Celebrate Your Heart with Acupuncture
Everyone wants to live a long, happy, and healthy life. Improving your heart health is an effective part of increasing your longevity. February is American Heart Month, and there’s no better time to learn how acupuncture works as a safe preventative measure against heart disease. Acupuncture can also help to improve heart function among people diagnosed with, and being treated for, heart disease.
Take Preventative Measures
Problems, such as high blood pressure, can keep you from being 100 percent healthy, even if you’re doing everything else right. An important reason to seek acupuncture therapy is that it can lower your systolic blood pressure by the same number of points as pharmaceutical treatments, such as calcium channel blockers and ACE inhibitors, according to recent studies. How treatment works: An acupuncturist stimulates just a few acupoints in your body that release neurotransmitters to the area of your brain that regulates your heart, which in turn reduces your blood pressure. For best results, seek weekly acupuncture treatment to keep your blood down over the long term.
Tackle Problems Head On
If you have been diagnosed with heart disease or high blood pressure, acupuncture can help put you back on the road to good health. In addition to lowering blood pressure, numerous studies show that acupuncture helps to regulate the autonomic nervous system — the group of nerves that control heart rate and blood flow. When stimulated, sympathetic nerves slow down. This helps to return your heart rate to normal and regulates your blood as it flows through your heart. Acupuncture is often effective in relieving angina symptoms. The treatment also increases relaxation, a necessary ingredient for patients on the road to recovery.
Control Your Stress
You can’t always control what happens to you on a daily basis, but you can control how you respond. You can better handle the stresses the day brings by making sure you exercise regularly, take time to stretch, take deep breaths throughout the day, and meditate — and luckily, a daily yoga routine can help you achieve all of these things. Also, positive distractions like engaging hobbies or spending quality time with friends and family can help you reduce your stress.
Say Goodbye to Bad Habits
Ditch bad habits like smoking, overindulging in alcohol, and overeating. Trading bad habits for good ones, such as increasing the amount of fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains you eat on a daily basis, and reducing your salt intake — in combination with a stress reduction strategy — can help lower your blood pressure, which is crucial when it comes to preventing heart disease. In addition, you can also seek acupuncture treatment for smoking cessation.
The Bottom Line
Acupuncture is the safest and most non-invasive way to ensure you are doing the right thing to prevent heart disease and high blood pressure. And if you haven’t tried it, you’ll really be surprised how gentle, safe, and relaxing a truly effective therapy can be.
Happy American Heart Month!