What’s the active ingredient?
Modern medicine has discovered a new potential threat to your health: high normal blood pressure. The author of the study reporting this possible menace says, "Research is needed to determine whether more aggressive treatment, including medications, is warranted. If studies show treatment is beneficial, the threshold for treating high blood pressure with medications could be lowered."
Since approximately 13 percent of the populace has high blood pressure and 19 percent has "high normal," what additional research will show is whether drug companies get to further cash in by selling their wares to millions more potential patients. Because so many of us are motivated to purchase health services by being reminded, "you can't be too careful," it's likely that it won't take much to start another cash cow grazing at a doctor's office near you. In the meantime, everyone with borderline high blood pressure is being offered the usual advice: protect yourself by losing weight, changing your diet, avoiding salt, and exercising.
This advice is given repeatedly despite clear evidence that high blood pressure responds better to mind-body interventions like anger management training and meditation than it does to lifestyle alterations. The mind-body connection indicates that symptoms like high blood pressure do not "just happen," but are a warning signal that mental factors need attention. Recent research provides hints about what these mental factors might be.
In a large study of men with high blood pressure in Japan, Italy, Norway, and the United States, the Japanese were least likely to die of heart attacks. This was true despite abundant risk factors like lots of fat in their diet, high stress lives, and the highest rate of smoking of any of the groups studied. The Italians were next most likely to survive having high blood pressure. The Americans and northern European men were three times more likely to die of heart attacks.
Neither the Japanese nor the Italians have access to some miraculous blood pressure medication that is unavailable in the U.S. and Europe, so, of course, the researchers want us to believe that it's their diet that saves them. But before you stir-fry some tofu in olive oil and serve it accompanied by green tea with a splash of Chianti, let's think this through from the mind-body perspective.
Japanese who move to the United States and live like Americans show rates of death from heart disease similar to Americans. Japanese who move to the United States and stay closely associated with Japanese community life have the same levels of heart disease that they have in Japan -- about a fifth the U.S. level. Their health is somehow protected even though they have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoke, and eat Western foods. The only difference that makes a health difference is maintaining close connections to traditional Japanese ways of life.
What is the active mind-body ingredient in the traditional Japanese -- and Italian -- way of life that promotes health? Robert Ornstein and David Sobel reflect on this in their book, The Healing Brain: Breakthrough Discoveries about How the Brain Keeps Us Healthy. "Although it is difficult to be precise about this, Japanese society emphasizes social stability and strong social ties more than the American does. In Japan, as many unsuccessful Western businessmen have found, to be autonomous and to stand alone like a rugged cowboy is seen as devious, even pathological. It is the norm in Japan to have lifelong friends, to join and to remain with the same company for a lifetime."
If you understand that beliefs affect health, it's not really that difficult to be precise about the active ingredient here: community closeness at its best leads to a sense of safety, security, support, and connection. Optimally, it fosters a deep inner sense of relaxation, even among the otherwise stressed.
Research substantiates this by showing that making a daily habit of evoking the psychological and physiological state of calm known as the Relaxation Response is highly effective for lowering high blood pressure. Meditation seems to provide the health protective mind-body factors that are missing when medication alone is used to subdue this sign of heightened arousal.
So why isn't meditation being routinely prescribed? It works well. It costs nothing. No equipment is required. You can do it anywhere. The side effects are so beneficial that most people who meditate or practice Dr. Herbert Benson's Relaxation Response report it improves their lives in many ways. Are the drug companies stopping us from meditating? Do doctors think it's a bad idea?
No, the obstruction comes from patients who would rather just take a pill than spend 20 minutes twice a day sitting quietly, doing "nothing." Resistance to meditation can also result from those rugged individualist traits that cause health problems. Rugged individualists aren't particularly inclined to sit and "do nothing" twice a day. Rugged individualists tend to think meditation is for wimps or weirdos. Rugged individualists would rather stay cranked up than risk letting their guard down by calming down. But the biggest barrier to using meditation is the preference for what seems to be the easy way out of health problems -- suppressing symptoms rather than taking an active part in changing root causes of our health problems.
It doesn't take a psychic to predict that the threshold for treating high blood pressure with medication will soon be lowered to include all those millions with high normal blood pressure. But no matter what health authorities, doctors, and drug companies might like you to believe, high normal blood pressure does not require medication to bring it into the safe range. It does, however, require changing your mind about the traditionally passive approach to health that shackles you to drugs, side effects, and supporting the pharmaceutical industry. Whenever health authorities recommend you medicate your symptoms into submission, you have a choice. Will you pretend your health is out of your control or will you cultivate the genuine autonomy and self-mastery that comes from choosing the mind-body approach?
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