Treatment for Hypertension with Tai Chi

Treatment for Hypertension with Tai Chi

Tai chi "could decrease blood pressure and results in favorable lipid profile changes and improve subjects' anxiety status," according to a study published in the October 9th issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2003. This suggests that Tai Chi may have a positive economic impact as an alternate modality for the treatment of moderate hypertension. This research has the potential to spare some people with mild chronic hypertension the potentially harmful side effects of taking medicine for the rest of their lives, as well as our society potentially billions of dollars a year. Having said that, this hasn't really happened.
I had a peek of the why while staying with a woman renowned for her expertise in traditional Indian medicine in the picturesque mountain town of Otavala, Ecuador. While on their way to learn about herbal medicine from the Indian woman, a group of young American medical students paused here. I approached a class of energetic, intelligent medical students and inquired if they had heard that Tai Chi can lower blood pressure as I followed them. "Oh, yes, I've heard that, but I would never prescribe it," one charming young woman responded.

When I pressed her for an explanation, she said she couldn't say for sure whether it would work. While research on Tai Chi has shown that it can help lower blood pressure, not everyone will experience this benefit. On the other hand, it's true that not everyone responds positively to the same medications. As an example, I told the young medical student that on several occasions during my visits to the doctor, he would hand me a prescription and say, "Let's try this and see how it works for you. If it doesn't do the job, we'll try something else." Everyone knows this, and judging by the student's expression of confusion, I'd say her memory banks were conjuring up comparable pictures.
Now that we know Tai Chi can help lower high blood pressure for many, why are our medical schools teaching their students that it shouldn't be prescribed? If it works for them, they can have a lifetime free of chronic and expensive drugs. And on top of that, it has a ton of positive side effects, like making your immune system stronger and your respiratory system healthier. In order to uphold their Hippocratic oath, medical professionals should start routinely asking patients and consumers this profound and crucial question. Considering how much more we know about Tai Chi's benefits now compared to even just a few years ago, medical schools that educate the doctors of tomorrow must do better than to teach their students about Tai Chi research and the implications it may have for their patients' health.
Our understanding of the specific benefits of Tai Chi as a treatment for hypertension has grown today. The Mayo Clinic team defined a "stress response" and its physiological repercussions in an essay published on mayoclinic.com on March 17, 2005. This is fundamental to hypertension and the physiological alterations that chronic stress reactions cause or worsen.
According to their article, the process of a stress response, also known as the "fight or flight" reaction, begins with the secretion of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) by the pituitary gland. This triggers a cascade of events that causes other glands, like the adrenal glands, to secrete more hormones, such as "cortisol" and "adrenaline," which are stress hormones.
The mind and body can suffer when this reaction is repeatedly triggered by the everyday difficulties of daily living. Approximately one-third of the U.S. population, or more than 90 million people, deal with hypertension because of this constant cascade of hormones and triggers.
Modern researchers are uncovering a startling truth, and prominent figures like Dr. Herbert Benson of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's Mind/Body Institute are at the forefront of this movement. The Mysterious 'Medication' of Meditation (http://my.webmd.com/content/article/25/1728_57992.htm) is a great piece by Jeanie Lerche Davis of WebMD Medical News. In it, she describes how scientists are finding that "meditation can indeed be medication - creating long lasting physiciolgical effects that reduce high blood pressure and even help unclog arteries to reverse heart disease."
Dr. Benson, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, wanted to find an objective way to demonstrate this impact, so he had five regular meditators undergo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of their brains while they were in the meditative state. "There was a striking quietude across the entire brain which was documented through MRI... ", Dr. Benson told WebMD in the aforementioned article by Davis. From that state of calm, activity resurfaced in the parts of the brain responsible for regulating metabolism, heart rate, etc. We suspected that meditation induced a calming effect, but we were unable to provide conclusive evidence. Physiologic changes would occur in the body if you thought a certain way and repeated it, as we knew. Here we have evidence that mental processes, through repetition, influence neurological systems, which in turn impact the physical body...
A study conducted by Dr. Amparo Castillo-Richmond of Maharishi University and supported by the National Institutes of Health focused on the prevalence of hypertension among Black individuals, as published in Stroke Magazine. The group that meditated noticed a narrowing of one of the brain's blood vessels. Which means that the flow of blood is getting better. A thickening of the arterial walls was observed in the diet and exercise group, suggesting a decrease in blood flow to the brain. The discovery prompted Dr. Castillo-Richmond to make the very intriguing claim, "It's possible to reverse heart disease through meditation."
Dr. Herbert Benson claims that stress is the root cause of hypertension and as many as 90% of the other diseases that lead to medical visits. Which is why it's so great that meditation practices can change our stress-producing "fight or flight" reaction in a healthy way; this was already found by Drs. Benson and Castillo-Richmond.
According to Dr. Benson, regular practice of relaxation techniques (such as yoga, tai chi, etc.) can lower metabolic rate, heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, and brain wave frequency. Benson claims that physical repetitive muscular movements in tai chi, yoga, or the rosary offer the profound hope of reducing anxiety, mild to moderate depression, anger, hostility, hypertension, cardiac irregularities, and all types of pain that stress exacerbates.
This idea that Tai Chi can help lower or prevent the occurrence of high blood pressure and other diseases is repeated elsewhere. In an article titled "Relax: Techniques to help you achieve tranquility," which describes why relaxation is important and what you could experience by practicing skills that will help you relax, Mayoclinic.com also advises Tai Chi for relaxation training.
In these, you'll find instructions on how to lessen the effects of stress on your body, including how to lower your blood pressure, slow your breathing rate, increase blood flow to your major muscles, and decrease tension in your muscles.
They continue by saying that you could be able to experience: Health issues like headaches, nausea, diarrhea, and pain diminish; negative emotions like rage, sobbing, anxiety, fear, and frustration diminish; vitality increases; focus sharpens; problem-solving abilities improve; and day-to-day tasks become easier and faster. Every time we start to look at a specific advantage of Tai Chi, like reducing high blood pressure, a whole new world of possibilities opens up.
The results of a Tai Chi study conducted at Boston's Tufts-New England Medical Center came to light in an article published in Archives of Internal Medicine, as reported on NBC's local WCAU Health (http://wcau-tvhealth.ip2m.com/index.cfm?pt=itemDetail&Item_ID=112735&Site_Cat_ID=77). When it came to the elderly, the researchers found that regular Tai Chi exercise lowered the likelihood of falls while simultaneously improving their flexibility, balance, and cardiovascular health. Individuals with heart failure, hypertension, acute myocardial infarction, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and healthy controls as well as those who had undergone coronary artery bypass surgery all showed improvements in cardiovascular and respiratory performance. Additional benefits were observed for older individuals' strength, flexibility, and balance; for fragile elderly individuals' reduction in falls; and for healthy individuals' reduction in pain, stress, and anxiety. They also note that the specific mechanisms through which Tai Chi achieves these advantages are mostly unknown.
The reality is that alternative medicine receives less than one percent of the National Institutes of Health's $28 billion (approx.) annual budget, leaving practices like yoga, meditation, tai chi, massage, herbal therapy, aromatherapy, and the entirety of alternative health systems to scrape by on just over one hundred million dollars. In light of these results, it is puzzling that Tai Chi receives such a pitiful allocation of funds for health research.
Just to review, hypertension affects almost one-third of the US population. Tai chi offers many documented health benefits, including a reduced risk of anxiety and depression, better respiratory function, an enhanced immune system, and enhanced balance for practitioners. It also has no negative side effects. Although Tai Chi has many additional benefits, the ones listed above should be more than enough to convince you that it is unbelievable that medical research funds are largely ignoring this practice, even though it has the potential to spare countless people from unnecessary pain and, in some cases, expensive medication for the rest of their lives.
The moment has come for us to start asking, as any responsible shoppers should, "What is the best way/product for my health?" Then, if Tai Chi is that service, the following issue arises: "Why doesn't every doctor prescribe it to their hypertension patients?" "Why don't all health plans pay for these Tai Chi prescriptions?" If you ask, I will give you. If we want the greatest health alternatives, we need to become educated and picky customers.
Everyone should see their doctor before making any major health decisions, and this article in no way promotes self-treatment. But if your doctor is just interested in one set of health alternatives, even though studies show that you may have more possibilities, you should talk to them about expanding their practice.
The year 2005 served as the copyright. Douglas Bill

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