Chiropractic Lowers Blood Pressure

Hypertension/High Blood Pressure -Study Finds Special ‘Atlas Adjustment’ Lowers Blood Pressure

By Daniel J. DeNoon- WebMD Medical News

Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

March 16, 2007 — A specific chiropractic adjustment can significantly lower high blood pressure, a placebo-controlled study suggests.

“This procedure has the effect of not one, but two blood-pressure medications given in combination,” study leader George Bakris, MD, tells WebMD. “And it seems to be adverse-event free. We saw no side effects and no problems,” adds Bakris, director of the University of Chicago hypertension center.

Eight weeks after undergoing the procedure, 25 patients with early-stage high blood pressure had significantly lower blood pressure than 25 similar patients who underwent a sham chiropractic adjustment. Because patients can’t feel the technique, they were unable to tell which group they were in.

X-rays showed that the procedure realigned the Atlas vertebra — the doughnut-like bone at the very top of the spine — with the spine in the treated patients, but not in the sham-treated patients.

Compared to the sham-treated patients, those who got the real procedure saw an average 14 mm Hg greater drop in systolic blood pressure (the top number in a blood pressure count), and an average 8 mm Hg greater drop in diastolic blood pressure (the bottom blood pressure number).

None of the patients took blood pressure medicine during the eight-week study.

“When the statistician brought me the data, I actually didn’t believe it. It was way too good to be true,” Bakris says. “The statistician said, ‘I don’t even believe it.’ But we checked for everything, and there it was.”

Bakris and colleagues report their findings in the advance online issue of the Journal of Human Hypertension.

Dr Gonzalez Comments- Chiropractic simply restores the body’s spine and nervous system so that it can function with no nerve interference. Nerve interference is what causes so many problems in the body and once corrected the body normalizes without the need for prescription drugs.  By understanding the importance of the spine and nervous system, how it is the master system of the human body you can begin to appreciate just how powerful and healing a Chiropractic adjustment is.

It’s too bad this research did not make headline news coverage on TV or front page news on major newspapers throughout the country. There would be millions of people tossing out their blood pressure pills and be lining up at the Chiropractors office to get their spine adjusted.