After first putting CBD in my ear and having an amazing near-instant experience, I started wondering whether or not it was ok to put CBD directly in the eyeball – like a common eye drop.
This wasn’t the first time I had this thought about putting CBD in, on, or around the eyes.
When I first had to speculate potentially “maybe” thinking about giving this a try, was when I was last at Disney Land with my parents, my spouse, my little brother, and my sister’s son.
We took a noon-ish flight from Twin Falls Idaho and landed later that night at John Wayne Orange County Airport.
Upon waking up the next day, my sister’s little one had reddish goopy pink eyes, with weird goop starting to form around the eyelid.
At this time, he was already taking an oral dose of CBD to help support autism and muscular dystrophy, and mainly to help him stay calm when loud noises made him plug his ear tight.
After looking at his eye, I wondered, could CBD help restore normal eye function?
I mentioned this to my mom and she didn’t want to experiment on the little one, so she took him to a walk-in clinic and got some eye drops that went on to fix the situation.
After doing a bit of research to answer my questions as to whether or not it was both safe and effective to put CBD oil directly into your eye, I found it to be quite challenging to find a straight answer from a high-quality CBD blog, that also linked to authoritative medical journals.
What I found was some mixed information from only a few researchers doing clinical trials on a very small group of patients. My quick understanding of the available information is some researchers are putting CBD directly in the eye, however, Dr. Clifton mentions that taking CBD on the inside (such as CBD drops, edibles, etc) can help the eye function normally.
The best way to help your eye return to normal function is to utilize high-quality CBD oil for internal use and “not” externally on or in the eyeball. In the near distant future, this may change and there could be various types of CBD eye drops available and recommended by medical authorities.
Currently, there are only a few CBD eye drops that some people might be using while experiencing desirable results. However, this is anecdotal speculation and not recommended by anyone in medical authority.
What CBD eye drops are available?
The only eye drop I found, specifically made for the eye, didn’t appear to be of high quality.
Their website was poor quality, low low-resolution (pixelated) images, had grammar issues, and did not link to any authoritative research, nor did it discuss any research.
It was quite apparent they were saying things just to say things.
They did admit there’s limited research and they also did say a few things that were opposite of the medical journals we’ll discuss below.
I even found one random blog website saying THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what all the medical journals are saying (all without linking to any medical journal), but, they did list the journals in text format – with no links to the journal.
Even though researchers are putting CBD drops in the eye, and although putting CBD oil drops in your eye might provide some soothing effects, there’s not enough research available for me to want to put CBD directly inside of my eye, nor would I recommend doing so – just yet.
If I were to consider putting CBD in my eye, I would use a CBD oil that was completely pure and safe and had no random additives, sugar, or flavoring.
What can you use CBD eye drops for?
Professor of Pharmaceutics and Drug Delivery, Soumyajit Majumdar, Ph.D., is finding a specific CBD analog that may help the eye return to normal function, in a few specific areas.
Currently, there’s no officially recommended CBD eye drop that I’ve found.
Is CBD oil good for eye pressure?
According to the Medical Journal of Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science (IOVS), THC was shown to allow the eye to return to normal functioning along with CBD interfering with THC.
In short, CBD may increase the pressure in your eye and THC might be able to lower it.
More research from the American Academy Of Ophthalmology (AAO) echoed what the IOVS said about CBD not helping return normal pressure to the eye.
In this journal, they ask an interesting question as to why the AAO and the American Glaucoma Society (AGS) recommend and support the use of smoking cannabis.
The AGS publishes position statements on the website regarding the use of THC-based cannabis and eye pressure.
Various methods, besides smoking cannabis, are available to help get the THC into the eye.
A few listed methods are oral, sublingual, and eye drops.
Two more studies (2018 & 2019) are verifying the need for more research into using THC for eye drops.
It appears to be quite clear that CBD oil will not help eye pressure.
Nemus Bioscience may be in the process of developing a CBD analog, to be used as an eye drop to help the eye function properly.