Lowering Blood Pressure without drugs protects your health best ….

Today's post: Tuesday, 9-25-2007

Today’s good news is not only do many nondrug methods to lower your blood pressure work, if you do the most important ones & several of the most effective ones, the chances are excellent you won’t need to take blood pressure lowering drugs or you can gradually stop taking them if you already take them now.

The even more startling good news is that doing this protects your health BETTER than taking the drugs.

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Before I explain why this is the case, two important cautions are in order.

1. If your blood pressure is at or above 150 over 100 or 160 over 90, what doctors call stage II hypertension, you DO need to take the drugs – at least until you get the nondrug methods working enough to take over the job.

Why? Because blood pressure that high begins to damage you & threatens even worse problems – even death. It begins to damage your heart; it may damage your kidneys & cause you to need dialysis to stay alive, & it threatens you with sharply increased risk of strokes, a heart attack, or a burst aortic aneurysm. And, those can kill you quite quickly.

In addition, in about five percent of the cases, there is a specific & possibly treatable medical problem causing blood pressure that high. This means that seeing your doctor to rule those out or treat them & to get drugs makes really good sense for higher level blood pressure that’s this high or higher.

So, even though drugs to lower your blood pressure are NOT the best initial treatment below that level or for long term treatment, for people with blood pressure that high, they can be lifesaving. And, the research backs this up. Giving patients with this sky high blood pressure treatment with drugs does lower mortality rates. (It doesn’t do so at lower blood pressure levels. I suspect that’s because of the health damaging side effects of the drugs cancels out the benefits at lower levels.)

2. If you are taking blood pressure reducing medicine now, it is NOT safe to simply stop taking it. Blood pressure reducing medicine works by pushing down or preventing a process that tends to increase blood pressure. So, your body often is pushing back. And, if you quit instead of gradually reducing the dose, you may well get surging super high blood pressure. And, that can be quite dangerous & even kill you.

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Why are the nondrug methods better than drugs in lowering high blood pressure for people with lower levels of high blood pressure & better for long term treatment for everyone?

(Lower includes readings from levels like 127 over 79 to 155 over 95 --though the higher part of the range borders on the danger level.)

The list of reasons is LONG:

1. It’s a LOT easier to keep using the nondrug methods.

People with high blood pressure quite often feel healthy & normal. Then, after they take the drugs, they find themselves feeling spacey, tired, & lacking in energy. Or they almost faint when they stand up. And, many men experience sexual problems including impotence or soft erections. With some of the medicines people develop a hacking, dry cough that continues as long as they take the drug. Side effects like these sharply reduce your quality of life to put it mildly !!

So, it’s no surprise that as many as half the people who start taking these drugs, stop taking them despite the real risks of doing so.

Contrast that with the nondrug methods: One of them increases energy for many people who use it. Another makes people feel mellow & refreshed after it’s used. Yet another has proven to IMPROVE the sex lives of people using it. And, even better, there are hardly any side effects for most of them.

On this factor alone, it’s hardly a contest.

And, there’s lots more….

2. If you use the most important nondrug methods & several of the most effective ones, you can lower your blood pressure as well -- & even better than – you can by taking drugs.

This specifically includes lowering blood pressure to desirable levels when drugs alone cannot for some of the methods.

The reason is simple. The drugs change your internal processes to remove the symptom of high blood pressure but seldom address the causes of it. Most of the nondrug methods work by reducing or eliminating the causes of the high blood pressure.

3. Similarly, while taking hypertension drugs to lower high blood pressure delivers some health protection to you, particularly at higher levels of blood pressure, doing so often causes other health problems.

This sometimes includes dehydration, increased levels of blood glucose or of LDL cholesterol (which both tend to harm your blood vessels & heart), & congestive heart failure.

In contrast to that, not only do the nondrug methods work to lower your blood pressure, virtually every one delivers other health benefits.

Here again, this is usually because the nondrug methods are improving or reversing the causes of the high blood pressure.

4. A corollary of this last point is that, while taking drugs for hypertension for higher levels of hypertension will give you some protection for your health, it is NOT enough by itself to give you strong health protection.

By contrast, if you use the most important nondrug methods well & use several of the most effective ones, you WILL get strong health protection.

This is precisely because the nondrug methods improve or eliminate the causes of high blood pressure & deliver the other health benefits.

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For these reasons, we are now writing an eBook & interactive online course on using the nondrug methods to reduce high blood pressure.

The methods we are including it in it have been tested as effective -- including some tested with double blind studies. And, the doctors who are most familiar with them endorse them.

As soon as it’s available, we’ll announce it here.