High Blood Pressure Cured Over the Internet (study)

Many people dislike visiting doctors. Others are unable to do so because they live in rural areas where doctors are scarce.

Even if you can visit a doctor without much effort, you might not like your doctor’s advice to take drugs to lower your blood pressure. More and more people are turning to the Internet in search of safer alternatives.

A team led by a researcher from the Peter Munk Cardiac Center at the University Health Network and the University of Toronto recently presented a study illustrating how people can cure themselves of high blood pressure with nothing more than an Internet connection.

But it has to be done in a very specific way to be successful.

Researchers recruited 264 people with high blood pressure with an average age of 57.5. Of those, 39 had blood pressure above 160/100 mmHg.

They divided the subjects into two groups: one that received an Internet-based lifestyle counseling program, and one that received a generic program also presented online.

The lifestyle intervention program consisted of weekly emails for a period of four months, two emails per month for the next four months, and one email per month for the last four months.

The emails contained links to videos recorded by former hypertensive patients in which they explained the lifestyle modifications that enabled them to lower their blood pressure, tools for tracking their diets and activity levels, and other informative and motivational materials.

The generic treatment group received factual but boring information about necessary lifestyle and dietary changes.

The difference between the two groups was the program received by the former included the type of interactive and the vivid information received by people in real life counseling settings, while the latter included the type of information they could read from any good book.

Checking their blood pressure quarterly over the course of a year, they found the systolic pressure of the treatment group dropped by 10 mmHg, while the generic treatment group experienced a drop of only six mmHg.

This is interesting because it suggests even non-vivid, no-interactive lifestyle modification information can lower blood pressure effectively, even if not as much as the more engaging delivery.

Here at Blue Heron Health News, we have helped thousands of people to lower their high blood pressure online using nothing but an easy, 9-minute blood pressure exercise. And the average results are much better than the 10 points in the study. Click here to become another blood pressure success story…