So you got your new CBD oil tincture in your hand but you don’t know how many drops of CBD oil you should take. This is a common question from someone who has purchased CBD for the first time. I must admit, when i first got into CBD many years ago it was confusing to decide first off which MG bottle option I should pick and then how much of it to take. The one thing I learned during my early days was experimentation was the best method and that proves true still to this day. The reason for that simply is because each person is so unique in so many ways there is not a typical dosage that works for everyone. The manufactures of CBD oil can give broad guidelines on a therapeutic dosage but when it comes down to you individually it’s really anyone’s guess.

There are a few things that may impact how much or how little CBD oil you should take in a day such as:

  • The person’s weight
  • The ailment you are using CBD for in the first place. Depending on the ailment you are using CBD for you might need higher dosages than other people.
  • Your body’s tolerance to CBD. You might be someone who needs less than a standard dosage because your body absorbs the CBD quickly or you might be someone that needs more than the standard dosage because your body is inefficient when utilizing CBD
  • CBD comes in different strengths (500mg, 1000mg, 2000mg, 4000mg), which will directly affect how many drops of CBD you will want to take. A 30ml bottle with 1000mg of CBD in it contains about 30 x 1ml droppers. Each full dropper contains about 33.3mg of CBD.  A 30ml bottle with 2000mg of CBD in it contains 30 x 1ml droppers and each dropper full will be 66.6mg. So essentially it doubles because the concentration of the bottle has doubled.
  • Your age might play a consideration into it

So how many drops of CBD oil should I take?

If you scour the internet for this answer you will likely find just as many different answers to this question. You will find guidelines and tables depending on your age, ailment, body weight. You will find certain blogs giving a calculation such as 0.25mg of CBD X your body weight. You will find other articles stating that depending on your ailment you will want to take more (which may be true depending on your ailment). Cancer is one of those ailments you want to Macro dose (over 100mg per day) because the severity of the ailment is life-threatening. In that case, that’s something you will want to consult with your family doctor about.  Even when it comes to pets they have a weight and breed table that I have seen in the past. While these equations and rough estimates might work for a majority of people they will not work for everyone. If using those dosages do not work for you or have not worked for you in the past then you simply write off CBD as not working which is likely not the case.

There is no perfect dosage for CBD that will work for everyone so we must throw all of these guidelines out the window.

Here is an example of a CBD dosage chart that I just randomly searched for. There were another 100 charts I could have chosen from and they ranged GREATLY in dosage. They simply are a guideline from the manufacture or the retailer you buy them from. The following chart is not what we are advising as you should be dosing when using your CBD but we wanted to show you it as an example of what you might find if you did your own searches.

The ideal dosage is unique to each person

The ideal dosage depends on each and every person and the right way of going about and finding your right dosage is by starting low and slow in dosage. If you start out at too low a dosage and it does not work you might think that CBD overall does not work. If you use too much CBD it may work for you but you may be using more than you need, much more, leading to it being very costly.

By utilizing a low and slow method you get the benefit of your body slowly accepting CBD first off. Over the following days and weeks, you will slowly increase your dosage. When someone comes to us asking us for a recommendation of a CBD oil most of the time I would recommend them a 1000mg concentration. This should last someone about 1-2 months if they are starting low and slow and gradually working up. CBD oil should certainly be used every single day for maximum efficiency. If you go with our advice and start with a 1000mg bottle a good starting value would be about 1/4 a pipette, once a day. Stick with that a few days and monitor how well you are doing after a few days. From that point slowly go up in dosage by let’s say 1/4 more. Keep raising it until you find some sort of relief but still adhering to the same dosage for a few days at least. You could get up to a point where you find relief at 2 full droppers (2ml) twice a day. If this is you then that might be an indication that you need a higher strength in the future.

If you started out with a 30ml volume and 1000mg concentration of CBD, that means each dropper (1ml) would be about 33.33mg
If you started out with a 30ml volume and 2000mg concentration of CBD, that means each dropper (1ml) would be about 66.66mg

Let me do the math on that so you know how I came to that conclusion. A 30ml volume bottle is pretty typical and the droppers inside the bottle are typically about 1ml or at least they have the measurements on them. So you take 1000mg / 30ml = 33.33mg per 1ml.

Here is an example when looking at the dropper pipette

Does the type of ailment reflect any sort of dosage I should be taking?

This is a great question with not an easy answer. Technically yes, from the books and material I have read anyways there are certain ailments which you might want to underdose the standard dosage (PTSD) or overdosage (macro dose) if you have an ailment such as Cancer which is life-threatening. If we actually went into depth on every single ailment and every suggested dosing regime then it would practically be a book. Actually, it is a book which I highly recommend if you are someone wanting to most you can about CBD and the specifics to certain ailments.

CBD: A patient’s guide is a book that you can find on Amazon or your local book store. It’s a book I had actually pre-ordered and waited for a long time. It goes very deep into the technical side of things and covers most ailments that actually had some research behind them which made it such a valuable read. It was pretty interesting to see what type of ailments needed a higher dosage while some needed a lower than recommended dosage. The information is out there for consumers to learn about, you just need to know where to find that information.

 

Are tinctures the right dosing method for me?

When new visitors come to our site, many of them have no experience with CBD at all. The number of choices involved I can understand can be a little intimidating. You first off have a choice between Tinctures, Capsules, Inhalable products such as vape, Gummies, Edibles, and Topicals. Then you have a further choice by selecting the amount of CBD you want in your products which we define as MG. This simply means how many MG of CBD is in the product itself.

After interacting with thousands of people over the years suggesting certain products and reading as many books on CBD I can find. I think that CBD Oil (tincture) is the best method for someone brand new starting out. While it might not be the best recommendation for each and every person, I think it’s the best recommendation for most. The reason for that is because you can vary the dosage very easily. Just think about it, the gummies we offer are usually gummies that have a certain amount of MG in them or the capsules that again have a certain amount of MG in each gummy. The CBD oil tincture is versatile because you can easily vary the dosage up or down and can be very specific with your dosage because of the pipette dropper. This is very important for someone who Is new to CBD because they simply do not know and had no experiencing using CBD before going based on what the ideal dosage for them would be.

Secondly, another contributing factor would be bioavailability. Bioavailability simply means when you use CBD, how much of the CBD actually is absorbed by your body. The bioavailability can vary depending on the dosing method (vape, sublingual, edibles, topicals). Tinctures may not offer the highest availability compared to vaping, but higher than gummies or edibles accompanied by the fact you can vary the dosage easily is a win-win in my books.

For the majority of ailments, I would suggest CBD oil tinctures. There are a few ailments such as anxiety, panic attacks, or skin issues which I might refer to as a vaping product or topical simply because vaping has the highest availability and impact among all the methods which is great for someone having panic attacks. The topicals on the other hand might help someone more with skin issues such as psoriasis or eczema.  This is not to say that the CBD oil tinctures might not work as effectively if not better but those would be my initial recommendations. If you are in a spot of financial security and can afford to test two different methods (tinctures and topicals) that might have even better results.

Here is a great little explainer video explaining bioavailability in more detail.

How to use a CBD tincture?

The next topic which might be good information to customers who are using a CBD tincture is how to actually use it. The standard way of using a CBD tincture is orally and under your tongue, this is called sublingual administration. Typically with specific pharmaceutical drugs such as Ativan (used for anxiety), you would put it under your tongue and dissolve. There are some drugs that do not absorb into your body very efficiently when going through your stomach. This is the case for CBD and why tinctures are administered sublingually. CBD on its own and in the pure state is fat-soluble, this simply means that it dissolves in oil rather than water. This is the reason that your tincture’s carrier liquid is typically MCT oil (derived from coconut oil). Even when digested via the stomach you lose much of the CBD, this is called bioavailability. When you administer your CBD oil under your tongue sublingually you have one of the best absorption options over capsules, gummies, and other edibles.

Under your tongue, you have sublingual glands which is a fast track to your blood supply through the lingual artery and facial artery. This is the reason that dosing orally typically has a higher bioavailability and is quicker acting over the alternative method of dosing orally (eating or swallowing). When you use gummies or capsules you risk degradation of the CBD because of the bad environment in your stomach and gastrointestinal system. Your digestion track is meant to break down foods with stomach acid, enzymes, or bile.



Summary

After reading this article I hope it gave you a little more clarity and answered your initial question regarding how much CBD oil you should be using. The answer is certainly not as certain as it might appear with all the variables at play. Most of the books that I have read would give you the same guidance I have done in the above article. Start low and gradually work up in dosage over days to weeks. Ensure that you use this product for at least a 30 day period because some people simply take longer to feel the effects of the CBD and the ailment they are trying to get relief from. More is not necessarily better, especially when using CBD. We hope that this information serves you well and if you have any questions or concerns by all means please leave a comment and we will be sure to answer your questions on this blog article.