"Essential" Hypertension And Appreciating It For What It Really Is

[yerrag]

Just an update on what my current protocol is:

Raw garlic, 15g x 3 times daily

Detox supplementation twice daily of : a) a capsule of 3omg Thorne double strength zinc piccolinate, b) a capsule of 400 IU of Unique-E Vitamin E, c) 2 tablets of Jarrow Formulas NAC Sustain, 600 mg each, d) 1 capsule of Thorne Selenomethionine 200 mg, and e) a capsule of Lidtke True B6 P5P 50 mg.

i tablet of Shaklee B-Complex

1 100mcg drop of Health Natura methylene blue twice daily

5 minutes of red light therapy using Redlightman Infrared Red Light Device

4 drops of idealabs Progestene twice daily.

Each night, before I turn in, I would drink a milk blend consisting of 10 grams of Great Lakes collagen hydrolysate, 20 g coco nectar, a pinch of salt, 500 mg GABA, and 500 mg magnesium citrate. As well as 50 ml of coconut milk blended in to increase fat content.

I had tried to use 1 drop Tyromix at twice daily but it has been causing my blood pressure to go higher, so I had to discontinue its use.


It's nearly a week since I started on using garlic, having replaced my PectaClear for a week. There seems to be a very slow downward movement in my blood pressure, but it isn't definite.

This coming monday, I'll begin using a good helping of magnesium body spray on myself, dosing to be determined, to see if the magnesium will help. Everything else will remain the same.

 

[yerrag]

I forgot to note that I'm also having 2 grams of wakame seaweed served in a soup with mushroom with a miso base. The wakame acts as a natural ACE-Inhibitor. I'm using Progestene because it raises my metabolism, to overcome the somewhat anti-thyroid effect of selenomethionine. It counters the temperature lowering effect of selenomethionine.

 

[yerrag]

Since Sept 9, I've reduced my daily intake of raw garlic from 45g to 30g. It's a precautionary measure, as I seem to be getting indications of arrhythmia at that dosage. My Omron electronic blood pressure monitor was occasionally alerting me to this with an icon flashing with the reading.

With the garlic reduced, everything else remains the same, except that I added a dash of Ashwaganda powder to my coffee each morning as well as 2x daily of magnesium oil body spray. I'm getting lower blood pessure readings since the change, but I'll need to make sure I have at least a week of data to use.

 

[yerrag]

I'm not doing well with Ashwaganda. Although it helps my metabolism and increases my temperature, it also increases my blood pressure. I already moved from taking it in the evening to morning, using only a dash of it. When mixed with orang juice, it works ok. But I have to be careful not to mix it with coffee, as it seems to make me feel funny, and sleepy as well.

Also noted that I need to add ferritin to the blood test markers to use to check my progress. In another thread, I had ferritin levels tested that were on the high end of of range. While I had tested negative on CRP, a marker for inflammation, I still think that the high ferritin levels were still a reflection of some tissue damage related to my chronic kidney conditon.

For now until the end of the month, my focus would just be on blood pressure improvements, and I will soon be posting weekly stats of my blood pressure (minimum, maximum, and average).

 

[ecstatichamster]

Thank you.

 

[yerrag]

Thank you.

You're welcome.

I'm starting to think that my issues - not feeling well, and experiencing arrythmia - may have more to do with using Progestene than with the high dosage of raw garlic I'm taking, or with the low dosage of Ashwaganda.

Post 22 of Not Quite Ready For Progesterone explains it.

Today, I'm going to stop my twice daily of 4 drops of Progestene. I'll keep you posted.

 

[yerrag]

This is getting to be embarrassing. It could very well be that my issues may have to do with a toothache that's been developing. A filling needs to be refilled. Meanwhile, the crack is causing my cavity to be breached. This infection could cause my blood pressure to go up as well. I have to get this fixed before I resume any recording, as this would throw off my readings. An infection would use up a lot of oxygen as well, and produce estrogen as well. I've applied oil of cloves on my aching tooth, it should keep things manageable pain-wise while I schedule with my dentist. Of all times, it had to happen now, while I'm in the midst of my "experiment."

 

[yerrag]

This is getting to be embarrassing. It could very well be that my issues may have to do with a toothache that's been developing. A filling needs to be refilled. Meanwhile, the crack is causing my cavity to be breached. This infection could cause my blood pressure to go up as well. I have to get this fixed before I resume any recording, as this would throw off my readings. An infection would use up a lot of oxygen as well, and produce estrogen as well. I've applied oil of cloves on my aching tooth, it should keep things manageable pain-wise while I schedule with my dentist. Of all times, it had to happen now, while I'm in the midst of my "experiment."

It turns out to my toothache wasn't a big deal. I came back from my dentist yesterday, and I realize my headache is a separate manner from the toothache, which turned out to be a minor case.

Anyway, I had to stop my protocol for a week, as I recovered from the headache, which I very much believe came from applying Progestene topically over a 2-week period. 8 drops (14 mg) a day seemed insignificant, but the effects seemed to have accumulated and eventually got significant enough to cause a headache, as well as increasing my blood pressure greatly. I was using it to counter the effect of one of the detox supplements that I use, which seemed to cause my temperatures to go down, which to me is a sign of lowering my metabolism. Initially, it worked well. But the compounded effects over a longer period proved that using Progestene at that dosage wasn't a good approach.

Since I still have a slight headache, I'm going to continue to be off my detox protocol. Tomorrow it would be a week, and I'm hoping that the headache goes away by then, so I could resume my detox.

In the meanwhile, let me show you how the results of my detox so far, before I stopped the protocol:

Blood Pressure-
Start of 3 months of Pectaclear (Jan) Min: 181/117, Max 218/149, Average 205/133
End of 3 months of Pectaclear (April) Min: 179/118, Max 205/133, Average 193/126

Break for 2 months (May-June)

Start of 1 month of Pectaclear (July) Min: 180/114, Max 211/134, Average 194/123
End of 1 month of Pectaclear (Aug) Min: 188/120, Max 215/136. Average 200/128
After 1st week of Garlic (Sep) Min: 181/113, Max 224/139, Average 200/127
After 2nd week of Garlic (Sep) Min: 175/112, Max 213/141, Average 197/126

Note that the values are based on obtaining the min, max, and average of 7 days of readings, for the start of a period it would be from the values of the first 7 days; for the end of a period it would be from values of the last 7 days. I could not maintain a consistent schedule of daily reading though. I take readings as I find the time to. It's not going to satisfy the rigor needed for scientific inquiry, but that's the best I can come up it, given my time and availability constraints.

The improvements are at best minimal using PectaClear. Still, there was improvement if comparing the average of 205/133 prior to 193/126 after 3 months of usage. After the 2 month break, and followed by 1 month of Pectaclear, the numbers worsened though. This concluded with an average of 200/128. Perhaps the 2-month break destroyed the momentum, but I didn't expect the values to worsen. I shifted to garlic, and the average went down slightly to 197/126.

When I resume, I expect to be continue on garlic, as well as on the same detox supplements (vitamin E, p5P, zinc, selenomethionine, and NAC) but I will discontinue the use of hormones. My cat spilled my methylene blue and caused a stain on my dining floor. So I would be without methylene blue, as well as intake of wakame, which I had used as a natural ACE-inhibitor, but found it I can dispense with it. I'll continue on with a daily dose of red light of 3 minutes on on each kidney, and 2 x 500mg doses of Emergen-C.

For food, I will have 2 glasses of fresh fruit juice daily (from any one of these: pineapple, papaya, satsuma orange, watermelon, cantaloupe- depending on seasonality and pricing), and I will make sure to lessen starch intake to compensate for the sugar intake from these juices. My protein sources are eggs, pork, beef. amd gelatin from both Great Leakes gelatin made into fruit jello, as well as pig ears made into gelatinous jelly similar to head cheese. I'll have occasional goat liver, mussels, oysters,and seawater shrimp, usually fried except for the mussels, which tastes good in soup or baked with cheese, garlic, and butter. I also continue with calcium intake from food, from cooked green leaves, egg shell powder sprinkled on my coffee froth topping, as well as tiny crustacean fritters and deep-fried anchovies. Oils are from using refined coconut oil for cooking, from butter that I take with boiled sweet potatoes on some breakfasts, as well as from coconut milk, which I mix into my coffee as well as my milk blend. I hope that these will fill my needs for fat-soluble vitamins A, E, and K. I take an occasional D3 as there had been less sunshine during the concluding rainy monsoon season, but will resort to more sunlight as the season improves.

As my problem centers still on my kidneys, I have to start soon with incorporating magnesium, both oral (magnesium citrate now, but prefer magnesium bicarb, once I get started on making it), and topically, with magnesium oil, and with footbaths or body baths with epsom salt. If garlic and vitamin C and magnesium still fail to lower my blood pressure (and lerad toxicity together with it), I can start taking 1500-2000 mg of niacinamide. Niacinamide is a last step, and very optional, since it really doesn't address or deal with heavy metal toxicity at all, yet deals more with another form of pathology of the kidney.

 

[yerrag]

Note: I got my Berkeley nitric oxide test strips today. I tested myself and found my nitric oxide levels to be very low, a very slight pink color coming out. This is good news. I was expecting it to be high though, since I have tissue damage as indicated by high LDH readings. One less thing to worry about.

 

[yerrag]

Over the last few days, I did a lot of thinking. And it dawned on me that I had been wrong in analyzing the aftermath of my attempt to use high doses of garlic to remove lead from my kidneys, and to lower my high blood pressure.

One mistake led to another, a comedy of errors.

It was actually the raw garlic I was taking that was causing me to pee very often at night. Garlic, I've found out, is a natural diuretic. The lack of sleep that resulted, at the very least, likely interrupted the production of glycogen stores at night. This likely led to low glycogen levels that during the day, my supply of glucose from glycogen came up empty, as I could recall having slight pangs of hunger, or discomfort in my eye, that I didn't have before. This probably led to my metabolism getting lower, as seen in lower temperatures and pulse rates. I had wrongly blamed the lower metabolism on a supplement I was taking fort detox, but in hindsight it was wrong, because when I was on detox with PectaClear for 3 months, I had been using the same supplement as well, and I had not noticed any negative effect on my metabolism.

I also learned that the high dose of raw garlic could have lead to a thiamine deficiency and a potassium deficiency. This potassium deficiency would easily create electrolyte imbalances that would affect the heart's ability to pump blood efficiently, and this could be the reason for my the irregular heart rate I was experiencing.

I also supplemented with progesterone in an artificial attempt to boost my metabolism when I noticed lower metabolism as I was doing the garlic detox. In hindsight, this wasn't needed. I was merely addressing the symptom (lower metabolism) and not understanding the cause then.

I'm considering reducing garlic dosage and taking it only during breakfast and lunch. Not taking garlic at night could give me my needed sleep so my glycogen stores are not reduced. Reducing the garlic intake while supplementing with thiamine and drinking fresh fruit juice (for potassium) would keep the side effects under control.

The past two days, my metabolism has come back, with higher temperatures and pulse rates restored. I no longer have an irregular heart rate as well.

 

[yerrag]

I'm still taking a rest from my detox with garlic. I have no more of the issues/side-effect of the excessive garlic intake, but I've just lost momentum and got busy and haven't gotten around to resuming my garlic detox.

Last night, I was feeling bloated out of having a full lauriat course of Chinese food for both lunch and dinner. I couldn't sleep. I decided to take a teaspoon of activated charcoal. Immediately, I had loose bowel movement and after got, I was able to sleep. When I woke up, I took my blood pressure and was surprised to see a low reading of 149/103. I took 3 more readings, and the average of 174/117 was more like it. I felt like there's a breakthrough, since was able to breach 180/120.

So what I'll do is to take 1 tsp of AC each night before bedtime and observe. I didn't plan on using the AC for lowering my blood pressure, as that wasn't what AC is known for. But AC seems to be affecting me positively, for some reason, and I should pursue this lead.

 

[ecstatichamster]

Garlic could have caused leaky gut and increased endotoxins load. Gut issues make you pee frequently.

Have you tried the ground cooked mushrooms. They can be magical. I think they reduce endotoxins. A lot. The activated charcoal adsorbs endotoxins and prevents too much reu-take of bile. Mushrooms are gentler, aromatse inhibitors and kind of sterilize the small intestine and lower endotoxins in the bowel through anti microbial action.

Btw Chinese food is for me off limits unless I make it myself because it’s loaded with vegetable oil.

 

[yerrag]

I've noticed that since taking the raw garlic, I've been having gas. I don't have gas usually, but I just let this go, knowing it must have come from garlic. Maybe I should reduce my dosage to a point where I don't have gas.

Would gas be associated with leaky gut and endotoxins? I've used the white button mushrooms in another of your post, but not the ground cooked mushrooms. I suppose it's worth giving it a shot.

What do you mean by re-uptake of bile? Isn't bile the liver's way of excreting toxins through the bowel? Does re-uptake of bile serve a good purpose, except for breaking down oil? What happens with too much re-uptake of bile?

I must have gotten used to a PUFA-free diet that the two full courses of Chinese food for lunch and dinner gave me enough PUFAs to cause me to get bloated. I was having acid reflux and when I spit it in the toilet bowl it was really oil. It looks like my body is rejecting the PUFA! It's hard to prevent eating Chinese food for me at restaurants as this is the only social activity in Manila. City life with extremely heavy traffic every day makes it hard to do anything else but eat for leisure.

 

[yerrag]

I got back my blood tests today, as part of the monitoring of my progress in detoxifying my kidney of lead. I had two weeks of taking insanely large amount of garlic, after which I had arrhythmia, presumably from the side effect of depleting my thiamine as well as potasssium. It took a week of staying off my protocol before my arrhythmia went away. And still, I took another week after that of further rest, wherein I continued to stay off garlic and detox supplementation. I had some headache remaining, which gradually went away. I also made sure I drank of fruit juice, to restore potassium levels, and took thiamine as well as niacinamide. I also slept better the past week, and with the hiatus from my protocol, I think the latest blood tests would give me a better snapshot of the state of my health, as far as my kidney is concerned. Needless to stay, there hasn't been much or a significant change in my hypertensive state. But the following results give me some hope that there is progress. One blood test after my baseline from a month ago doesn't establish a trend, but here goes:

Uric Acid - from 352 to 379 umol/L (range 202- 416): Negative development
Albumin - 41.42 to 38.9 g/L (range 35-50): Negative development
LDH (kinetic) - 238 to 201 U/L (range 135 -225): Positive development
CO2 - 33.52 to 28.9 mmol/L (range 22 - 30): Not definite, down but within upper range)
Urine Protein/Creatinine Ratio - 30.94 to 25.65 mg/mmol (range <22.6): Positive, but still outside range

 

[yerrag]

I've pretty much stopped for the time being treating my hypertension, as I think things through as well as do some more research. In this time, I have dabbled in some experimentation, which I have not recorded except for my blood pressure log.

I've come to forming a hypothesis as to why I have hypertension, and if I consider factors outside of lead toxicity, I am narrowing it down to a magnesium deficiency. Why I say so was my serendipitous experience with using a lot of garlic last month to see if it will lower my blood pressure. Those two weeks were a good learning process. I learned that too much garlic depletes thiamine, potassium as well as magnesium. I started to have arrhythmia, and I also experienced more pain at my arthritic left knee, and I also had more psoriasis or scleroderma at my scalp region. Trix pointed me to a book called Potassium Nutrition, by Weber, and I learned of mycoplasma bacteria which could cause arthritic conditions to get worse with a deficiency of potassium, and also learned that potassium will not be absorbed by the body when there is a magnesium deficiency. This was leading me to think that I could be deficient in magnesium, as I had in the past been perplexed by my inability to raise potassium levels even after ingesting a lot of potassium, through food and through supplementation. That burtlancast showed me that magnesium could also chelate lead was another tidbit of info that pushed me more into looking at magnesium as a solution to my hypertension.

When I started to take more magnesium in the form of magnesium citrate, I noticed that my arthritic knee pain started to lessen, and I could walk up stairs as well as rise from a kneeling position without feeling much pain. During mornings, when I rise ot of bed, I didn't feel as much the stiffness of my left middle finger, which had for a good 6 months been bothering me. I had tried to deal with these pains using red light as well as thyroid, but none come close to the effect of using magnesium. And I observed these effects without so much as attempting to fix my knee pain and the trigger finger. I was focused on my blood pressure. So, the case goes stronger for a therapeutic magnesium supplementation for me.

I'm also beginning to think that my hypertensive condition began shortly after I had my mercury detox. It was an effective mercury detox because, after removing my dental amalgams and undergoing chelation, I could run for 5 kilometers and even more without even so much as training for it. It was effortless and a breeze. Before my mercury detox, I struggled running beyond 1 kilometer. I was panting and kept thinking it was for lack of practice and training. Imagine how much lactic acid was building up to cause me to be drained for so short a distance. But the downside to that was that I eventually developed hypertension. I now think that with the increased oxygen-carrying capacity of my blood, and with the increased oxygenation of my tissues, I was burning and producing a lot more energy than my body could handle. During those years where I was mercury toxic and couldn't deliver enough oxygen to my tissues, my body had adapted to having low oxygen. Probably the level of magnesium in my body stores had adapted to the level of metabolic activity brought about by oxygen as a limiting factor. When my oxygen supply increased and oxygen ceased to be a limiting factor, my metabolism had increased to a point where magnesium became a limiting factor. In order to address this bottleneck, and to throttle my metabolism, the body sensed the need to lower my metabolism. It did this by constricting my blood vessels, thereby limiting tissue oxygenation. This way, my metabolic rate would be right-sized for my low magnesium level.

The constriction of my blood vessels led to my hypertensive condition. To correct this condition, I would have to supplement with more than just a maintenance dose of magnesium. I now have to look different forms of magnesium. I started looking at magnesium bicarbonate, and I'm readying the equipment to make my own magnesium bicarbonate water. But while at it, I realized that magnesium bicarbonate might not be ideal for my context. Bicarbonate would increase my serum CO2 levels, which normally is good, but in my case it would have the effect of increasing my metabolism. Increasing my metabolism would invariably cause my body to react by lowering it to my maladapted state, and this would cause it to constrict further my blood vessels, thereby increasing my blood pressure. I've observed this effect when I improve my breathing through Buteyko. Instead of lowering my blood pressure, it would be increased instead. I imagine that if I were to go to higher altitude, my blood pressure would increase, contrary to what Ray Peat says. Not that Peat is wrong, but Peat talks to a normal state, not to a maladapted state to which I belong. I believe many people experience the same effects as mine, only because they have maladapted conditions as well.

So, now I'm going to order different form of magnesium from Amazon and have it shipped to me. Currently, I have magnesium chloride, magnesium glycinate, and am still looking to add one or two more.

 

[ecstatichamster]

In Buteyko they wold suggest a short course of cortisone for what you described.

 

[yerrag]

In Buteyko they wold suggest a short course of cortisone for what you described.

That's interesting. I didn't get that advice from my Buteyko instructor. How would cortisone help?

 

[ecstatichamster]

That's interesting. I didn't get that advice from my Buteyko instructor. How would cortisone help?

A short course of cortisone helps people whose CP goes down after breathing exercises, and/or whose heart rate rises.

I think the theory is that you need the cortisone due to some sort of “adrenal exhaustion”, it may be a wrong theory but it does seem to work.

I would suggest you try it. You can even use an asthma inhaler if you don’t have prednisone.

 

[ecstatichamster]

I stumbled on this again and it is timely

Blocking Tissue Destruction

• 
  While hypothyroidism makes the body require more cortisone to sustain blood sugar and energy production, it also limits the ability to produce cortisone, so in some cases stress produces symptoms resulting from a deficiency of cortisone, including various forms of arthritis and more generalized types of chronic inflammation.
  

• 
  Often, a small physiological dose of natural hydrocortisone can help the patient meet the stress, without causing harmful side-effects. While treating the symptoms with cortisone for a short time, it is important to try to learn the basic cause of the problem, by checking for hypothyroidism, vitamin A deficiency, protein deficiency, a lack of sunlight, etc. (I suspect that light on the skin directly increases the skin's production of steroids, without depending on other organs. Different steroids probably involve different frequencies of light, but orange and red light seem to be important frequencies.) Using cortisone in this way, physiologically rather than pharmacologically, it is not likely to cause the serious problems mentioned above.
  

 

[yerrag]

I stumbled on this again and it is timely

Blocking Tissue Destruction

• 
  While hypothyroidism makes the body require more cortisone to sustain blood sugar and energy production, it also limits the ability to produce cortisone, so in some cases stress produces symptoms resulting from a deficiency of cortisone, including various forms of arthritis and more generalized types of chronic inflammation.

• 
  Often, a small physiological dose of natural hydrocortisone can help the patient meet the stress, without causing harmful side-effects. While treating the symptoms with cortisone for a short time, it is important to try to learn the basic cause of the problem, by checking for hypothyroidism, vitamin A deficiency, protein deficiency, a lack of sunlight, etc. (I suspect that light on the skin directly increases the skin's production of steroids, without depending on other organs. Different steroids probably involve different frequencies of light, but orange and red light seem to be important frequencies.) Using cortisone in this way, physiologically rather than pharmacologically, it is not likely to cause the serious problems mentioned above.

I've been trying to figure out how cortisone could help me, and then your post came along. I recently took an am as well as a pm blood test for cortisol, and it seems that my cortisol levels are normal. Would cortisone still help me?

I also do not have a problem with my control pause. With an increase in control pause, I experience higher blood pressure as well.