Some days ago, a doctor friend accused me of what he perceived as my “hatred” of modern medical practice. It was after he sought my views on AIDS and I gave him a version contrary to prevalent opinions in medical circles. Whereas he was right about me not being too impressed with the philosophy of modern medicine, he was wrong to think I’d throw away the baby with the bath water. I can still relate to some success stories occurring daily in specific medical arena. I know some very brilliant doctors, pharmacists, physiotherapists and the likes. In emergency rooms and intensive care units, in private clinics and disaster sites, in burn units and trauma centers, many work tirelessly with hands and hearts. They mend bodies, save lives and offer hope. They make our world better with their care. I’ll always appreciate them.
When you need a doctor, only a doctor will do. For instance, when you have a gunshot wound or suffer from severe burns or you are involved in a severe automobile accident, you’ll need a skilled surgeon- not even the best naturopath in the world could prove to be as appropriate.
But as you read on and note my candid observations, you’ll realize another sad side to the story. There is a great failure in health care today. Many books were and are being written on the subject. They include Cured to Death published in 1982 by journalists Melville and Johnson, Death By Modern Medicine by Dr. Carolyn Dean MD, ND, Confessions of a Medical Heretic published in 1979 by award-winning medical doctor and instructor Robert S. Mendelsohn, the 1992 book by medical doctor James B. Carter titled Racketeering in Medicine: the Suppression of Alternatives along with newer titles such as Selling Sickness, Overdosed America, Critical Condition and Natural Health Solutions & The Conspiracy To Keep You From Knowing About Them. I could go on and on.
Even from mainstream medical establishments, cold, hard facts are trumpeting the sad story. The April 15th 1998 Journal of the American Medical Association reported that there are more than 2 million drug reactions annually in the USA, and more than 100 thousands of these are fatal. These makes drug reactions the 4th leading cause of death in America. But the reality is much much worse.
- These only count drugs that are correctly prescribed and at the right dose
- Not included are patients given the wrong drugs, or who are given wrong dosage or wrong drug combinations
- Does not include patients with fatal reactions to drugs but whose death were attributed to other causes
- Does not include patients whose cause of death is deliberately obscured to protect the physician and hospital involved
Add in these numbers and you suddenly realize that cause of death from adverse drug reactions could be as high as 700,000! Consider that only about 1% of adverse drug reactions are reported (FDA report), then Modern medicine, despite all the great things it may have accomplished is the leading cause of death in the United State! (Lessons From The Miracle Doctors by Jon Baron, page 13).
I shudder when I consider what the true situation would be like in my country if we could get the data.
Understand, this is not an attack on medical doctors, pharmacists et al– majority of whom are highly competent and well meaning. Nevertheless, it is important to note that when it comes to the major diseases of our time (cancers, AIDS, heart disease, osteoporosis, diabetes, hypertension, asthma, arthritis etc) the modern medical ‘paradigm’ of searching for “magic bullets” and managing symptoms with drugs has failed miserably.
Today, in medicine, diseases are never viewed as a body state. Instead they are viewed and categorized as a set of symptoms and numbers. Medicine has forgotten its Hippocrates root and has assumed the Newtonian view of the 17th century when the world was viewed as a big machine. According to this “new” paradigm, the body parts can be isolated and treated independent of each other like a mechanic would a motor car. No holistic consideration! If you have a running nose; take an antihistamine to dry it. If it is a headache; you take paracetamol. And if you present with an elevated level of cholesterol, you’ll get a statin to lower it. Even pregnancy, one of the most beautiful and natural events in a human life, could be reduced to a 9 month old disease with caesarian section as the final treatment! Root causes are unimportant. To eliminate the symptoms or manipulate the numbers within a set of pre-acceptable values is the concern of medicine. Once these are achieved the disease must rightly be gone. Could that be right? I don’t think so!
One of the most commonly encountered medical problems of modern man is hypertension. In managing this condition, many are being ‘cured to death’ literally, by modern medicine. Today, I stand to be corrected: “Have you seen anyone permanently cured of high blood pressure with the use of pharmaceuticals? None, I’d say.” Fortunately, this stubborn condition, with the right support can easily be taken care of by natural remedies.
The three most commonly encountered blood pressure problems in clinical practice are portal (liver), renal (kidney), and stress induced (adrenal). A basic screening you can do in the home to find out which area is causing your blood pressure problem is to follow this simple protocol:
- Take blood pressure at the same time each day
- Take it sitting in the same chair
- Let the same person take it each time
- Use the same arm consistently
Day 1 (screening for high blood pressure caused from an acidic system)
- Step 1: Take your blood pressure, and record results. If the blood pressure is high, take 500mg of magnesium and potassium supplement (a combined formula is preferred).
- Step 2: Wait for 15minutes after taking the supplement, and then take your blood pressure again.
If your blood pressure dropped by five or more points, then a contributing factor to the problem arises from an acidic system.
Day 2 (screening for high blood pressure caused from adrenal stress)
- Step 1: Take your blood pressure while lying flat on your back, and record the results.
- Step 2: Before removing the cuff, immediately stand up and take your blood pressure again in the standing position. Once again record the results.
If your blood pressure dropped five or more points upon standing, it is an indication that the adrenal glands are stressed.
Day 3(screening for high blood pressure caused by kidney and or liver stress
- Step 1: Take your blood pressure, and record the results. If high, do a kidney/liver detoxification.
- Step 2: Wait 15 minutes, and take your readings again.
If your blood pressure drops five or more points, then one of the contributing factors is likely a liver/kidney stress.
Recommendations:
- Acidic system: Take 500mg of magnesium and potassium three times daily with meals. Also, increase alkaline substances in the diet like fruits and green vegetables, especially in their raw forms. Also adhere strictly to proper food combination and timing. I would have loved to dwell more on this aspect but lots of explanations would be required which goes way beyond this write-up.
- Adrenal stress: You need to supplement with adrenal support with pantothenic acid, adrenal glandular and ginseng taken three times daily. You can usually find these in combination formulas labeled adrenal support. Work to reduce emotional stress and use relaxation techniques (meditation, yoga etc) and aerobic exercises.
- Kidney/liver stress: Detoxification of these organs is a must using organic herbs. Once again this write-up is too limited in scope to address them.
Funny enough, hypertension or high blood pressure is not a disease. It is an observation! It is just a name given to how your body responds to certain lifestyle changes. There are no pathogens that cause hypertension. You can’t isolate a microbe under a microscope and say, “Aha! This is what caused hypertension,” because hypertension is actually just a cause-and-effect that follows a lifetime of consumption of wrong diet, lack of proper nutrition, lack of exercise, emotional imbalance and a lack of proper hydration. That’s no disease, that’s just a result.
Think of it this way: if I told you to go run up a hill, you’d get to the top of that hill and you’d be breathing hard. Your respiration would be rapid. Your heart rate would be high. But because you could associate your run up the hill as a cause of your rapid breathing you don’t think, “Boy, I have rapid breathing disease.” You are confident that when you stop running and have had time to catch your breath, your breathing would become normal.
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But supposing you could not, for some inexplicable reason, associate the cause of your increased heart rate with your exertion and at the top of the hill, a doctor were to diagnose you as having Hyper-Respiratory Illness or HRI and we could find a company come up with a drug to mask the symptoms — a drug that would forcibly slow your heart and slow your breathing, wouldn’t you be convinced you had a disease and the drug the cure? Think about it.
Just like it is absurd to think that you need a drug to slow your heart rate after running up a hill when stopping to catch your breath is all that is required, so it is absurd to think that you need a pill to cure hypertension when all that is needed is a reversal of those things that resulted in your elevated blood pressure! No drug could treat high blood pressure. None! No ACE inhibitor, Calcium channel blocker, Diuretics or Beta blocker could treat hypertension. You might as well add all your prescription drugs into water and bathe with it, a cure would still not happen! This is because all these drugs are targeted at symptoms and not the cause of the observable high blood pressure. Even surgery would not cure hypertension. Coronary bypass or angioplasty cannot cure high blood pressure caused by clogged arteries. Think of it for a moment: If all your doctor did was bypass or clear the arteries supplying blood to your heart, doesn’t that mean that all the other arteries in your body are still clogged- including the arteries that supply blood to your brain? The answer, of course, is yes. And, in fact, your odds of having a stroke after heart surgery are dramatically increased.
Remember: You cannot cure hypertension until you reverse the lifestyle changes that got you into having it in the first place!
Sounds simple? But that’s where the problem lies. Men of today are too sophisticated to appreciate simple things.
Supplementing the recommendations earlier given is hydration- you must reduce, if not completely eliminate, your intake of non-water beverages such as soft drinks, tea, alcohol or milk, and increase your intake of real, pure water. In many cases, high blood pressure is simply a sign of chronic dehydration.
A gradual rise in blood pressure is an indicator of a gradual establishing shortage of water in the body. It is now recognized that a gradual loss of thirst perception as we grow older is responsible for the onset of chronic dehydration and subsequent hypertension. A lack of sufficient water intake reflects as 66 percent deficit in the volume of water held in some cells of the body; 26 percent is reflected in the fluid environment outside the cells; only 8 percent of the deficit is imposed on the volume held in blood circulation.
The circulatory system adapts to its 8% loss by shrinking in capacity. Initially peripheral capillaries close down, and eventually the larger vessels tighten their wall to keep the blood vessels full. This tightening leads to a measurable rise in tension in the arteries. This is called hypertension. And thank God for that! If the blood vessels did not tighten on the void, gasses would separate from the blood and fill the space, causing gas locks which can be very fatal.
Another reason for the tightening of the vessels is the need to squeeze the blood volume in the arterial system so that water can be filtered by reverse osmosis and injected in some vitally important cells in the body, such as brain cells- a crisis management program to keep vital cells in the body alive.
Naturally, an increase in daily water intake and the use of sea salt to boost mineralization (not processed salts like common table salts which lack the full spectrum of minerals found in natural salts) is essential for this condition. Unfortunately, conventional medical procedure gives diuretics (medicine to induce urination) in an attempt to eliminate salt touted as the culprit in high blood pressure with the water passing out from the body. But as it is usual with chronic conditions, conventional medicine got it wrong. Giving diuretics can only lead to a further water loss from an already dehydrated body, a criminality in patient care if ever there was any. So your first step is to increase your water intake whether you are thirsty or not. But in doing so you must avoid chlorinated water like a plague because:
- It destroys your essential fatty acids,
- It attacks your arteries and causes arteriosclerosis, a major cause of hypertension
Another thing to keep in mind regarding high blood pressure is blood viscosity. If you are eating a lot of saturated animal fats and hydrogenated oils your blood will be viscous. To put it in plain terms, “if you eat too much meat, love fried foods, butter, and use hydrogenated oils for cooking, you are a prime candidate for viscous blood.”
The new methods of hydrogenation of oils to increase their shelf life are based on the use of catalysts such as aluminum, lead and cobalt. This is the means by which the hydrogen is pumped into the oils using one of these catalysts. What remains in the oils is a residue of these metals. Now, aluminum, lead and cobalt are known toxins. Just imagine what these toxic metals are doing to the immune system and organs in the human body. In addition to these metal residues, the oils have been changed molecularly so that the body doesn’t know how to properly metabolize them. These oils form the cholesterol that is incorporated into the cell walls in your body. Little wonder, hypertension and type two diabetes are clinical partners. While it is wrong to say one condition leads to another, you can now realize that they have a common cause. The oils once incorporated impede the process of cellular exchange, or letting nutrition in and letting wastes out. Since insulin is a very large molecule it has a difficult time passing through a cell wall created with man-made fats and not cholesterol. But I digress.
Remember, a blood that is viscous is harder to pump through your arteries and is detected as a high blood pressure reading.
So if you want free-flowing blood and healthy blood cells, turn to a plant based diet. Consume healthy quantities of plant-based fats and oils, including raw nuts. Avocados are excellent and you could even make oil from them. The best oils, of course are omega-3 oils. You can find these as supplements. Check to make sure it is from a reputable company. Make sure it is 100% natural.
And remember good old garlic. It is a natural blood thinner without the associated hazards accompanying aspirin or Coumadin (incidentally a rat poison) indicated for the same purpose. If you, like me, find the smell of garlic offensive, you could turn to onions instead. Simply chew a bulb of raw onion every night. Alternatively four matured size onions could be blended in about two liters of pure honey. Dosage is about three dessertspoonfuls (about 30mls) three times daily. You’ll never regret it.
My favorite herb for blood viscosity is aloe vera. You don’t eat the outside leaf but the inside gel. It is a clear or translucent jelly. Blend it into a smoothie and drink. This greatly enhances the oxygen capacity of the blood, reduce blood viscosity and maintain blood alkalinity needed for general health.
I have often been asked whether there is a genetic component to high blood pressure and I have always answered in the negative. When something runs in a family, it does not necessarily have to have a genetic component. We learn our habits at home. Our eating habits are learned in the home. We eat what our parents ate. The family food is made in the same cooking pot (imagine if it is aluminum). The reason some scientists don’t see this is that they are not paid to see it; and physicians are not taught to look for nutritional causes to diseases.
There are several healing supplements for hypertension. They include evening primrose oil; cod liver oil (not the synthetic variants you find in capsules); kelp, chlorella; magnesium etc. A naturopathic physician would guide you better.
Courtesy of Rev Father Anselm Adodo are formulas employed traditionally to cure hypertension in the country. You can prepare them yourselves. The formulas are safe:
Formula 1
- 10 bulbs of garlic
- 2 bottles of coconut water
- 4 bottles of water
Mix 2 & 3 together and blend with 1. Dosage is 1 shot thrice daily for 4 weeks
Formula 2
- Talinum triangulare (water leaf; Igbo- Ntu oka, ofe bekee; Yoruba- Ibure)
- 10 litres of water
Cut the roots of (1) into pieces. Measure 10 handfuls of the roots into (2) and bring to boil. Dosage half a glass daily for two months
Formula 3
- Leaves of Ficus asperifolia ( sandpaper tree; Igbo- asesa; Yoruba- epin)
Squeeze the fresh leaves in water (like you will do bitter leaf). Dosage: drink a glassful thrice daily. This is one of the most effective preparations I know.
Sola Adedeji, a Pharmacist is a Guest writer ([email protected])
