Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, board certified doctor of non-force chiropractic and practitioner
of functional medicine.
The focus of today's talk is going to be about high blood pressure.
Most people don't check their blood pressure often enough, and high blood pressure is a
silent killer.
If you want to be proactive and protect your health and you're over 40 or 50 or you have
any significant stress in your life, even if you have no symptoms, you should check
your blood pressure periodically.
I'm going to talk a lot about that today.
I'll talk about some patients that I've helped reduce their blood pressure without medication
and why it's important to take medication if your blood pressure remains high and nothing
else you're doing is getting it down.
So really important subject.
I'm excited to talk about it today.
And if you have questions about that, please email me at drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
You can also listen to all of the past episodes of this show.
This is episode 49.
We're coming up on a year that this program has been on KDAR 98.3 FM.
This is episode 49, so there's 48 past episodes available on my website, binkleyhealingcenter.com.
If you have an iPhone or an iPad and like to use Apple podcasts, it's available there.
Safe, effective, natural solutions, or just put in my name, it'll come up.
Also Spotify and YouTube.
So check out those back episodes.
And if you like what you hear, please like, scroll to the bottom and like the podcast
that encourages other people to check it out and hopefully influence more people to make
healthier choices for their lives.
That's the reason I do this show.
Thank you for listening and I love questions.
Send your questions to me about high blood pressure or any other health related topic
and I can discuss it on the air or I can just respond to your message and answer your questions
privately.
So here's before we get into the blood pressure conversation, here's another major benefit
of doing testing with me.
I was just reading a review.
I spend, I don't know, 20 or 30 hours every week reviewing medical literature.
I get inundated with all of the, it just comes, you know, you used to have to spend hundreds
of dollars a month subscribing, you know, paid monthly subscriptions to various medical
journals depending on your specialty to get all the latest research.
And so the one thing that's nice is it all comes, it's emailed out to most doctors now
through portals like Medscape and Medpage and others.
Not WebMD.
WebMD is a patient based website that's mostly pharmaceutical marketing.
It's not the best source of information.
If you're Googling, if you want to look up information about a condition and you want
to look up information online, I always recommend that you check out sites like the Cleveland
Health Clinic or Harvard Medical News.
And then of course all the real research is at PubMed.
That's usually a little bit more difficult to read for a lay person.
And of course, you know, ask me, send me your questions.
So but anyway, a major benefit of getting testing done at my office is I'm not connected
to the electronic health record system.
So I was reading an article about other doctors lamenting that, you know, I mean most doctors
hate the time it takes to input all of your information into the electronic health record
system.
And you know, it is important.
It's great that it exists.
It's important that if you go to, you know, Dr. A over here, say you go to the emergency
room and then later you return to your regular doctor, maybe in a different state if you're
on vacation or just for whatever reason.
And if you've had emergency care or medications that could interact with something some other
doctor may prescribe, it's a great thing that doctors can look up and see what other meds
you're on.
And the main reason that the electronic health record system is a good thing is because if
you're taking toxic potentially, you know, life altering medications that have strong
interactions with each other and with things that you may eat or a whole host of other
things, it's important for any doctor who's treating you to know everything that you've
done recently.
And sometimes patients come in and they don't remember what happened or what that other
doctor did, what tests they did, et cetera, so they can access it.
So that's a good thing generally and in principle.
But this article was about how a lot of times you get the electronic health record and depending
on who entered the data at the other end, it could be next to useless.
Somebody was describing a patient that went to emergency room and the data that had been
entered by that emergency room was basically useless.
Still it didn't really give them, that doctor any kind of appreciation for what treatment
and testing that patient received in the ER.
And then he gave an opposite example where like you see in the movies, if you ever watch
shows about attorneys where they do a data dump and you get box fulls, you request the
data on someone and you get, you know, people come in with hand cards full of stacks of
boxes of medical records.
Anyway, he did it.
He had another patient request the medical records and it was three or four box fulls,
42 inches high stack of paper that was just impossible to weed through and also get any
useful information from.
So that was a little bit of a tangent, but my point is sometimes you may want to get
some testing done to find out how things are going with your health and you may not want
anybody else to know about it or at least not right now, maybe later.
So when you order tests in my office, no one else has access to them without your permission.
So one recurring benefit of this, for example, is people who need to qualify for life insurance.
If your cholesterol is high, life insurance is varied.
They check your cholesterol, they check your blood pressure, your age, your weight, your
BMI, some of the criteria.
Those are the most important ones.
Some companies require other things, but the point is if you're going to apply for life
insurance and maybe you've been speaking to your advisor and you're wondering if you're
going to qualify, it can be very expensive.
If you're, especially if you're a man over 50 and you have any test finding that shows
that you're at increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, et cetera.
And so I've had many patients who have been in that situation have come in and maybe their
cholesterol is a little bit elevated or maybe they do have pre-diabetes or some early signs
of liver or kidney disease.
And we put them on some better food, a little bit of exercise if they do it or oftentimes
just some supplements.
Many, many times just give them a few supplements to flood their river of life that courses
throughout their body.
Give it all the nutrients needed for your kidneys, your heart, your liver, your immune
system to start working better.
Cholesterol is mostly controlled by your liver and three or four months later it goes back
to normal.
Then you take that test in or you go to the insurance company, however they want to do
it and get that test done and qualify for the lowest rate.
Another common example is maybe you want to know what's going on with you and you don't
want your family to worry about it.
So this one doesn't come up that often.
I just thought of it as another example.
I usually recommend that patients include their family once they know what's going on
if it's something important and they usually do.
But for some it's nice to know even if their spouse or their brother or their daughter
is a doctor, there is often a way to enable you to get information and a proper diagnosis
and treatment recommendations before you choose, before you choose.
You have that choice to share the information with others.
So blood pressure.
Some important studies have come out in the medical literature about potassium.
We hear all the time about, oh if you're going to control your blood pressure you need to
not eat too much salt.
But what they don't tell you is that what really matters is not your total sodium intake
but your sodium potassium balance.
Sodium and potassium are both essential nutrients.
You couldn't survive without them and what really matters is keeping sodium and potassium
in balance.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
We're talking about high blood pressure today and how you can control it safely and effectively
with natural means wherever possible.
But we're also going to talk about the importance of just making sure you know whether or not
your blood pressure is high or not.
So you usually don't hear much about the importance of potassium but for example if you've ever
or you know anybody that's had heart surgery, many doctors recommend supplementing potassium
to a high normal level after heart bypass surgery.
This is an article that came out, it was reported in the European Society of Cardiology, sort
of counteracting or pushing back against this widespread practice of routinely or sometimes
even aggressively supplementing potassium to achieve this high normal level.
This was reported by Benjamin O. Bryan, MD, PhD of a university that I can't pronounce
in Berlin.
They reported it to the European Society of Cardiology and basically they showed that
this tight control of potassium is often unnecessary and is based on no solid evidence and sometimes
can even cause problems.
So too much of a good thing is never good and it's a little too technical to go into
the details but I was surprised to see that, that study came out because it's really common
to recommend potassium.
Potassium supplements are regulated usually to be no more than 99 milligrams because taking
more than that can be problematic.
The bigger picture is, which we're going to come back to in more detail in a minute, is
you can get all the potassium you need from food.
All vegetables have potassium in them.
So by contrast, there's another study that came out from the European Society of Cardiology
updating their treatment guidelines for hypertension, for high blood pressure.
So high blood pressure has for decades been defined as 140 over 90 or above.
So the systolic top number 140, bottom number diastolic over 90.
Normal blood pressure is 120 over 80.
High blood pressure has long been considered to be 140 over 90.
Well for several years now, they've been lowering that upper number.
The top number has been increasingly recommended to be lowered to 130.
So pretty much the working, it's not completely official yet, but many, many places, at least
the cardiologists are recommending in America and in Europe, that you really think more
of treating high blood pressure to 130 over 90.
And again, so normal is 120 over 80.
But these guidelines in the European Society of Cardiology's most recent presentations,
based on the review of boatloads of data, are recommending that the new guideline be
for a blood pressure goal of 120 to 129, which is basically saying less than 130, but also
for the bottom number to be 70 to 90.
I've never seen that before.
And I haven't been able to find the data that they based it on yet, but they're even saying
that the bottom number should be 70 or below.
I'm not sure how important that is.
But the things that were exciting about it to me is they've established three categories.
Instead of just normal blood pressure, 120 over 80, or high blood pressure, 140 over
90, or maybe 130 over 90, they're establishing a third level called elevated, not high, but
elevated blood pressure.
So they're saying now normal is 120 over 70, elevated is 120 to 139 over 70 to 90, and
then the usual hypertension 140 over 90.
But they also emphasize, this is one of the best parts, they emphasize that out of office,
out of a doctor's office, blood pressure measurement is very important.
They're stressing that.
The guidelines for that are much stronger than in previous guidelines, because everyone
has heard of the white coat syndrome.
You go to the doctor's office and your blood pressure is elevated because you're in a doctor's
office.
Maybe you're in an unfamiliar situation or you're worried about having to start taking
more meds or a whole host of reasons people's pressure goes up when they're in a doctor's
office.
So it's a really good idea for many, many people.
Again, almost anybody over 50, say, or anyone who has high stress in their life.
And when I have conversations with patients, they say, oh, I don't have any stress.
Well, your blood pressure is off the charts.
You tell me that you can't sleep and you have anxiety and you have a whole host of other
things, but they don't experience.
So if you don't like the word stress, if you think that you don't have stress, but you
have anxiety, you can't sleep, you get angry, you have tight muscles, you have symptoms
like this, you have stress.
Call it, pick a different word if you don't like the word stress.
But those are all signs of stress.
If you have any of those things, you should be checking your blood pressure at least once
a month.
And if it's high every day for a few weeks, a couple of weeks, when your blood pressure
is elevated, one reading doesn't mean anything.
You have to check it a few more times and get a pattern.
And the best way, if it is high so that you don't freak out, the most important thing
to do is check it every day a couple of times a day at least for a week and then average
those numbers.
So write all the readings down for at least a week, add them all up and divide by the
number of entries to get the average.
And that average over a week is a much better indicator of your risk from the damaging effects
of high blood pressure than any individual reading.
Another thing that was really exciting in this updated guidelines for the European guidelines
for high blood pressure treatment is that they introduced a new recommendation for lifestyle
options to help lower blood pressure, including changes to exercise advice and the addition
of potassium supplementation.
So I just mentioned that sometimes potassium supplementation is not so great.
So they do qualify this by among other things recommending that you get the potassium not
from a quote unquote supplement, but from food.
But they also suggest that people in this new elevated middle of the road blood pressure
category, not too high, not too low, but elevated again by definition, 120 to 139 over 70 to
89.
And they recommended those people be subject to a risk stratification assessment before
the treatment decision is made.
So basically before they just slap you on medication, write you a prescription, they
check for certain things.
So for example, people in the elevated blood pressure category, not high, but elevated
who also have moderate or severe chronic kidney disease or already have established cardiovascular
disease, diabetes, hereditary hypercholesterole, hereditary high cholesterol, or for any other
reason are considered high increased risk for cardiovascular disease, then these patients
are recommended to after three months of lifestyle intervention, consider going on drugs.
So that's the important part.
After three months of lifestyle intervention, they recommend, so they recommend doing three
months of lifestyle intervention before starting on drugs.
That's not in the American recommendations.
They give lip surface to recommending lifestyle intervention, relaxation, better sleep, some
of the things that I'm going to talk about here a little bit later.
But in my experience, hardly anyone does it.
And I don't know, I don't have any, I don't live in Europe.
I don't know how many people in Europe are doing it either.
But at least it's part of the recommendations.
It's more strongly encouraged.
The education, the research there generally always includes much stronger support for
recommendations for doing something natural, healthy, better food, exercise, and supplements
to address a situation that is easily treatable with that instead of just going straight to
drugs.
So that's always exciting.
Here's another really exciting part of these new European recommendations that they insert
certain caveats.
So they suggest treating blood pressure to get it down to somewhere, the upper number
to somewhere between 120 and 129, basically below 130 instead of just below 140.
But they also say that more lenient targets can be considered in people with orthostatic
hypotension.
That means if you stand up, get dizzy.
This is huge because many, many people, I've had, I don't know, countless patients who
were on meds for blood pressure and they refuse to take them because when they stand up quickly,
they get dizzy.
Especially older patients, old people that were in their upper, you know, 75 or older,
80s especially, your blood vessels get stiff.
And if you're too aggressively treating blood pressure with drugs, that's one of the main
reasons to control it naturally instead of with drugs because the drugs can't respond
as fast as you can stand up.
So you get dizzy and that's how you know.
That's how you know, for example, if your blood pressure is too low.
If you stand up quickly and you feel dizzy, your blood pressure is too low.
And if you stand up quickly and you get dizzy and you're on blood pressure medication, you
might be taking too much medication or the wrong medication or you're a really good candidate
who should consider better food, exercise and supplements in addition to your medication.
So these new European guidelines also suggest, you know, not aggressively, over aggressively
treating people to these new lower targets of 120 to 130 upper number for blood pressure
if they're 85 years or older or if they have moderate to severe frailty or a limited life
expectancy.
So, you know, people that are in care homes or have some kind of chronic disease, you
know, there's no reason to overdo it with those people because it's not going to dramatically
increase their lifespan.
Interestingly, the same article quotes a physician at the University of Washington in Seattle,
American College of Cardiology saying, these new European guidelines have thoughtfully
used the latest study data to simplify recommendations and coordinate their guidelines to be more
in line with US guidelines.
Well, they're not more in line with US guidelines.
They're better than the US guidelines.
The US guidelines do not emphasize testing your own blood pressure at home and they do
not have this third classification of elevated blood pressure with the caveats that I just
mentioned to avoid over treating blood pressure with medication.
I'm Dr. Todd Benkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to almost any health challenge.
We're talking about high blood pressure today and it looks like I'm going to be doing a
second episode on high blood pressure next week because we're going to run out of time
before I get to all the stuff that I wanted to talk about today.
But of paramount importance, something anyone can do, you can do, someone you know who has
blood pressure can do, to lower your blood pressure is deep breathing exercise.
So, lots of people talk about doing aerobic exercise, also very important.
These European guidelines, for example, the last thing that was a change from the standard
previous guidelines were 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise per week is also an option,
an alternative to the current recommendation of at least two and a half hours per week
of moderate intensity exercise.
You know, so that's important because for older people, the moderate exercise is going
to be better to prevent injuries, prevent falls.
So people just don't have the strength to do vigorous exercise.
But for younger high stress people, people you know that are less than 70, say for example,
but or you know, especially people that are in their 40s or 50s but still have high blood
pressure because of their lifestyle, they're going to benefit more from vigorous intensity
exercise, because they're going to get stuff out of their system.
It just feels good.
People, you know, lots of people have just learned this from experience.
So it's good to have it now codified into the recommendations for more people.
But the goal of every functional medicine practitioner is to enable you to live long
and live well without drugs.
So I've seen thousands of patients personally with high blood pressure, and some of them
want to get off of all their medications, including their blood pressure medications,
and some of them don't.
But I will never recommend that anyone stop taking blood pressure medication until their
blood pressure is well controlled without it, number one, and they discuss their decision
with their prescribing physician.
So I often have people come in and say, I don't want to take any drugs.
I want to get off all these medications.
And you know, there's lots of ways to get off of certain medications.
I still always recommend that they go and discuss that decision with whoever prescribed
that medication.
I didn't put you on any medication.
It's not my job to take you off of that.
That's your decision.
You need to discuss it with that physician.
For example, I don't think anybody, almost no one in my humble opinion, very few people
need to take statin drugs.
And very few people, in my opinion, should take or need to take, especially if they're
willing to do the alternatives that work better, very few people need to take osteoporosis
drugs because those things are mostly bad.
And there's just so many better alternatives that work better.
But blood pressure medications are the great exception.
If you have high blood pressure and you're not controlling it without medication, then
you need to take the medication, maybe for the rest of your life.
Or again, if there's other ways to get your blood pressure down without medication, for
many people, but not everyone, some people, if you're over 80, especially, it can be very
difficult.
I've had patients who've had high blood pressure for 30 years in their 80s get off of medication
by controlling it with better food, exercise, and supplements, but they're the rarity.
So unless you do something, and I'd be happy to do the proper testing to identify a way
for you or someone you love to reduce their need for medication, because it's also good
to most people end up on three or sometimes four medications just for blood pressure.
They're on lisinopril and hydrochlorothiazide and maybe a beta blocker or something else.
There's so many different drugs to control blood pressure.
There are ways to reduce your dependency on pharmaceuticals, even if you still need to
maybe just take one of them at a lower dose.
And that's a good idea for a lot of people.
As long as you make that decision with proper documentation, check your blood pressure at
home.
So I'm going to talk, tune back in next week.
I'm going to talk and do a whole other episode on blood pressure because there's so much
more material to go over, including getting a good blood pressure cuff to use at home.
So thank you for listening.
I'll see you next Friday for more information about high blood pressure and a safe, effective
natural solution to eliminate it.
Have a fantastic weekend.
You've been listening to Safe, Effective Natural Solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4 p.m. for Safe, Effective Natural Solutions right here on 98.3 The Word,
KDAR.