High BP, Stress & The Power that Made the Body

High BP & Stress

The design of the human body is such that one could argue high blood pressure is more important than low blood pressure owning to the fact that, while there are multiple mechanisms to raise blood pressure there is only one regulatory hormone, atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) to lower blood pressure. I wrote about this a bit more extensively in an email to a friend but never ended up blogging the rationale. If one were to consider a soaker brand type hose for watering your lawn and could increase the pressure enough, the hose would eventually break which could be similar to a ruptured aneurysm. But, while high blood pressure may kill a person through such mechanisms the process could take years. Contrasting the high blood pressure scenario with a type I hypersensitivity such as anaphylactic shock and we can see that the time of death for anaphylaxis can occur with such speed as to be measured with the second hand of a watch. Hence, the logic goes that low blood pressure is worse then high blood pressure because, even at the extremes, you'll still live longer w/ high blood pressure.

In the email to my friend, I waxed philosophically about extensions of the notion that things which most layman may consider "bad" are actually not as bad as the contra condition.

Based on further studies in neurology and physiology I am now also leaning towards the position that stress is more important than being relaxed. With this, we could also consider the extreme positions that those two diametrically opposed positions

The Power That Made the Body.... -

This position I'm about to present could be controversial but, I do so based mainly on the science of embryology. Many people seem to equate the phrase of "The Power That Made the Body" with God which, may or may not be the case. To get to the point, I would suggest that whatever power makes the body doesn't do a very good job because over 50% of all fertilized eggs never make it to full term. This is independent of any externally induced abortions but rather because of faulty development in the embryo - faulty enough to elicit a natural, spontaneous abortion of the fertilized egg. Additionally, up to 5% of babies actually born have birth defects (3-5% seem to be common figures reported in the literature, w/ a DACBAR at Logan citing 5%)

The full phrase is, "the power that made the body, heals the body" and, in a healthy born person, I'd generally agree.

The genetics a person has isn't just the hand they are dealt, it's more like the whole deck - The hand a person is playing at any given time seems to also be influences by epigenetics - recalling that the word "epi" is derived from the Greek meaning "above" so, epigenetics would be above genetics in helping to determine exactly how our genes are expressed.

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I realize neither of these topics are fully developed in this writing - maybe things like this could make for a good static page so I can add to the ideas as time allows - I still have about 15 things left to do before completing Trimester 4 at Logan. ;)

Better get back to studying.