Blood Pressure and Ancient Practices

Research from the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has found that prayer in health, associated with religion and spirituality, have a positive impact in people suffering from high blood pressure and other health conditions.

Blood pressure is a silent human companion that only causes problems when is too high or too low, but also too late to eradicate the power, becoming a potential life treating condition. Although, modern medication is effective in getting control over blood pressure, many people prefer to return to the natural mankind origins.

Many Americans are using herbalism and prayer to improve their blood pressure and other diseases. Prayer and other spiritual practices have demonstrated their power by means of “prayer chains" who are the major promoters of religious practices for wellness.

Although scientific research and investigation on these practices only began recently, prayer has been used as a remedy for illness for thousands of years. Established by Congress in 1998, the NCCAM has been supporting research on the spirituality area for more than a decade.

Related to blood pressure, 45% of 31,000 adults used prayer for health reasons, and 43% for their own health, according to a NCCAM's survey performed during 2004, with the help of the National Center for Health Statistics. Prayer is defined as an active process of appealing to a higher spiritual power.

The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) returned 36% of all the respondents using CAM, but when the definition was extended to include prayer as a part of CAM, then the percentage went up to 62%. All percentages refer to the use in the preceding 12 months.

Complementary and alternative medicine include herbal preparations, special teas, dietary supplements, vitamins, magnet therapy, massage therapy, spiritual healing, meditation and prayer, among other disciplines, and from all of them prayer was the therapy most commonly used by Americans.

However, most people using prayer as a blood pressure therapy is also engaged in other alternative approaches that usually have other spiritual components, including tai chi, yoga, reiki, qi gong or meditation, and almost 10% of them had participated in a prayer group for their health.

The U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine is a group of diverse health care and medical systems, therapies, and products that are not presently considered to be part of conventional medicine as practiced in the United States, although they could be fully credited elsewhere as Chinese Herbology.

Within CAM , spirituality is broader; it is defined by NCCAM as an individual's sense of purpose and meaning to life, beyond material values. Spirituality may be practiced in many ways, including through religion.