Blood Pressure and Chiropractic?

As a chiropractor, I've always wondered about the sources of blood pressure. If you read medical/health literature, you would know that over 90% of blood pressure cases are 'idiopathic'. That means that the cause is medically unaccounted for or simply unknown.

I'm not so sure it is unknown. Ask anyone who has blood pressure and they'll most likely say it is due to stress. Emphatically, I believe it to be the truth and the whole truth. You see, blood pressure is controlled by chemicals released in your bloodstream, mostly from your kidneys and lungs. When the control of these chemicals is reduced, blood pressure may not be as controllable by the body.

So the great concern is who or what controls these chemicals and their release. Well, if you guessed it was your nervous system, you're absolutely right.

Now let's go back to stress for a moment. You may know that stress is of 3 major types: physical, emotional and chemical. Stress, folks, lives in your nervous system. So when your nervous system is under stress, how well does it control the rest of the body, blood pressure included? Not well enough!

So clearly, blood pressure is merely a sign or symptom of the underlying problem--stress on your nervous system.

Consider this excerpt from WebMD:

George Bakris, MD, spoke to WebMD. "And it seems to be adverse-event free. We saw no side effects and no problems," adds Bakris, director of the University of Chicago hypertension center.

Eight weeks after undergoing the procedure, 25 patients with early-stage high blood pressure had significantly lower blood pressure than 25 similar patients who underwent a sham chiropractic adjustment. Because patients can't feel the technique, they were unable to tell which group they were in.

X-rays showed that the procedure realigned the Atlas vertebra -- the doughnut-like bone at the very top of the spine -- with the spine in the treated patients, but not in the sham-treated patients.

Compared to the sham-treated patients, those who got the real procedure saw an average 14 mm Hg greater drop in systolic blood pressure (the top number in a blood pressure count), and an average 8 mm Hg greater drop in diastolic blood pressure (the bottom blood pressure number).

None of the patients took blood pressure medicine during the eight-week study.

"When the statistician brought me the data, I actually didn't believe it. It was way too good to be true," Bakris says. "The statistician said, 'I don't even believe it.' But we checked for everything, and there it was."

"At the base of the brain are two centers that control all the muscles of the body. If you pinch the base of the brain -- if the Atlas gets locked in a position as little as a half a millimeter out of line -- it doesn't cause any pain but it upsets these centers," Dr. Dickholtz tells WebMD.

And now, consider this ABC News report:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7V95wyb63s]

Now remember, chiropractors advise patients to always pay attention to the cause rather than the effect. So if high blood pressure is the effect of stress on your nervous system, our advice is to pay attention to how much stress there is on your nervous system.

The best way to figure out how much stress may be on your nervous system is to consult your chiropractor. A thorough spine and nervous system analysis can reveal this in a reasonably short period of time.

Hey, who knows, help for this nagging and chronic epidemic may be easier than you think.

Have a beautiful, healthy and well day!

Dr. Behjat H. Syed