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I dated a Chinese woman from Vietnam at one time who's lower BP number was 170. The upper was 200 something. She's in her late 40s now and aside from the doctors freaking out when they take her BP, she's never had any health problems. She refuses to do anything about it, too.

HBP rarely kills before the victim is past 40; that's why it has not been weeded out of the gene pool. Using isolated counterexample as an excuse to do nothing about a medical condition (I know you are not proposing doing nothing) is a very bad idea. Use statistics instead.

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I think you should look at diet before commiting to drugs for the rest of her life. I think this is the great problem with western medicine, they almost never consider any course but drugs and surgery. My mom was put on some drug for HBP and in a year's time, she was on seven more, each an attempt to counteract the side effects of the one before. She was feeling sick all the time from it. I convinced her to stop the drugs and eat a non fat diet, which she did (for a while), felt better, and the BP went down.

Side effects are very individual; I never had any, but I know people with serious HBP who searched for appropriate therapy for years. I also knew a guy who was so 'accustomed' to his high pressure that 'normalizing' it left him groggy and sleepy all the time. He decided (in consultation with his cardiologist) he prefered to forgo any treatment for a while, but then managed to lower his pressure somewhat gradually and get used to that level.

Any physician will tell you to lower your stress level and intake of salt, caffeine and alcohol first, carefully increase the level of physical activity, lose weight etc. That might or might not work. As I said before, one might also try biofeedback, meditation, acupuncture... Some of these have well documented success record, some only anecdotal.

'Non-western' medicine(s) also used drugs they were able to prepare. For exemple, first antimalaric (quinine) and anti-inflamatory drug (aspirin, or acetylsalicylic acid, derived from willow bark) were 'traditional' treatments. Though, they were usually accompanied by hundreds of others with no therapeutic value (except as placebo).

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Check out a diet course by a Dr. McDougal. Essentially, it's a 0 fat diet. I was on it for years (until I got married) and would prefer to still be on it.

Well, I am sceptical (what is the right preposition here? 'of'?) any '0 anything' diets. That said, it is pretty clear that we eat much more fat than we evolved for; only few hundred years ago it was very difficult to obtain much fat of any kind in food. (Again, there are exceptions, like people living in polar regions... Sigh, life is complicated!)

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Eating good means different things to different folks. It seems a lot of modern ailments are caused by diet, and diet is almost always ignored by western medicine.

While I agree with the first statement (for example, there are people capable of saying 'vegeterian' and 'natural' in the same sentence ), I would not say we ignore diet. On the contrary, enourmous industry is built around it. You might be right that it often just masquerades as having anything to do with medicine or indeed health. (Besides, my physician does keep pestering me about losing weight and does not suggest any drugs for that )
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