The S&A Health Report: "Get Thee to a Nunnery!"

If you don’t recognize it, the title of this report is from Hamlet’s advice to Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. If you’re looking for a role model for health, think about the folks in your nearby monastery or nunnery. Seriously, when it comes to the silent killer known as HYPERTENSION, our religious friends avoid it with little more than “a wing and a prayer.” It turns out that nuns don’t get hypertension (AKA high blood pressure) at all. These ladies barely get heart disease – or even wrinkles, much to the dismay of the makers of Botox. Surely we have a lot to learn from them. Many theories have been posited in an attempt to explain this phenomenon, one of which is that their lifestyles of songs, prayer or meditation, and simple daily chores is just not conducive to such stress-induced maladies. Most people, on the other hand, live their lives in a frantic search for more… more money, more prestige, more credentials, more toys, more meaning. And the list goes on and on. From this stress-filled lifestyle comes a slow but deadly disease called hypertension.

For more than 60 years, numerous studies using subjects from animals to humans have shown that “stress” increases chemicals in the body that slowly lead to chemical imbalances, hormone imbalances, and ultimately inflammation. When this becomes chronic, WHAM, the result is disease.

However, it isn’t just “bad stress” (rush-hour traffic) that does damage. Ironically, even the “good stressors” (getting married) can cause damaging physiologic responses. For those of us in the Western world where stress is abundant, one in four people have so-called “prehypertension” and don’t even know it. Prehypertension is a blood pressure of either 120-139 systolic (the pressure your heart creates when it pumps blood out) or 80-89 diastolic (the pressure created when your heart relaxes between beats). With these readings most doctors will advise you to make the usual lifestyle changes: lose weight, exercise, limit alcohol, eat a heart-healthy diet (whatever that is), and reduce your sodium intake. And hopefully all doctors will tell you to cut out or at least cut back your tobacco usage.

Interestingly, some simple facts will get you to think twice about this silent killer:

It is the last two facts that disturb me greatly, because it truly suggests a failure on the part of not only our healthcare system, but our political choices as well. Since the HIV/AIDs epidemic began in the 1980s, there have been a total of less than 600,000 deaths from this disease. It is fact, that there are more people that die from hypertension every year in the U.S. than have ever died from this so-called “epidemic” of AIDS. Bill and Linda Gates might consider spending their $787 million earmarked for AIDS vaccines and HIV in a more efficacious manner. But I digress.

Hypertension is an expensive illness for everyone. In the U.S. alone, tens of billions of dollars are spent annually taking care of complications from high blood pressure. The list of complications is long but includes stroke, heart attack, kidney failure, and even blindness.

Unfortunately, there is no one easy cure, but one of our best defenses against this malady is a good strong dose of common sense. Use common sense and be at peace when you feel that your blood pressure may be up.

Here are several therapies to consider for lowering your stress and your blood pressure:

When it comes to hypertension… what do I do?

So while we all can’t live the peaceful, wrinkle-free lives of nuns and priests, there are some things we can do to decrease our risk of becoming another victim of this silent killer.

Here’s to our health,

David Eifrig Jr., M.D., M.B.A.