How To Lower Your Blood Pressure: 5 Things To Try Before Medication

[Music] wow [Music] hi welcome to another episode of talking with docs i'm dr ross geller with joey trivia and chandler so dr paul zalzel dr brad weaning and mike heffernan dr mike heffernan a cardiologist you've seen him on some of our other videos and today we're doing a really important topic and it's do i need to take medication from my high blood pressure blood pressure medication okay um so we talked in another video about you know measuring blood pressure and what it was all about and now the question is you know do i need to take a blood pressure pill um i i guess we were just mentioning that that we prefer that if a patient can lower their blood pressure without taking a pill that's perfect and if so if you can get to you know a threshold that we would like 120 over 80 perhaps even just a little bit higher 130 over 85 even without a medication then that's reasonable and so what are some of the things that you can do in order to make that happen so uh healthy weight okay um regular exercise and and you know regular exercise you know we're here in canada and the canadian guidelines are 150 minutes of vigorous exercise a week and and you can break that up they can be little 10-minute spots it doesn't have to be you know 30 or 40 minutes of aerobic exercise all at a given time don't average that over the year no yeah and one one busy busy day isn't going to cut it exactly and ideally it's most days right rather than doing a 110 minutes one day you want to have a little bit of high intensity every day most days of the week okay um so that's healthy weight that's regular exercise and then and then and diet and so i'm not necessarily meaning go out and restrict your calories so it's not that that concept it's a diet that is going to is going to lower your blood pressure so there's a mediterranean diet there's a dash diet and by and large these all have the same theme and that's you know foods uh that are more vegetables more fruit uh legumes and nuts um and uh and and i suppose lean cuts of meat uh if you're if you're not vegetarian um and then less of less trans fats less processed foods less sweets and carbohydrates less sugar so those are all the you know the lifestyle things you can do and so we have a patient we made this diagnosis we would prefer not to just throw a pill at a patient right away it's like nope you know what here's three months here's six months try and do these lifestyle changes and then take your blood pressure at home if you can purchase a machine that would be great yep very affordable nowadays too you know generally here about a hundred dollars somewhere between you know 70 and 100 and if you can take readings most days of the week we ask patients usually to take two or three readings write them down on a piece of paper lots of people like excel spreadsheets and reams and dreams of and that's fine sure um the more data the better and we can make a really good and thoughtful decision as to you know a few months later do you really need to be on a medication is there is there any evidence on the lifestyle stuff for meditation i have a lot of a lot of read a lot of stuff about meditation and things like that all the things that can cure and help any any evidence on sort of a daily meditation or anything like that that can reduce blood pressure yep yep so probably about five to seven points and and the other things i was just mentioning as well you know exercise changing your diet all of those things all each contribute about five you know somewhere between five and ten points in your blood pressure it's pretty significant like meditation is suggested two other ones obviously thankfully it's less common obviously stop smoking if you can for sure do your best does that include vaping which uh sadly is becoming very popular or not necessarily so i don't know what the answer to that i wonder if the nicotine might be part of it so not sure about the baby give us a comment in general it's still not good for you and then what about caffeine north americans we seem to be addicted to caffeine we we need to wake up early and have lots to do so there's nothing wrong with a cup of coffee a day you know it's it's like everything's like your mom says everything in moderation right okay so now we're at the point you've gone to the cardiologist your family doctor you had high blood pressure it wasn't so high that you immediately had to seek treatment tried some lifestyle stuff all right we're talking a couple weeks few months a few months okay a few months you come back you've done your blood pressure at home it's still elevated now you have to have the conversation about medication medications okay and and there are lots of medications that we can use you know we're not restricted to one there are numerous classes there they all have their their quirks you know their diuretics which are common right um we don't often prescribe diuretics for instance for a young active individual where they might have to go to the bathroom in the morning often so diuretic is a medication that makes you pee out makes you good it makes you fluid but it lowers your blood pressure right there are things called ace inhibitors there are things called arbs there are things called calcium channel blockers so the whole host and it's really what your physician is going to do is you know speak to you get an idea about what kind of your lifestyle your preferences are and then and then make a choice and and you know they're all good okay um and and most often i think it's important to know is we have to combine them yes um because often you know we know that an average canadian requires high 3.2 know blood pressure medications at their maximum dose to achieve the target blood pressure what say that again yeah three so the average canadian average canadian needs three blood pressure pills three different types three different types at their maximum dose to achieve adequate blood pressure so so if your physician is saying hey look you know you're going to need to be on a pill hopefully you only need one right hopefully you can do all those lifestyle changes so you don't need the other two right but sadly as we get older a lot of patients require more than more than one so in anticipation of the flood of big pharma comments that we're gonna get what is the percent of people that have success with the lifestyle modifications say listen i got down to healthy weight i now eat mostly plants i exercised regularly i quit smoking like what are the chances of saying listen you get to come off your medication or you get to not go on it's high high so there's a lot there's a very real chance of success the trouble is the things we're suggesting are very hard to do right that's why we have people that have weight problems and high blood pressure it's because it's it's easy to say it's hard to exercise every day it's hard to eat right it's hard about that time right yeah to the person who's typing the comment right now and saying these guys are paid by big pharma just ignore them trust me we are not paid by big pharma in any way we're just telling you what the scientific evidence and the data suggests can lower your blood pressure and thereby prolong your life i would imagine yeah right so then my last question would be so now i've been on them for someone's going to say i've been on this for 20 years yeah is it still worth a crack at the lifestyle stuff do you ever not see people who have been on it and say i really just did a 180 on my life and now i'm i'm feeling a little bit dizzy like my blood pressure's too low now yep oh for sure okay and it's funny you should say that because so i have a patient in my practice um who shall go unnamed um and he has done just that and so he's lost about 60 pounds um over the last several months and he's just decided look i'm going to get control of my life i'm going to really try and change this i've taken away four of his blood pressure pills he was on more than four more than four more than four to get things under control wow and four have been stripped away get no room for lunch if you're unfortunate i know i know amazing so it speaks to the potential of of your willpower i remember in medical school that vague fact where a pound of tissue as like a mile of blood vessels in it or something like that or just like tissue has a lot of microvasculature so that's why you need the pressure to perfuse the tissue if you have too much tissue so yeah weight loss a lot you guys must be sick of hearing this we always say lose weight because that's going to help just about everything we've ever talked about in our videos yeah common theme so that's a that's an awesome summary of blood pressure and what to do to lower it and if you need medication some things to think about so if you like this video please like it subscribe to our channel and remember you are in charge of your own health we'll see you next time

Channel: Talking With Docs

Views: 998,402

Keywords: blood pressure, high blood pressure, how to lower blood pressure, blood pressure measurement, blood pressure control, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, lower blood pressure, high blood pressure symptoms, how to lower blood pressure naturally, blood pressure monitor, how to read blood pressure, blood pressure guidelines, low blood pressure symptoms, high blood pressure treatment, pressure, low blood pressure, blood pressure chart, omron blood pressure

Id: hXC304-cFaU

Length: 8min 22sec (502 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021