Q&A 7/19/22 Hypertension

PODCAST HIGHLIGHTS:

02:53 MEDICATION and NUTRIENT REPLACEMENT

04:52 ACE Inhibitors

07:11 SELF MONITORING

07:56 ACE INHIBITORS SELF CARE

12:25 NUTRIENT DEFICIENCIES

14:50 Vitamin D TESTING

15:56 BETA BLOCKERS

25:19 WAYS TO LOWER BLOOD PRESSURE

26:50 HIGH HEMOGLOBIN

28:12 RELAXATION

31:48 BIOFEEDBACK DEVICES

34:45 LOWER INFLAMMATION

37:03 HERBS & SUPPLEMENTS

39:27 PEMF MAT

Transcript from Webinar:

This is Dr. John. I’m here on July 19th to talk about hypertension. Now, I apologize that there was at least one person who was really looking forward to histamine problems. However, I got so many requests for hypertension/high blood pressure. People have been put on blood pressure medications that I really felt I needed to do the hypertension first, so that’s what we’re going to do today.  It’s only reasonable, in the way that things tend to be reasonable at this point in our lives, that blood pressure would be up.  Anxiety is up, clinically-diagnosed anxiety is more than four times what it used to be. Depression is also up about four times. So you would expect,  then, for blood pressure to have also skyrocketed, which it has, along with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc., because of all the things we’re going through.

There are a couple different things I’m going to talk about today with hypertension.  There was a nice article that we got from Ron Grisanti. Ron is the president of Functional Medicine University that Kathryn and I both graduated from with our certificate in Functional Medicine. Dr. Bruce said he’s a very bright guy, and he sends some really fun health information out to us every few weeks. We have taken one of those for today’s discussion.  A lot of it was also in our newsletter that Kathryn sent out this morning.  I want to thank Dr. Grisanti. I’ve made a few modifications, so his stuff was all correct. If there’s anything wrong, blame me.

02:15

Ok, so we’re going to look at what you need to do in order to get tested and for nutrient replacement. Then I’m going to talk a little bit about alternative blood pressure treatments. This is a question that I get multiple times a week. There are many things that can be done for blood pressure treatments that people are simply unaware of (I’m only going to talk about things that are proven; there’s a track record for them), and how medications affect nutrient levels there. I put a few here, but there are more.

02:53 MEDICATION and NUTRIENT REPLACEMENT

The medication can attach itself to a nutrient, and then they pass out of the body. It can alter the acid-base balance in the gut so the nutrient can’t be properly absorbed. Probably the biggest one are some medications that need very large amounts of specific nutrients in order for them to be able to work. There are others, too, like when we get into some of the diuretics that cause increased urination.  Sometimes it’s just the increased urination that is washing these nutrients out of the body. We’ll talk a little bit about each of those and what you can do about it.

These are a few of the major categories of blood pressure medications.  I’m talking about the nutrients that are commonly depleted and what the result is of those nutrient deficiencies, because they can be extremely significant. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of people. It is very rare that I have ever had a patient come in and say, “You know, I’m having these problems and I don’t know what’s causing them, and my doctor said it could be because of this drug.” I hear that almost never, unfortunately. Every drug, I don’t care what it is, has some side effects. There are not really even side effects that are known effects on many of them. Then there are side effects that are more abstract in terms of observability.  For example, Pharmaceuticals that, secretly, hijack the nutrients and take them out of the body before they can be used for life’s processes.  It’s one of the things you want to look at or have someone else look at for you. Whenever you start to get new symptoms because they can be directly caused by the pharmaceuticals that you’re already taking. Okay, now we know that, but we tend not to think of it at the time.

04:52 ACE Inhibitors

Let’s talk first about ACE inhibitors. These are angiotensin-converting-enzyme inhibitors, so they stop the action of angiotensin, which you don’t need to know, but it causes constriction of the blood vessels and increases blood pressures. Now, these are one of the really commonly used families. Most people that are on one or more of these drugs, the blood pressure drugs, will be on an ACE inhibitor.

The one I see the most is Lisinopril. A huge percentage of my patients are on Lisinopril; it has a pretty good track record. Not a lot of severe side effects. Coughing is the most common one. But they all do have side effects. This category of drugs you can tell because they end in PRIL – the angiotensin converting enzyme: Lisinopril, Enalapril, Ramipril and some of the nutrients that can be depleted. This is not a totally comprehensive list. I’m just hitting the high points. We’re looking at zinc, magnesium, potassium and calcium as the primary things that can be depleted. Now, many of you will recognize the fact that you can’t live without potassium, magnesium, or calcium, and you’ll be very sick without much zinc, so this is really critical. Potential nutrient problems of being deficient in those electrolytes and minerals that I had on the last page. Hair loss, slow wound healing. We know that from zinc taste and smell problems we see with zinc, prostate problems we see with zinc, etc. loss of sex drive, frequent infections, leg cramps. The first three things that I give people for leg cramps are potassium, magnesium, sodium, and sometimes calcium. So those are huge weight gain, bone loss for sure. High blood pressure. Now, how ironic is that? One of the side effects of this blood pressure drug is it can cause high blood pressure.

07:11 SELF MONITORING

So why you want your doctor to really be paying attention as you’re going through this and why you want to monitor your own blood pressure very regularly? I mean, you don’t have to get fanatical about it, but a few times a week when you do monitor your blood pressure, get in the habit of taking it a few different times of day. So one day, take it first thing in the morning, the same day, maybe take it midday or early evening after work, for example, but alternate the times that you take it. Because the timing of the high blood pressure or of the blood pressure can tell us a tremendous amount about what the source of the issue is. And, of course, these do have a little bit higher risk for cancer.

07:56 ACE INHIBITORS SELF CARE

So what do you do? Well, you should do if you’re taking this category of drugs, usually it’s going to be lisinopril. Do frequent metabolic panels. So that’s a chemistry panel. We run what’s called a chem-14. But what you just need a metabolic or a chemistry panel, they use those interchangeably. These are very inexpensive. If we run it, it’s under $20. They’re moderately accurate. Any of the tests for minerals in the blood are less than perfectly accurate because so little of those minerals are actually in the serum in the fluid part of the blood. So there are tests that are better. There is a red blood cell analysis. We use that when we have strong suspicions of copper or zinc issues in particular, or magnesium, because red blood cell levels of those are much more accurate. That’s a little bit more expensive. Those are running about 60 bucks apiece. So to do a whole panel, that’s going to be a. Around $300.

Or you can do my new favorite, which is Oligo scan, and that is a device that shines light into the palm of your hand and it penetrates about four millimeters and it is then able to check the level of a variety of things in your blood, including minerals and toxic heavy metals, which is what I like it for, because the toxic heavy metal tests are generally not very good. You know, there are hair tests and that’s just what’s being excreted. There are urine test that’s only accurate if you use some type of agent to release it from the tissues or if it’s a very recent exposure. So none of them are perfect. The OLIGO scan isn’t perfect either, but it’s relatively inexpensive, around 100 bucks, and it can check for a bunch of things, even vitamin levels.

10:06

So what do you do if they’re low? The first thing would be take a electrolyte supplement. Now check with your health care provider first on that one. There may be a reason they don’t want you on an electrolyte supplement. Those meds, the blood pressure meds and other meds can cause a retention of too much of the electrolyte which can cause problems also.  For instance, like too much potassium, an excess of electrolyte can cause heart arrhythmias, amongst other things. And so if you’re going to do an electrolyte supplement, check with your health care provider before you take it, but they are generally quite safe.

Additionally, something I didn’t already mention, since zinc is one of those minerals, would be to do a moderate level of zinc supplement. And there are lots of good reasons, as most of you know, for taking zinc at this time in 2022. Okay, so let’s take another look here. Now, we got calcium channel blockers. This is another pretty commonly used grouping. I don’t see it used quite as commonly as the ACE inhibitors. That’s not quite true. I see a lot of amlodipine.

Actually that brings another point that I might forget later. I’m seeing a lot of studies over the last couple of years and I’m seeing doctors changing their prescription habits around blood pressure meds in a way that I think is very good. Traditionally, a doctor would give a blood pressure medication, hydrochlorothiazide, for example, a diuretic, and if that didn’t work for their side effects, they’d give something else.  If that didn’t work they’d give something else. Well, now most doctors that I see are actually giving three or four of these different types, different one from each from different families of these hypertensive medications. And they can do it then at much lower doses. So you might do a quarter of a dose of four different medications rather than four times the dose of one. And that’s going to have a lot fewer side effects. So I think it’s a much better prescribing practice that we are now seeing.

12:25 NUTRIENT DEFICIENCIES

And so things that can get really depleted here, potassium and calcium again, but also vitamin D and probably coenzyme Q10.  Symptoms that can occur here. Again, you get the fatigue and the leg cramps. You can get other cramps, too. I know people that get guitar players, that get hand cramps, frequent infections, thirst, all of this good stuff and, high blood pressure. So here we go again, a high blood pressure medication that can cause high blood pressure. Okay, so amlodipine I’ve seen cause irregular heartbeat. So it’s one to watch for if you start getting a rapid heart beat in particular.

So what do you do? Pretty much the same thing as the last slide on what to do. You do frequent metabolic panels.  Vitamin D and CoQ10 tests a little less often. They’re a little more expensive. Generally, if vitamin D is in a good level. You don’t have to check it very often. These are moderately expensive. Here you’re looking at closer to $100 per test.  Moderately accurate again. And then do an annual more in-depth check. And that’s, again, the red blood cell levels and or an OLIGO scan. And what do you do? You take an electrolyte supplement again, check with your health care provider first, take vitamin D or get sun. There are very, very few people who cannot safely take vitamin D. There are some and there are signs and symptoms to look for. So some people will get what they think is a sun rash. That can actually be a more significant problem from taking vitamin D and being in the sun. And anybody with autoimmune problems or very high levels of inflammation, I will do a second vitamin D test. One is the storage form and one is the active form. If you have tons of the storage form, it’s fine. It doesn’t damage anything because it’s almost inert. But if you have too much of the active form that’s very heating cause a lot of inflammation and some kidney damage.

14:50 Vitamin D TESTING

So if you have autoimmune disease and you show up with low vitamin D or you’ve got just raging inflammation and you’re low in vitamin D, don’t just pop vitamin D, you need to get both of those tests done and you need to have them done at the same time to see if you’re over converting. I had a couple patients with severe kidney problems a few years ago and they had incredibly low vitamin D levels. Their doctor told them to take these huge levels of vitamin D and fortunately, I got them in time and did the other tests and found that they were four times a safe level of vitamin D, because when the there’s a lot of inflammation and a lot of cytokines, they block the vitamin D receptors so the body keeps converting more and more of the inactive vitamin D to active vitamin D, but you can’t use it because the sites are blocked. So it’s a little tricky.  Also take CoQ10, totally safe.

15:56 BETA BLOCKERS

Beta blockers. Examples of later beta blockers or atenolol and metoprolol. Those are the two that I see the most. Bisoprolol, I see quite a bit of too. But metoprolol is also a rhythmic agent, so I see quite a bit of metoprolol and atenolol is a very, very old drug. And I like very, very old drugs because they’ve been around long enough that we have a pretty good idea what the side effects are. Now, these block adrenaline uptake. So particularly when people first start on them, it’s hard to even function. I mean, you’re kind of walking down, bumping into the walls. You’re dizzy, just grossly fatigued. People tend to kind of grow into them so they don’t cause as much of a problem. You know, different people are more or less sensitive to them, but again, they’re blocking adrenaline uptake. So people that are very stressed are those of you that get white coat hypertension. Those would be clues that you might need a beta blocker to block the excess adrenaline so that it doesn’t cause hypertension. Now, these can deplete the body of coenzyme Q10 and melatonin. So this is really severe in terms of potential problems. So you can have insomnia, obviously, from the low melatonin, disrupted sleep, increased risk of cancer. Cancer risk goes up significantly with low melatonin, autoimmune disorders, muscle cramps and memory loss.

So basically, you’re going to take melatonin and CoQ10 on those. Again, melatonin, almost anybody is fine with melatonin. About 10% of people will have wild, wild dreams and about 10% feel a little dopey in the morning. But otherwise, melatonin is magical, as is CoQ10. Okay, a couple of centrally acting medications. We got clonidine and methyldopa and both of those can deplete CoQ10.  CoQ10 is called ubiquinone or ubiquinol, all depending on the form it’s in and it is called ubiquinone because it’s ubiquitous means it’s in every cell of the body. It’s needed by every cell of the body. When people have problems with statin drugs, it’s mostly from the low CoQ10 as well as sometimes they get the cholesterol too low, but CoQ10 is a big problem. So again, all of these things like fatigue, weakness, muscle and leg cramps. And you see the reason for this is CoQ10 is needed to produce energy and you have to have enough energy to mount an immune response to protect you against infection, to protect against memory loss so that your muscles aren’t weak, so that your heart is pumping strong enough that it’s doing the job. So I don’t see these used very often as blood pressure medications, fortunately, because they’re not my favorites.

So take a CoQ10 supplement. It’s really important in energy production for every cell of the body. Now, the variety of possibilities, there are a variety of possibilities because there are different types of ubiquinone and they will work in the body a little bit differently. But the bottom line is ubiquinol has two times greater bioavailability. Now, depending on the quality of the company, the quality of the product you’re taking, it could be anywhere from 100 milligrams to 300 milligrams a day or even more in people with heart problems. So this is one you definitely want to check in with your health care provider and make sure you’re getting really high quality and you’re getting the right amount.  So then diuretics. So we have tons of diuretics. We have Aldactone or Spironolactone, which is a potassium sparing diuretic. And then we have hydrochlorothiazide, which is the most commonly used of these. So in general, they cause increased urination, which lowers the volume of fluid in the blood.

Okay, so you pee out the water, the water doesn’t build up. There’s less pressure on your heart, there’s less pressure on the blood vessels. And it’s just easier to pump the blood throughout the body. Hydrochlorothiazide was a first line hypertensive medication, often used alone historically. But because of the side effects, I see it used a little less often and frequently much lower doses than I saw it used at many years ago. Now there’s a danger of dehydration. You’re peeing a lot and you can get excess sodium loss because you’re peeing a lot. And both can lead to being lightheaded or having orthostatic hypotension. So this is a big deal. I did a show on a lot of the show was on orthostatic hypotension, which is low blood pressure when you stand up. This is a real problem for older people that are on blood pressure medications. They get out of bed, they stand up to go to the bathroom at night. Their balance probably isn’t perfect in the first place, but they also then will lose consciousness because there’s not enough blood flow getting up into their brain because they don’t have enough blood volume and then they can fall, hit their had fall and break a hip, etc.. So it’s a real, real problem. So if you have relatives or, you know, older people on diuretics, make sure that they’re getting their sodium levels checked and that they’re not getting orthostatic hypotension.

Also, you can get potassium loss from the urination, which is also problematic. So then you’ve got a category of diuretics that are called potassium sparing. So because it’s been recognized that a lot of people pee out way too much potassium, which will cause cramping and heart problems, etc., they use this category of potassium sparing. Now that’s good that you spare the potassium, but if your biochemistry is off in other ways, you can get a very high potassium, to sodium level, which is bad.  So you got to you got to really get this one right. So Spironolactone blocks, testosterone receptors. It’s often used with hormonal issues, but it also disrupts ovulation, estrogen metabolism and adrenal function as a big effect on adrenal function. You can get loss of libido. Menstrual problems, breast pain. It has been linked to breast cysts and possibly breast cancer. So not one of my favorites. I think there are other ways that this can be looked at. For one, you can give potassium to patients who are having a loss of potassium, but where everything else is working. So anyway, this is one you want to get checked out regularly if you’re on it.

And these have a very strong effect on all electrolytes. Electrolytes and a lot of vitamins and minerals in the blood. So remember the B vitamins, B one through 17 or however many you want to look at, are water soluble. So that makes them very susceptible to diuretics washing out too much of the B vitamin. Now, with fat soluble vitamins, you don’t really have to worry about that. But here we see the same characters calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, all critical. Those have to be in very, very tight ranges. Zinc, vitamin B1 is more susceptible than most of the B vitamins to being washed out. And B1 is critical to prevent neuropathy and other disorders. And this is a particular issue for people on diuretics that are drinking significant amounts of alcohol because the alcohol also depletes B1 and folate. Okay. What do you do? So once again, get frequent metabolic panels and CBC. That’s a complete blood count. Again, this is inexpensive. Less than 25 bucks. Pretty accurate. And then do more for in-depth checks. Red blood cell levels again or an OLIGO scan. What do you do if you’re low? Take an electrolyte supplement, take a B vitamin with thiamine and methyl folate. Okay. And again, those are essentially you can’t overdose on those. They’re both water soluble. They just wash out of your system if you take too much of it. So this is a real simple one.

25:19 WAYS TO LOWER BLOOD PRESSURE

Okay. Now I want to look at some other possibilities and how to lower blood pressure. One that rarely I rarely hear this one offered up as a suggestion. But it’s a good suggestion, which is to donate blood. Thicker blood is harder to pump. If there’s more volume, it’s just putting more stress on the heart. The heart has to beat harder. It has to really change the tightness of the blood vessels. And so you get hypertension. So on the CBC, that’s a complete blood count. Look for a high hematocrit. Hematocrit is how tightly packed the blood is with solid elements. If it’s too tightly packed, it’ll be thicker and harder to pump. Look for high M.C.V. That’s mean corpuscular volume. And that indicates the average size of the red blood cells. If they’re too big, it causes crowding. Here’s a caveat. If you go to most labs, they’ll say they’ll have a range of either. 80 to 100 or 79 to 97. Both are wrong. You do not want your MCP to be higher than 90, maybe 91, because those are indications that you probably have folate and or B12 deficiency and that your blood’s too thick.

26:50 HIGH HEMOGLOBIN
Now, we all want to have lots of hemoglobin because that gives us more oxygen carry a carrying capacity. But studies have shown that there’s significant increased cardiovascular risk with elevated hemoglobin. And one of the real big easy to look for here that is rarely, rarely called out by medical doctors and that’s a high platelet count. So this so-called standard reference range for most labs it’s under 450. Some labs it’s under 400. But I promise you, I’ve got great research showing that there is significantly increased cardiovascular risk over 280. And I’ve had several women come in that had recurrent miscarriages. Someone looked at their labs and said, Oh, these are all great, you’re just fine. And they had platelets in around the 400 range. Well, platelets are blood clotting mechanisms or cells, and you don’t want to have high blood clotting range or high blood clotting potential when you’re pregnant. You need to get blood to the placenta. So these are just some things you should look for in your CBC and then go out and help somebody donate some blood. Help you help them. It’s all good.

28:12 RELAXATION

Ah, yes. Here we are. It’s the one that everybody hates to talk about. You relax when you physically relax. The messages that are being sent to your entire cardiovascular system change; your adrenaline level in particular will go down when you start to relax. And epinephrine or adrenaline is what causes the blood pressure to rise. In order to meet the emergency that the body thinks is happening. So you get a restriction of the blood vessels, the blood pressure goes up and it’s very, very dangerous. By the way, the worst day of the year for heart attacks is the Monday after we change the clocks. I cannot remember which ones which, but where you lose an hour of sleep for Daylight Savings Times, that Monday is the number one day for heart attacks. The worst day of the week is Mondays. People kind of relax over the weekend. They, you know, maybe eat too much, drink too much. And then they on Monday morning, they want to sleep. Then they get up too late. They’re in a hurry. They’re rushing around and bam, really a problem. So anyway, anything that’s meditative or relaxes you. Now, for some people, yoga does not relax them. They think it’s a competitive sport and they just get crazy trying to do yoga and doing postures for them. That’s probably not very helpful for their blood pressure. Tai Chi I love because it’s the best exercise to keep strong bones. It’s the best exercise to prevent falling or fear of falling. So really consider taking a tai chi class. Yoga is great too, does a lot of fabulous stuff. Hobbies, and again I said “hobbies” and nothing specific because it’s whatever relaxes you. Some people get relaxed reading a book, other people, their blood pressure goes up. Some people get relaxed doing gardening. Gardening will put my blood pressure right out the top of my head. I don’t like gardening. It’s just an annoying thing to do. So it’s not good for me.

For most people, watching comedies versus stressful or frightening movies is one of the best things you can do in your life. Walking, there are several studies showing that walking barefoot on cobblestone would reduce blood pressure by over ten points, and some were up to 30 points for 24 hours. Now, even if you can’t find cobblestones which are not so easy to find here in the US, walk barefoot, if it’s safe, on the beach, on some grass, whatever you can find to get some texture on the bottom of your feet. They actually make floor mats like kitchen mats and other mats that have cobblestones built into them. So you can stand barefooted while you’re washing your dishes and get your blood pressure down. So that’s kind of cool. And then there’s grounding. So in grounding, I’m not talking about the grounding mats. There’s a lot of disagreement about those. But getting your feet barefooted on the grass. On even brick or even cement, you’re going to get some benefits, will lower your blood pressure. It’s also great for sleep if you ground out before bedtime. So that’s a couple of easy things.

31:48 BIOFEEDBACK DEVICES

Respirator, lots of good clinical evidence. We have one in our clinic. It’s basically a biofeedback device. You put that belt around your chest. You put the little ear things in your ears. And you turn it on and it will signal you when your breathing is out of balance.  This has a really, really good track record, we use one in our clinic. Handgrip exercises. Now this goes back. This article was from 2004 in WebMD, but there are articles that go way back well before that, that handgrip exercises are very good at lowering blood pressure. So either isometric where you’re just squeezing it or isotonic where you’re actually pumping it. Both will lower blood pressure. One hour a week of handgrip exercise reduced systolic pressure by more than ten points. So if you watch TV, there you go, 10 minutes a day, 10 minutes a day while you’re sitting there watching TV, watching your comedy, and you can get your pressure down by ten points. Now, the point of this is that you may have pressure that has to go down 30 points. Do everything. Do everything I’m talking about here. They’re all in the realm of, you know, reasonable periods of time.  They are additive with each other. Also, even if you needed them to still do some medication, you could probably reduce your medication by half or more, which is going to cause fewer nutrient deficiencies and fewer side effects.

This is kind of interesting. There’s this is a company (GEHA). But I just wanted their quote here. I had known this I read the original article on this, which was pretty mind blowing. And, you know, the pilots who are flying these F-16s are so fast. And the G-forces are so strong that they have to wear pressure suits. And even with that, a lot of them were starting to pass out. And so they started having them grip the steering wheel very, very tightly and pump it even like they’re doing hand grips in order to keep them from passing out from the G-forces.

And what they found through time is that the pilot’s blood pressure would go up over 200 their systolic, but that in general, they had the lowest blood pressure of the people being tested because that combination of the hand gripping actually caused a long term, low blood pressure. So this is pretty cheap. I mean, you know, those things are, what, ten bucks?

34:45 LOWER INFLAMMATION

Inflammation causes thicker blood. Inflammation damages the blood vessels. Inflammation increases blood sugars. It’s the key cause of obesity. All of those. Are increasing blood pressure. And inflammation is also the primary cause of all of our leading causes of death in the US cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke, cancer, etc. And the primary starting point of inflammation is in the gut. There are now thousands of reports and hundreds of well-done studies showing that inflammation really starts in the gut. So if you’ve got high blood pressure, work on your gut as well as some of these other techniques to get it down. In our clinic we use red light and we use infrared light frequencies because they lower inflammation. If you lower inflammation, your blood flow is better and you have lower blood pressure. Using sunlight reduces inflammation. So sitting in the sun for a few minutes. But the red light, the infrared light won’t cause sunburn and we get great results.

Now, this is a pretty strong looking guy, and that’s probably not a coincidence. Many of the Professional sports teams, particularly football teams, use red light and infra red light to lower inflammation and they’ll have their players sitting in front of them on pretty much a daily basis. My favorite is PEMF that’s pulsed electromagnetic frequencies. These cause the arteries to pump more efficiently. It thins the blood. It keeps it from coagulating, which is one of the primary causes of high blood pressure is hyper coagulation where the blood is very thick. This is going to increase blood flow to lower inflammation and lower blood pressure.  We have four different kinds of biomass and PEMF units in our clinic. We use them all day long, every day. We love them and my patients love them.

37:03 HERBS & SUPPLEMENTS

Okay. And then there are tons of herbs and supplements for hypertension. But just like with the medications, the key is you have to know what the root is. So is the cause having too much inflammation? Is it too much stress? Is it fluid retention? And so then you come up with an herbal formula that can treat that. As just one example. Taka an individual with poor circulation with fluid retention, which is very common. And these are just a few of the herbs that help with sodium and water retention. A lot of these, you know, dandelion, ginger, parsley, hawthorn, juniper, you know, you can get make tea out of and sip it all day. And then there are Chinese herbal formulas like Wu Ling San, which is directly diuretic. And a lot of my patients are able to get off diuretics and use Wu Ling San. So again, this is I’m not going to go into a whole track about specific herbs and supplements, but just keep in mind that they have a role.  So if you’re doing PEMF, red light, respirator, and grounding out you’re going to feel great and your blood pressure is probably going to come down into a very, very normal range. And you won’t have any of these side effects that I was speaking about at the beginning of the presentation today.

So you’ve been tuned in to “Ask Dr. Nieters.” Tell your friends, send us questions and have them join us on Tuesday afternoons. Then I’m here to answer questions. Any questions? Do I have a recommendation for a PEMF unit? Yeah! I am actually a distributor for Beamer. I’ve never sold a Beamer. I got it because I wanted to use it to buy one. They are the best proven. They’ve been used in Europe for decades and are approved there for hospital use even because they’re so powerful at increasing blood flow. I find them at least, you know, in my income realm to be very, very expensive. We’re looking at about 4 to $5000 out the door.

39:27 PEMF MAT

So I have used a mat that I find works really, really well and it’s a combination.  I don’t know if you remember, it was back a few slides. There was a picture of a woman that was lying on a mat that was called a healthy wave mat. And that had built into it the PEMF, the red light, the infrared light, a bio mat where there’s far infrared, that shining through amethyst crystal and a negative ion generator. And how much was the one in that picture, Kathryn. “That was about 1500 to 1800.” So under $2,000, and it did five things, and we love it. My patients love it. I personally have a small one that I put on my chair as a mat, and it does the same things, but it’s much, much smaller and it’s flexible. And that was how much? “$500.” $500. So if you’re interested, contact Kathryn and she can set you up with, you know, the different types of options and see where you want to go.

Okay. Well, this is Dr. John. I’ve enjoyed being here. Keep those slides because you may want them if you ever go on blood pressure medications to kind of prevent any of the side effects. And if you have questions, send them to us, email them. You can call in during the show or not call them but us chat while we’re here on the show. And we would love to hear from you. And we have another question from.

41:12

“You mentioned donating blood. Is there any age restrictions on this?”

That there’s you can’t be too young. But I don’t know what the age is. I don’t know of any age restrictions. Because you’re older. And one of the other cool thing is they’ll test your blood and they’ll tell you if you have any problems you need to look for. And so it’s a freebie.

Totally cool. All right. Thank you. Happy Tuesday. And we’ll be back next week. Bye bye.


REFERNCES:

PEMF MAT: Healthy Wave Mat

Pharmavite. Common drug classes, drug-nutrient depletions, & drug-nutrient interactions. www.aafp.org/dam/AAFP/documents/about_us/sponsored_resources/Nature%20Made%20Handout.pdf. Accessed September 20, 2019.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5874849/
https://nutritionreview.org/2016/12/practical-guide-avoiding-drug-induced-nutrient-depletion/


Dr. John Nieters L.Ac, DAOM, is an acupuncturist, Chinese herbalist, functional medicine, writer, teacher, and leader in the community. In this episode, John talks about his experience with the importance of finding your vision and purpose in life, in order to create the right goals for you.

Disclaimer: Dr. John Nieters received his Doctor of Oriental Medicine and Acupuncture degree from Five Branches. His use of “doctor” or “Dr.” in relation to himself solely refers to that degree. Dr. Nieters is a licensed acupuncturist in California. This video is for general informational purposes only. It should not be used to self-diagnose and it is not a substitute for a medical exam, cure, treatment, diagnosis, and prescription or recommendation. It does not create a doctor-patient relationship between Dr. Nieters and you. You should not make any change in your health regimen or diet before first consulting a physician and obtaining a medical exam, diagnosis, and recommendation. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. TheBalancingPoint.net, Alameda Acupuncture, and Dr. John Nieters L.Ac, DAOM are not liable or responsible for any advice, course of treatment, diagnosis or any other information, services or product you obtain through this video or site.

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