Effects of Hypertension – Its Allopathic and Naturopathic Treatment
Naturopathic treatment is supposed to offer the best cure possible for hypertension patients. Since the illness is most commonly attributed to the lifestyle disorders, the cure too could be possible by correcting the diet and eating habits. However one must know more about the disease in general before following an adequate therapy.
The course of essential hypertension is variable. The blood pressure tends to get higher as the disease progresses, but often 20years or more may elapse before sustained hypertension causes enough damage to produce symptoms or complications in one or more of the target organs. Occasionally, for no apparent reason, there is an abrupt worsening,or acceleration, of hypertension when blood-pressure levels become exceedingly high, leading rapidly to heart or kidney failure or to brain hemorrhage (malignant hypertension). On the other hand, some patients have mild elevations of blood pressure intermittently throughout life without life without progression and with little or no damage to target organs. Untreated, most hypertensive patients die at an earlier age than healthy individuals: the most frequent causes of death are heart failure, heat attack (myocardial infraction), and stroke.
Treatment
Probably no more than 3 percent of all hypertensive patients can be cured by surgical means – removal of a diseased kidney or a tumor of the adrenal gland, surgical repair of a diseased kidney artery, or coarctation of the aorta. For the others, treatment consists of dietary measures to reduce salt intake and – if the patient is obese–weight. Usually one or more drugs are necessary in addition. There are three categories of drugs used to reduce elevated blood pressure: diuretic agents, which promote the loss of water and salt from the body; vasodilator drugs, which relax and dilate the arterioles and thus decrease the resistance to the flow of blood; and drugs–including ganglionic blockers and beta-adrenergic blockers–that impair the sympathetic nervous system, which controls the rate and force of the heartbeat as well as the tone of the arterioles. In the late 1970s a new class of drugs, which inhibit the action of the enzyme renin, was introduced.
It has been demonstrated that if blood pressure is maintained within normal or nearly normal limits with appropriate medication, the fatal and nonfatal complications of hypertension are significantly reduced, especially when diastolic blood pressure is more than 104mm Hg initially. Because hypertension seldom disappears spontaneously, treatment is a lifelong process. Persuading patients to comply with a treatment program for a lifetime now looms as the largest obstacle to adequate control of hypertension.
