Kevin Menard practicing acupuncture at his clinic in the Hamptons.
With the cannabidiol (CBD) market valued at $6.4 billion last year, CBD brands are constantly thinking up new ways to differentiate themselves. One way to do so is to combine CBD with other herbs. As a result, it’s now not uncommon to see a sleep formula that combines CBD with sleep-inducing ingredients, like melatonin, for example. And yet, despite the hyper-competitive CBD market, there remains one area of alternative medicine that remains largely untouched by CBD brands: Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).
Kevin Menard, LAc, Chinese Medicine Practitioner and founder of Dragon Hemp.
Being sourced from a plant (hemp) and highly therapeutic, you might wonder why CBD isn’t already used in TCM. Puzzled by the absence of hemp in his TCM texts, Chinese Medicine Practitioner Kevin Menard, LAc., did some digging and discovered cannabis was in fact recorded as a Chinese herb 1800 years ago. In a recent phone interview, Menard says it even made the shortlist of 50 fundamental Chinese herbs because it was so therapeutic for pain. It was only taken out of the Chinese Medicine books because of the British Opium Wars and subsequent eras of conservatism.
Kevin Menard performing cupping on a client at his clinic in the Hamptons.
Turns out this overlooked combination is actually a match made in heaven. With CBD regulating the nervous system and lowering inflammation, and Chinese…