High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, is when the force of your blood pushing against the walls of your blood vessels is consistently too high. It’d be like trying to force a whole lot of liquid through thin tubes quickly and forcefully– the tubes can’t handle that for a prolonged amount of time, right? Eventually, they burst!
Right now oxygenated blood is running through your body’s circulatory system. Your heart is beating, creating pressure that pushes blood through a network of vessels. High blood pressure puts stress on your heart and your blood vessels– they cannot work as well when this happens.
How do you get high blood pressure? Factors include your family history, as well as smoking, drinking too much alcohol, and obesity.
What does high blood pressure often lead to? Well, it can cause strokes, heart attacks, heart failure or kidney disease. Not good, right?
For the record, if you get your blood pressure measured, it’s high if it’s greater than 140/90 for those under age 60 or greater than 150/90 for those over age 60.
In order to lower your blood pressure, you could take drugs, of which there are several. Many people have been put on beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors, and other medications. You can also take a more natural approach, by eating a healthier diet, losing weight, exercising more, quitting smoking/alcohol, and reducing the amount of sodium in your overall diet.
Chiropractors can help those with high blood pressure by offering adjustments. For example, an adjustment to the C-1 vertebra, which holds up the head, can work wonders for affecting blood flow in the arteries at the base of the skull. If this vertebra is misaligned, the arteries contract. That’s not good. So a chiropractor aligning this vertebra allows for blood to flow better throughout the arteries. Chiropractic care essentially takes away the stress on the body’s pathways so that blood flows at an appropriate pressure.
Need help managing your high blood pressure with the intent to lower it? Call Dr. Gerard’s chiropractic office in Forest Lake at 651-464-0800 to make an appointment today.
Recent Comments