What are Natural Remedies for Hypertension?

Why don’t more doctors use natural cures for high blood pressure ?

Before we go any further, I need to clarify an important point. Type I or essential hypertension has no cure. The word “cure” has the connotation that once you treat high blood pressure, either with drugs or a natural method and your numbers go down, then you’re “cured” , you no longer have hypertension and you can stop treating it. But that’s not the case at all. In almost every instance, if you stop doing what lowered your blood pressure, it will go back up. Therefore, I will try to avoid using the word “cure”.

The only natural remedies for high blood pressure most people know about are diet and exercise.

If you’ve been diagnosed with hypertension or pre-hypertension and you are overweight, your doctor may have mentioned that you need to lose some weight by watching what you eat and getting some exercise.

With some doctors that’s the extent of it, then he or she writes you a prescription for one or more hypertension drugs.

The primary reason for this is most doctors rely on what they were educated in, primarily the use of pharmaceuticals to treat illnesses. In many cases their education in nutrition or exercise science or anything else that might be categorized as natural was minimal.

But that’s changing, medical schools are teaching more preventive medicine – how to stay healthy not just fix problems. They’re teaching future doctors the essential part nutrition plays in maintaining health and preventing illness.

Many doctors are taking continuing education courses because they’re tired of treating their patients with drugs that may help their symptoms, but have sometime serious side effects and don’t fix the underlying problems that caused the symptoms in the first place. Hopefully that includes your doctor.

The two biggies: Nutrition and Exercise

Proper nutrition and exercise more than any other natural methods can help to lower your blood pressure and improve your overall health.
And may help prevent hypertension if you don’t now have it.

Vitamins, minerals and herbal supplements

Of all the supplements that have been linked to lowering blood pressure, the minerals potassium and magnesium are the standouts. Others include vitamin C, calcium, hawthorne berry, garlic and folic acid. We will cover these and more in other articles.

The most important thing to remember about vitamins, minerals, and herbs is the definition of the word supplement. According to Websters Dictionary, a supplement is: something added, especially to make up for a lack or deficiency.

Your primary source for any vitamin or mineral should be the food you eat. That’s how your body was designed to obtain it’s vitamins and minerals.

Alternative therapies

Any of the above treatment methods can also be considered alternative to conventional western medicine. Many of these remedies have been successful in other cultures for hundreds of years, and are now slowly being adopted in the west.

These alternative therapies include:

• Holistic medicine
• Chiropractic
• Homeopathy
• Meditation
• Breathing for Relaxation
• Hypnosis or Hypnotherapy  (nobody’s going to make you quack like a duck).
• Acupuncture
• Naturopathy
• Ayurvedic
• Traditional Chinese medicine
• Yoga

One size does not fit all

If you’ve been subscribed a drug for hypertension (or another illness), your doctor did a follow up with you to make sure that the drug was getting the results she wanted. If not, she may have adjusted your dosage, changed to another medication, or added another medicine.

The reason – we’re all different, what works for you may not work for me.

The same is true for alternative treatments. What lowers my blood pressure 10 points may have no affect at all on you.

And just as your doctor may prescribe a combination of drugs to get the desired results, a combination of natural remedies will probably give you the best results.

One last note. Don’t expect the fast results that you may get from pharmaceuticals. It may take several weeks or longer to start seeing a drop in your blood pressure. So you’ll have to be patient. Hey, that will help too. Become more patient – lower your stress – lower your numbers.