Al Sears, MD (An anti-drug message to consider)

[gmattson]

My old office manager J.F. was on beta-blockers for high blood pressure.
I put her on a treadmill once to give her a test and nothing happened.
She got extremely short of breath, but her heart couldn’t keep up. It was still at 80 bpm. She couldn’t challenge her heart and make it stronger because of the drug from her cardiologist.
How did this happen? Because no one has messed up modern medicine more than cardiologists.
They’re all about the methodology of using heart drugs and technology, but are opposed to the general concept of analyzing your health and how to improve it.
It’s a true but sad state of affairs that a cardiologist can’t tell you any more about how to improve the health of your heart than the average person you meet on the street. They know virtually nothing about it.
They know how to use drugs. But the drugs are not health enhancing. In fact, there are no categories of cardiac drugs that I don’t disagree with. One by one, I ruled all the drugs out.
For example, if you are getting treatment for high blood pressure, you might be on beta blockers. But think of what cardiologists are doing there.
They’re now giving you a drug that blocks the regulation of your heart, down-regulates your capacity to get your heart rate up, and suppresses your heart’s natural ionotropic capacity to beat more firmly.
Initially, beta-blockers sort of work to artificially bring down your blood pressure, and your heart will calm down, but now you can never get the benefit of exercise.
So over time, beta-blockers will turn your heart into a fat, lazy, incompetent water balloon. You already had high blood pressure to deal with, now you have a gross de-conditioning of your heart.
But there are other steps you can take to lower your blood pressure naturally. And when you do, your chance of heart disease, heart attack, and stroke go back to normal. It’s as if you never had high blood pressure in the first place.
Step 1 – Use Nature’s Own Blood Pressure “Prescription.” I’m talking about magnesium, your body’s natural blood vessel relaxer. I’ve used it in my practice with great results.
It helps balance potassium, sodium and calcium, which all affect blood pressure. There are many studies that show the more magnesium you get the lower your blood pressure will be.
Why take a drug when this overlooked mineral can have the same effect?
New research even finds that if you get enough magnesium you have a lower risk of dying from any cause. The study followed 4,203 people over ten years, and found that the rate of death from all causes was 10 times higher for people getting the least magnesium.1 And the rate of death from heart problems was more than 50% higher for those with low magnesium.
You can get more magnesium by eating nuts, seeds, dairy products and dark green, leafy vegetables. But modern farming practices have depleted much of the mineral content in our soil, so there’s not much magnesium in vegetables any more.
Magnesium used to be in your drinking water but water with high mineral content – hard water – fell out of favor because most people don’t like the taste.
If you can’t get enough magnesium through food, you can take a supplement. I recommend between 600 and 1000 mg a day. Take it with vitamin B6. It will increase the amount of magnesium that accumulates in your cells.
Step 2 – Toss The Processed Salt. Salt itself isn’t bad. We naturally crave salty foods. In fact, when your blood is at its healthiest, it’s slightly salty.
Unfortunately, the salt you find in most foods today isn’t even close to what Mother Nature intended. It’s bleached and refined. When they’re done making it into the white stuff that goes into packaged foods and your salt shaker it’s like franken-salt, with residual chemicals from the processing.
Try to avoid the foods that have the most processed salt. Bottled salad dressing, cured meats (beef jerky, salami), processed cheese, salt-covered snack foods and pickled foods (like olives and dill pickles).
Instead, look for sea salt. It’s unrefined, and has all the minerals and co-factors nature meant salt to have, like potassium and magnesium.
Regular salt is almost pure sodium chloride. Natural sea salt has sodium chloride too, but also has over 50 other minerals (including magnesium) with all the co-factors and trace elements nature intended real salt to have.
To Your Good Health,

Al Sears, MD
1. Reffelmann T, Ittermann T, Dörr M, Völzke H, Reinthaler M, Petersmann A, Felix SB. "Low serum magnesium concentrations predict cardiovascular and all-cause mortality." Atherosclerosis. 2011 Jun 12. Epub ahead of print.
________________________________________

[Bill Glasheen]

It’s a true but sad state of affairs that a cardiologist can’t tell you any more about how to improve the health of your heart than the average person you meet on the street. They know virtually nothing about it.

Wow!

Having once been on the research faculty in the Division of Cardiology at the University of Virginia, my response to this statement is put up (show me the evidence) or shut up. Show me *your* articles in peer reviewed journals, and not your anti-pharma blogs. If you can't show me evidence that your peers have deemed to be worthy of publication, then your opinion is worth what I paid for it.

I see one (1) reference about magnesium. You aren't an author on that piece, and this isn't news. I've been taking a calcium-magnesium-zinc supplement for over a decade - partly because of the beneficial effect on BP. You cite me a reference from 2011? A little late to the game?

there are no categories of cardiac drugs that I don’t disagree with

Yet another blanket statement which makes the author come across as an extremist flake.

I put her on a treadmill once to give her a test and

Research by anecdote isn't.

Here's the thing...

1) Diet and exercise (leading to good body composition and a good basal metabolic rate) are KNOWN to help blood pressure. Nothing new here.

2) People with hypertension by their very nature don't have "normal" physiology, so we can't use "normal" as a reference point when discussing their physiology. For many such people, medication is life-saving.

3) All people - if they live long enough - will become hypertensive. It's irresponsible not to address it.

4) Overreacting to hypertension by giving too much BP medication is equally irresponsible. Recent peer-reviewed research and information from my own predictive modeling group has shown that overly aggressive management of hypertension may lead to fracture-inducing falls. And in the elderly, a broken hip is the beginning of the end.

5) All the above are reasons to engage in bone-mineral-building resistance training (preferably free-weight training) in combination with the above-mentioned calcium-magnesium-zinc supplementation.

- Bill

[gmattson]

Thanks for the comments on the Doctor's article Bill.

My medical doctor prescribes drugs ONLY if the patient won't try his non-drug health options or. . . if the patient tries, but doesn't succeed with the non-drug program.

Most medical doctors I've encountered don't bother with the first option.

[Bill Glasheen]

You have a good doctor, George. Hold on to him as long as you can. Primary care is becoming a very scarce resource in the post-Obamacare era. *Good* primary care is even more scarce.

Way back when I was in college and graduate school burning the midnight oil for classes and still teaching martial arts, I had a great deal of difficulty finding a good physician to manage me. Most were academic geeks who never found time to go to the gym either during their education or afterwards. When told I should just stop doing physical activities that made my body hurt, I knew that the conversation had ended. After asking around and finding a good doc (whom I kept all the way through school), I learned to seek out "jock docs" who themselves had played sports while in school and understood the lifestyle I aspired to. And now that I'm a bit older, the population is less healthy, and research is catching up to the "why", it appears that my thinking was ahead of my time.

Your formula for success is a good one, George. But then birds of a feather...

My own company - involved in third party reimbursement of health care - is getting out of the "pay claims" mindset and shifting to a "well being" paradigm. Needless to say they enjoy having an employee in the research area who walks the company talk. We're absolutely advocates for the unwell who need robust, traditional medical care. Sooner or later, death and taxes catch up with us all. But while few will admit it, we're not sad when our competition gets the stubborn who just want to take their medicine and get on with their unhealthy lifestyles. To each his/her own.

- Bill