Your blood pressure is one of the key metrics tracked by modern medicine.  The primary concern is too much pressure causing a blood vessel to rupture and cause a stroke.  High blood pressure also is a major contributor to heart attacks and chronic heart disease.  Over a 1000 people each day die in this country from causes with high blood pressure as a major contributor.  It is estimated that between 70 to 80% of first heart attacks, strokes, and chronic heart failure patients have high blood pressure.  Worst of all, 1 in 3 people have high blood pressure.  Compare that to the ½ of 1% (0.5%) of people who are diagnosed with any type of cancer or the .001% of the population that contract AIDS each year.

The really strange thing about blood pressure, in spite of it being so impactful and common, is 95% of the time your doctor has no idea what is causing the pressure to rise.  They spend billions on cancer research and AIDS research every year, and yet a problem that is a hundred times more common and they have nothing.  What’s up with this?  They rule out adrenal, thyroid, and kidney disease, and if that comes up empty, as it usually does, they say “We don’t know.”  They call it idiopathic essential hypertension – that is doctor lingo for “We don’t know hypertension.”

Now before you get all conspiracy theory about this, let’s look at why doctors don’t know.  The problem lies in how medicine looks at the body.  Western medicine began in this country as a way to meet the needs of the battlefield during the Civil War.  It treats disease by attacking its manifestations, the symptoms.  This works well in emergency life and death situations as often found in war.  Western medicine is all about saving your life – a good thing at times.  But Western medicine is terribly deficient in understanding how the body works and working within and with the extremely complex balances in the body.

Blood pressure is a perfect example of this failure of Western medicine.  Abnormal blood pressure is a consequence of the body getting out of balance in one or many ways.  It is a result of many biochemical, endocrine, and neurologic factors which influence the heart, vascular tone, blood viscosity, and the health of the blood vessels themselves.  If your blood pressure is out of balance, we have to look at:

Electrolyte excess or deficiency
Oxidative fatty acid metabolism
Membrane permeability (sterol/fatty acid balance)
Sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous balances
Cardiovascular stress
Myocardial insufficiency
Kidney excretion insufficiency
Testosterone excess or deficiency
Estrogen excess / progesterone deficiency
Posterior pituitary/ adrenal cortex insufficiency
Inflammation

As you can see there are a lot of different balances that can be out of whack, and you may have one, two, or the whole lot messed up.  Modern medicine does not look at most of these physiological mechanisms when evaluating blood pressure.  Medicine likes single cause / single effect situations that they can throw a drug or external intervention at.  The body is really messy and complex.  Single cause thinking does not work for health maintenance or for chronic diseases.  It sometimes works for acute diseases, like an acute infection or acute injuries like a gun shot wound.  Human nature is to ignore or discredit anything we can do nothing about.  This appears in medicine as ignoring or discrediting any problem you don’t have an answer for.

Let’s look at some examples of blood pressure causes.  When you go to your favorite burger joint and try to decide between the Coke and the milkshake to go with your burger and fries, which is easier to suck up through a straw – the Coke or the milkshake?  Think of the sucking by your mouth as a pump.  You have to work much harder to suck up the milkshake.  Now imagine that your blood might be as thin as a Coke or as thick as a milkshake.  Which situation do you think would require higher pressure to pump around?  The thick milkshake blood would require much higher pressure, and checking your blood pressure would show you have high blood pressure in that case.

While this sounds kind of silly, what we are talking about is blood viscosity measured by erythrocyte sedimentation rate and hemagglutination.  Certain things you eat, inflammation, disease states, gut bacteria, infections, and so on can drastically vary how sticky your blood gets and how thick it becomes.  Historically this has been termed blood sludging.  It can actually be seen as it happens in the blood vessels in your eye.  Most hypertensive people have high blood sludging driving up the work the heart has to do to move blood around.  What factors do we have to address to thin out the blood and make it easier to pump?  Our electrolyte balance (controlled by the kidneys, pituitary, adrenals, and diet) is critical, fatty acid metabolism (diet), inflammation, hormone balance, infections, basically a long list.  Diet is a key player here.  Most hypertensive people know they have to be very careful of salt.  In reality it is the balance between sodium/potassium and chloride/bicarbonate levels that have to be watched – not just sodium.  Sugars and simple carbs ramp up inflammation and trigger blood sludge.  Any seed oils and especially any hydrogenated fats and trans fats really thicken the blood.  Here is a video:  YouTube

So basically eating junk food drives up blood pressure.  The older you are the more compromised your digestion will be and the more the poisons from junk food will get into your blood stream.  That is why you can get away with a lot of junk when you are young but not as you get older.  Although I find clinically that even young kids are showing these problems these days.

Stress is a major factor in blood pressure.  Stress drives up your sympathetic/ fight or flight nervous system activity which makes your heart pump harder.  A funny example of this is white coat high blood pressure – where your blood pressure goes up just because you are at the doctor’s office.  We are drowning in stress these days and this produces such high rates of high blood pressure.  Meditation, nature, fishing, art, friends, things that increase our relaxing parasympathetic nervous system help lower blood pressure.  Happiness is an essential ingredient for health for this reason.

The big picture here is that blood pressure is a reflection of balance or lack thereof in many different systems.  Most of these systems are controlled by lifestyle and diet – both generally out of the control of your medical doctor.  Consequently your high blood pressure is called idiopathic because doctors don’t have a pill or intervention that gives them control over the causes.  Instead they resort to drugs that either reduce the volume of blood to pump (diuretic water pills) or actually poison the heart so that it can’t pump as hard (calcium channel blockers, ace inhibitors).  These reduce the pressure by inhibiting the pump without fixing the actual cause.  This may be better than allowing the pressure to blow out a vessel and cause a stroke, but at what cost?  

Is there a better way?  Yes there is, but it requires us to clean up our life on all levels.  We have to reduce our dietary stress, emotional/mental/social stress, and get our inflammation under control. What that looks like is very individual.  We are all different and need different specific answers to this health challenge.  There is no one right answer to blood pressure, but the general answer is that it is telling us we are out of balance and we need to get our life back into balance ourselves.  Doctors can not do this for us.  Pills can block symptoms for a while, but not forever.  The answer is to get healthy.

Take care,

David       

             


Ellen update:    

Here we are catching Ellen and her friend Jan heading out to check out the new art exhibit at the Fine Arts Center in Carmichael.  At least one of us has a life!