High Blood Pressure and Chiropractic

What pressure?!

Blood pressure is, to most aging people, one of the key indicators of health.  After all, every MD visit starts with a nurse “taking” blood pressure, doesn’t it?  High blood pressure is considered a problem.  But what if high blood pressure is a symptom and not a cause?  What if high blood pressure is one way a body uses to regulate itself through an unhealthy terrain of stress?  This changes the conversation around high blood pressure entirely.  Because then, we have to ask, “What factor(s) is leading to high blood pressure?”  If we don’t find out and simply do something like take a drug to lower the blood pressure the cause hasn’t been addressed what-so-ever.  Everyone knows that is a bad idea!

Best Practices to Lower Your Blood Pressure:

• Add a good mix of appropriate “Doing” activities.  This is a tremendous way to potentially normalize blood pressure.  
• Eliminate the wrong foods such as those containing caffeine (a strong vasoconstrictor). 
• Eat healthy vegetables and fruits as another powerful choice toward normalizing blood pressure.
• Lowering stress levels is also important.  Not only do we need to lower our surface experience of stress but we need to actually lower our physical stress responses – what our bodies do mostly at the unconscious level.  Meditation is one way to do this.  Biofeedback and gentle functional nervous system care such as I use in my office are other very effective ways to lower stress and have strong positive impact on high blood pressure.

If you want to get some of these best practices in place to lower your blood pressure, enlist help –  from friends, family, and supportive people in your community.  Its harder to make big changes by yourself.  In fact, loneliness can play an important role as a cause of high blood pressure.  But that’s the subject for another blog…….