Yoga for high blood pressure

Since we're talking about diagnosing and treating more people with hypertension, it would be good to point out that medications are not the only treatment for it and in fact should only be part of the answer, in the same way that Cap'n Crunch is "part of this balanced breakfast".

Another recent study showed that yoga can actually be effective as a lifestyle treatment for blood pressure. The results were quite promising, showing that 3 sessions a week were effective at lowering the blood pressure by 11/6 points over a number of months! And they actually found that it wasn't the physical posturing type of yoga that made the impact so much as the meditative and deep breathing types, which anybody should be able to do without fear of being injured. It was actually found to be most helpful in people 50 years or older who already had issues with hypertension.

It seemed like this yoga method was as effective as the DASH diet or losing 5-10% of your body weight if you are overweight, all of which are on par with some types of blood pressure medications in terms of efficacy.

You can find it in numerous places around the area and specifically looking for places with classes involving pranayama (breathing) or restorative yoga would be idea, as well as probably yin yoga.

I think any of these practices that involve deep breathing and focus are effective because they are good at relieving stress and tamping down the fight-or-flight system which raises the blood pressure.

NSAIDs

Advil and Motrin are ibuprofen, then you have Aleve (naproxen). Those are the over-the-counter ones. Prescriptions are Mobic (meloxicam), nabumetone, indomethacin, Toradol (ketorolac), diclofenac, Lodine, and the list goes on. All of these medications are in a class called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). I'm giving you this list because there is mounting evidence that these medications a) don't work as well as we'd thought and b) have some very serious long term side effects we're finding out more about. NSAID's act by reducing the amount of prostaglandins you make in order to reduce inflammation. However, prostaglandins have a ton of other effects and are involved in the maintenance of just about AIDs and also stronger if they are taken every day and/or around-the-clock. every other organ system that you have. The effect is stronger with higher doses of NS NSAID's work best and are best indicated for times when something is r...

Kidney Stones

I've written about this previously , but it's often hard to explain to people what a 10 is on the "1-10" pain scale if they haven't been in that spot before. For women who have had children, they generally know what a 10 is, but for men it's a little harder. When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation, we had a patient calmly sitting there saying his pain level was at a 10 and our resident, who was an ex-military sniper with a large skull tattoo on his forearm and a crosshair through the eye, calmly leaned forward and asked, "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you could not be in more pain than you are now, correct?" The patient changed his answer. Getting to the point, a kidney stone is about the close I can come to describing a 10/10 pain to people who haven't gone through childbirth. The fundamental issue is similar - your body is trying to move a big solid thing through an opening that was not really desig...

Pain

Sorry to be a pain I would say about 90% of the comments I hear from people about their pain threshold is that they think they have a high pain tolerance. Which is statistically impossible unless I just attract people who have a high pain tolerance. We traditionally ask people to rate their pain on a 1-10/10 scale and while we hear a lot of 9's and 10's, I would say that, having been present for a number of them, a 10/10 would be giving birth to a first child. For those who haven't experienced that, my old psychiatry resident described it as "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you would not be in any more pain than you are now" (he was also a former Marine sniper which might explain that). But this is pretty pervasive throughout the medical system and got me wondering as to how people's understanding of what their pain threshold was matched up to what it really was. Fortunately, there were researchers who had a yen to poke peopl...

Hey Doctor Scott ...

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