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Life with hypertension

Hello, I'm 49 years old and after weekly use of TaiwanTCM Liang ginseng bought on the ariadne.cz website I can not believe my blood pressure has stabilized and my values are from 120-135 / 70-80. I ceased without medication to take the cure for pressure - because it caused me side effects - the pressure was fluctuating, my head ached and I coughed. Now I'm just worried that the spell will not end. Please, will I have to sip this tea until the end of my days? But I'm writing to you because you say that ginseng can interact with drugs and that we have a doctor. This information laughed at me, my dear and worthy district physician, who wanted to help me prescribe high blood pressure drugs, knows nothing about this, of course, the effects of ginseng do not recognize and know. Can not you at least briefly indicate with which medication the ginseng should not be combined? I ordered another dose and I would hope to wait for my condition to not get worse, it's probably too short a time to evaluate. But thank you very much, and if you are interested, she will be happy to write to you how my condition is developing. Regards, and thanks. JZ

Hello.

Ginseng has many beneficial effects. One of them is that it expands blood vessels and reduces blood pressure . The relaxation effect of ginseng on smooth muscle blood vessels by allosteric activation of NO synthase 3, increased expression of its gene and normalization of the stress axis has been known for quite some time. This is confirmed by recent scientific studies ( Chen1996cpg , Chow1976psc , Jeon2000ekr , Han1998erg , Sung2000erg ). But shortly, there are a few things to note.

Hypertension is only a symptom

First, hypertension is not as bad as a symptom, like a fever. Like fever, hypertension also exists differently, and each requires different treatment. Ginseng excels in primary (essential, idiopathic) hypertension , which is the majority of our population - accounts for up to 95% of all hypertension. Minor (said secondary) hypertension , the cause of which is in other illnesses, is treated with other medications, and ginseng does not always work on it, or even in specific cases it may not be beneficial. Therefore, and so I get to my second comment, I recommend using ginseng always (three times a day) to measure the pressure. That is why I recommend the doctor's supervision. And it's not just because doctors have the right to a healing error.

Dr. House is not just a fairytale figure

Although I read readers' letters carefully and I think a lot, I am in a huge disadvantage to someone who has you in your office and can send you to specialized examinations. I'm just a biologist, not a psychotron. For this reason, I give all of my recommendations only as advice to a good doctor. Really good doctors, as good as mythical Dr. House, though real, really exist in us. I know because at least two I personally knew: One of them was related to my uncle, the intern who wore all the medical books in his head. The other is my former classmate , who graduated in medicine and became an angiologist in Bratislava and later in Brno. This is a doctor who not only takes his job seriously, but also has an eidetic knowledge of medicine, human genes, and chemistry that will make me feel better at all times (and, of course, the doctor of physics for a woman :-). This man, even if he did not know anything about the ginseng, would roughly study his effects within 3 hours and immediately put it right in the pen of his knowledge, despite the false negative propaganda that ginsels have been doing since the 1990s wannabe "medical" magazines.

Every doctor must be a detective, to a large extent. A good doctor is not easy to oblige, whether it is tested by patients or propagandists. When a doctor tells you that he does not recognize ginseng, do not tell him that more scientific publications have been written about the ginseng than about any other medicinal plant. Answer him with a smile that ginseng in one of his series was recommended by Dr. House and watch his reaction. (Specifically, it was to regenerate the immunity after the patient's inadvertent irradiation . Dr. House, if I remember, recommended Chinese herbs and Chinese caterpillars ( Cordyceps sinensis ) , I just forgot the indication.)

For further inquiries

If the spell is not over

Maybe not, but the pressure you need to measure three times a day, as you have done so far.

Side effects of your medicine for increased blood pressure

By the side effects you describe, you may have been prescribed amlodipine. His arbitrary abandonment is something I can not and can not even prescribe here. Once again, find a physician who will not only be nice and worthy, but in addition to thousands of industrial medicines, there will also be thousands of effective secondary metabolites freely available in the wild.

How long you have to take ginseng

Hypertension is a chronic disease and its causative treatment is, as an exception, beyond the scope of contemporary medicine. If you are interested in avoiding the dreaded complications of hypertension - myocardial infarction and stroke - you need to treat hypertension symptomatically, by artificially lowering blood pressure. Symptomatic treatment, of course, does not eliminate the real cause of hypertension. In other words, just as you say, you will have to take something for hypertension until the end of your days. If ginseng takes you, you can talk about happiness. Ginseng has fewer side effects because it reduces blood pressure by turning the key in the ignition, not by pulling the fuel inlet hose, as Ca 2+ channel blockers do.

Taking ginseng with other medicines

As you have known, ginseng alone is a remedy for increased blood pressure and other problems. However, its interactions with other drugs are weaker than we would expect, because ginseng, taken at long-term in low doses, only causes a slight change in the expression of certain genes. This will not alter the physiology of the organism so much to affect the effect of industrial drugs, most of which are allosteric at the level of ready-to-eat foods. Do not be afraid of fake "ginseng" interactions and other herbs that have been scattered here and there since about the 1990s in magazines designed for the medical audience. Ginseng is one of the safest herbs and can be used self-regulatingly - if a ginseng does not do well, it just drops it off.

When to use ginseng

We have noticed a case of negative effects of ginseng on renal hypertension. I would also observe the traditional recommendation not to use ginseng for acute fever illnesses, especially bacterial.

Other scarecrows (any contraindications and interactions) are, as I suggested above, mostly fictionalized to match the main indications . For example, a broad-spread "interaction" with warfarin, which is used as a cure for heart problems, may serve as an example - these are, however, one of the main ginseng indications . Another example is the interaction with anti-diabetes medications - in fact, ginseng itself acts slightly antidiabetic and limits the complications of diabetes . Physicians can easily refute these false contraindications by reading articles written by experts on ginseng, not by rent writers of reviews of "various herbs in medicine", when studying scholarly literature.

That's what I'm doing with you for now. We are interested in your experience and we will be happy to hear from you again.

-boris-

| 2011 - 24.1.2018