of factors: how heavy you are, and your body chemistry, among others.
Talking to your doctor can be an easy way to come by a working plan, something that may be especially important when you take prescription medications alongside your CBD on a regular basis. If there is no dosage plan forthcoming from your doctor, however, one way to proceed would be to start with a small dose, say, 30 mg a day, and to raise the dose by 5 mg each week until you are able to perceive the health effects you hope for.
How Do You Work Out How Many Milligrams You're Taking?
Most CBD products - oils, capsules, gummies, and so on -- come with literature about the quantity of CBD present per dose or serving. A package of gummies, for instance, may come with 5 mg of CBD per gummy. If you prefer CBD oil, you probably have a dropper on the bottle, and information on the label about how many milligrams there are to a drop.
If the label only mentions how much CBD there is in the entire bottle, you'll need to make calculations for yourself. In general, it takes 20 drops to make up a milliliter; if you have a 20 ml bottle, then, you could work out that the bottle contained 400 drops. If the label says that the whole bottle contains 2,000 mg of CBD, you would need to divide it by 400 to arrive at 5 mg of CBD to a drop. If you need to take 10 mg, you would need to drop two drops sublingually.
What If You Take Too Great A Quantity Of CBD?
In general, CBD doesn't cause harm when taken in larger quantities than needed. A study done in 2011 (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22129319/) found that taking doses as high as 1,500 mg a day did no harm to humans. A different study, one performed in 2019 (mdpi.com/1420-3049/24/9/1694), however, found that very high doses could potentially cause liver damage and interfere with prescription medications.
The incidental effects of excessive CBD consumption can be as mild as diarrhea or fatigue. The side-effects can also depend on the quality of the CBD that you have, however. The higher the quality, the lower the level of impurities present, and the fewer the side effects. A study done by the CDC on a few dozen people, for instance (cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6720a5.htm), found that large doses of synthetic CBD came with serious reactions. If you make the mistake of buying a CBD product that doesn't offer clear, third-party lab certification of the source, contents, and purity, you could end up with such a product. It's important to look for quality, lab-certified products.
While CBD products require no prescription, you still need to pay attention to the kind of dose that you take. Keeping these ideas in mind can help you work out the right quantity to use to help your health.