Alternative treatment: Lifestyle and Medication

For a long time, so called alternative- or complementary medicine has been ignored by school medicine practitioners. Since time and again they were proven wrong with prejudice, other ways of treating are now progressing. Often in fields where school medicine did not have much to offer, people have gone to alternative healers to find cure. Often they were then seen by quacks and now a whole industry of alternative medicine and complementary medicine exists.

That this is not always to the advantage of the patient, but sometimes just money making scam has become obvious and people should be careful who their trust their health with.

Through the years I have become more and more convinced that excellent supporting treatment is available in the case of heart disease and especially hypertension. Science also has caught up with the old prejudices and many treatments have now become officially 'good practice'. It suffices to take the example of acupuncture.

A new term has been found for schoolmedicine and alternative treatment going hand in hand, called 'Collaborative Medicine'. This is evidence based practice where clinicians use both modern treatment with medication and interventions, as well as, where proven beneficial, more traditional ways of treatment. I am a strong promotor of Collaborative Medicine.

On the professional pages of this website under treatment you will also find a tab called 'alternative treatment'. You may find it interesting what is presented there.

I would like to split the collaborative treatments here in Lifetstyle and Treatment with medication

Lifestyle

It is very clear that people with high bloodpressure need to make adjustments to their lifestyles to become and remain healthy. This includes losing weight, stopping smoking, and eat a healthy diet, reducing salt, for example. This is discussed elsewhere on this site.

Other important lifestyle changes you could make are related to being aware of the close connection between your body and your psyche. We can only be physically healthy' if also in our mind we are sane', as a very old quote. What is important here is that we learn to listen to what our body tells us. In patients with high blood pressure we often find that there is a strong relation with stress and indeed, often these individuals have problems bringing their body to relax.

There are a number of strategies to cope with stress.

This page is under construction.