December 12, 2006 by William Zvarick, L.Ac.
Amy has a condition known as malignant hypertension. At the age of 30 she had already suffered two strokes which affected her vision and hearing and she suffered chronic severe headaches and muscle spasms throughout her body. She had been on many different medications but nothing really controlled the problem well.
When Amy first sought my care I had no way of knowing how much help I could offer. Hypertension typically responds well to acupuncture treatments, but I had never treated such an acute case. Fortunately she responded dramatically. As long as she took at least one treatment a week she was able to function normally. Her blood pressure would always drop from 20 to 50 points after each treatment and her headaches would resolve.
There are some promising results from studies on acupuncture for hypertension, and more research needs to be done. But clinical results like the one above are compelling. Not all patients respond so dramatically, but most do respond well. One fortunate aspect of acupuncture is that it’s extremely safe.
Even in cases where there is no improvement there are no adverse side effects. The points have an intrinsically balancing effect. In other words, a patient without hypertension will not experience below normal blood pressure as a result of the same treatment given to lower blood pressure in a hypertensive patient. Acupuncture differs from western medicine in this respect. In fact, often patients will report that other "unrelated": problems will resolve during the course of treatment.
The ancient Chinese did not recognize hypertension as a distinct problem. When you go to an acupuncturist he will ask you many questions about your body other than your blood pressure. Chinese medicine always views the body as a whole, rarely focusing exclusively on "the problem". We always treat the body as a system, observing how the various organs and their energies interact with each other. This is why people with the same western diagnosis will often get different acupuncture treatments, and also why it’s a bit tricky to construct studies to measure the effect of "a treatment for hypertension". The best acupuncture treatments are not "off the rack" but "tailor made".
