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Calcium channel blockers will not work if you eat a diet high in dairy products.
Ace inhibitors is a class of medicines such as betaloc, (a.k.a. toprol, lopressor) which is very strong, and should only be prescribed once diet and exercise have been tried.
Some physicians will only prescribe anti-hypertensives after trying behavior modicifation, like diet, exercise, even telling you to meditate.
But if your blood pressure reads higher than 140/90 when you are at rest, you are likely to suffer headaches, blurred vision, and eventually dizzyness and edema, which means your hands, feet, and face can swell.
The first thing to do is determine the cause of the blood pressure being elevated. An endocrine study may reveal too much thyroid activity in a very young, lean person,
a statin which lowers cholesterol may be prescribed for someone at risk for blood clots from family history or a threatened stroke, or certain other medications.
If anxiety is the cause, or a person has anxiety disorder, then a very mild ace inhibitor, propranalol, has very few side effects, is inexpensive, and can stop the jitters. One way to screen for this is to ask if you ever feel a sense of dread, or doom, or feel jittery *without* drinking caffeine. If this is you, then the propranalol can inexpensively treat both problems at once and is much (very much) less likely to cause addiction than a benzodiazapene such as valium.
There is still another pharmaceutical, non-surgical option when the lotensen, lotarsen, toprol, etc just are not getting your numbers into the normal range. The doctor may add thiazide diueretics (water pills) to your regimen. Do not get too much direct sunlight be sure to add a banana or fortifued glass of orange juice to your daily diet if you are prescribed this.
There is a trend these days to blame everything on weight, and cardiac disease used to be called "the disease of choice". Even if your blood pressure is partly controllable by you, the hypertension must be addressed and dealt with in a professional way by your doctor or nurse practitioner. As a person who is heavy now, I will testify that I had high blood pressure even to the point of nosebleeds as a young person, and was first given medication in my teens. I am certainly responsible to eat cautiously, and work out, but when a doctor discontinued my medicine and I could not drive safely, I came to realize that an ounce of prevention really IS worth a pound of cure.
Good luck getting this high blood pressure under control, and if your doctor does prescribe something, then take it for life, or until your doctor says you shouldn't take it any more.
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