HYPERTENSION

Hyper = abnormally increased, excessive; tension (as used here) = blood pressure within an artery. Hypertension is high blood pressure.

Blood pressure is the pressure of the blood flowing through your blood vessels against the vessel walls. It depends on your blood flow (how much blood is pumped by your heart) and the resistance of your blood vessels to blood flow. If the pressure is high, your heart must work much harder to maintain adequate blood flow to your body.

Hypertension has any number of causes. While the traditional point of view is that more than 9 of every 10 persons with hypertension do not have a cause for it that can be identified ¹, and call it Essential Hypertension, nothing can be farther than truth. Some risk factors of hypertension can be controlled, some cannot. There are a growing number of physicians who disagree with this number. In fact, there are many patients where identifiable causes can be found and treated effectively without prescribing a life sentence to drugs. Controllable risk factors ² are obesity, eating too much salt, alcohol, lack of physical activity, and stress. Uncontrollable risk factors ² are race, heredity, and age.

In 2000, there were 10,398,000 million office visits ³. Notice the word "million" after the numeric value. That word actually means the numeric value is 10,398,000,000,000. And out of all those visits, the doctors didn't know why 9 out of 10 of those people even have high blood pressure!

Controlling blood pressure is vital, as it is a major risk for heart disease and the chief risk factor for stroke.

Hypertension is often referred to as the "silent killer". Unless you have your blood pressure checked at least twice a year, you may not even know there is a problem. Some people experience symptoms when blood pressure is very high, but the majority of people experience no symptoms at all -- until for some people it is too late.

Did you know that insufficient magnesium may cause or contribute to hypertension? This writer had roller coaster blood pressure for years until a magnesium deficiency was addressed. And if you reason on it, magnesium makes muscles relax, whereas calcium tightens muscles. Therefore, when the magnesium:calcium ratio is out of whack, a person may experience all sorts of symptoms including muscle pain, headaches, irregular heartbeat, and many more. Remember the heart is a muscle. Magnesium must be present in sufficient quantity to relax the muscles. When muscles are tight, the vessel walls cannot expand as well, thereby putting more work on the heart to push the blood through.

Please don't run out and buy magnesium. There are multiple reasons for hypertension. A person who has or suspects hypertension should be evaluated by a competent physician. And remember -- you need a nutritional guide when taking supplements. Our bodies are so wonderfully designed and to keep such a precision machine running, we want to turn to a good nutritional counselor.

Tipu Sultan, MD, is well-versed in nutritional supplementation. He believes in adhering to the Hippocratic Oath to "First, Do No Harm". He also believes in "Finding the Cause and Treating the Cause". Dr. Sultan states, "Most illnesses are caused by environmental, nutritional, dietary, and hormonal factors and it cannot get simpler than that."