The first thing I do when someone tells me that they have high blood pressure is to ask them, "how do you know that?"
The usual response is, "well, my doctor told me."
What did he base that conclusion on?
The typical story is that they went to their doctor once or twice, had a slightly high blood pressure reading (less than 150/90), and were told they had high blood pressure and needed to take medication for it every day.
Let's step back and think about this problem.
Blood pressure is a "vital sign." It is one of our most important physiological parameters. If you give your body a healthy environment, lifestyle, and diet, your blood pressure should be normal.
Does it make sense to take drugs for a disease that is due to lifestyle and diet? Of course not.
Moreover, when do you WANT to have high blood pressure? You need high blood pressure in high-pressure situations. Going to the doctor is stressful. You may get the worst news of your life at the doctor's office. So why wouldn't you have high blood pressure there?
Many patients have high blood pressure when they go to the doctor, because they are anxious. This is called "white-coat hypertension" (high blood pressure).
The first thing I ask patients with a supposed diagnosis of hypertension to do, is to measure their blood pressure at home four times per day, for one week.
I carefully instruct them to wait five minutes before checking it, to focus on relaxing, and to not do anything exciting or stressful while checking it.
The vast majority of them DO NOT have high blood pressure at all. Some of them actually have LOW blood pressure.
Then I tell them to take their cuff to their doctor’s office and DOUBLE, TRIPLE CHECK that the readings on their at-home cuff match the readings in the doctor’s office. Then, we’ve established that 1) their home cuff works and is accurate, 2) they only have blood pressure at the doctor’s office, and 3) they can monitor their blood pressure at home with periodic check ups with their doctor to make sure things stay the same.
Only once we've established that they do, in fact, have high blood pressure, do we treat it as such. Otherwise, we taper them off of high blood pressure medications.
Why do I think this is so important? Many of the medications we use to treat high blood pressure cause losses of minerals from the body, particularly magnesium, potassium, and calcium. We need these minerals for normal, healthy cellular function.
Ironically, cardiovascular disease is strongly associated with magnesium and potassium deficiencies. What if our treatments for high blood pressure are actually making the diseases they supposedly treat, worse?
So what else can you do for high blood pressure?
I recommend red and infrared light therapy, sunlight, sauna, fixing your light environment, and blue blockers.
But what people with high blood pressure need most is proper laboratory testing and evaluation, to determine what their nutritional deficiencies and metabolic imbalances are. Their toxic load can play an important role too, as toxins like lead and mercury are strongly associated with high blood pressure. You can schedule a consultation with a member of my team by visiting my website here and clicking Apply for Consultation. This is vitally important in cases of high blood pressure, given how important blood pressure is and how many different factors there are that affect it. Schedule a consultation today and we can get you started on the path to normalizing your blood pressure, so that you don't need high blood pressure medications for the rest of your life.
Next time, we’ll talk about how I approach lowering blood pressure, naturally. Make sure you’re subscribed to find out more!
Until next time, be well,
Dr. Stillman
My mother is in stage 4 kidney failure. She has excess levels of potassium and phosphorus. She follows a extremely strict diet but the kidneys aren’t filtering out what they need to. She is now having issues with high blood pressure and put on blood pressure meds, which is in torn causing more problems with the nutrients. Seems like there is no good solution on what to do in this case . What are your thoughts ?