I made a huge oversight and forgot to specifically search for DMSO results from Iran while doing the foreign component of the final DMSO search once the US declared war on Iran. This was a massive oversight because Iran cut the nation's internet, and there are going to be about 150 DMSO studies which be impossible to access or view until it's restored and the servers it were on come back (somewhat similar to how Ukraine was one of the most common places doing DMSO research, but it all stopped once the war started).
I also have a 17,724 page document of Chinese Studies which needs to be run through AI and pared down (China's database is terrible, so the only functional way to work with it was to run each page of results for "dmso" through AI to flag possibly relevant studies, then copy and paste the sometimes lengthy summaries given for each of them into a word document, then subsequently sort that document). This looks like a lot, but I think it will be much faster to go through than a lot of other things I've had to do and people are helping me on it.
I feel I may have still skipped some foreign spellings of DMSO, and I may need to re-go through ~30,000 results at some point in the future, but outside of that, I think the hardest part of the project is done and most of the relevant literature on DMSO has now been compiled in one place.
Beyond that it is still a bit surreal the current war with Iran is taking place, and while there were a lot of signs this was going to happen (e.g., Trump mobilizing a war fleet to go there) I fully admit I never imagined this would happen (which goes to show I live in a bubble too). That said, on February 17th, in a reply to Trump's daughter celebrating the Chinese New Year, one commenter noted that years of the Fire Horse correlate with wars, violent revolutions, and major natural disasters, and I was continually thinking about that until the war started.
As a current patient being treated for hypertension, this article is an eyeopener. Eleven years ago, at 60 YO, I was diagnosed with high BP and prescribed HZT. I only took it for a couple of weeks with no follow up GP visit, deciding that I was too young for frequent doctor visits to be my new job as I had seen so many in my age group doing. Life went on, Covid happened, and my skepticism of the HC industry only reinforcing my decision to stay away from doctors, even though my Doc is an old school GP that actually still does home visits. At 69 YO, I started losing my cognitive ability and feared Alzheimers and dementia were creeping up on me so scheduled a doc visit. My initial BP was 220/100 ! After a few minutes, it dropped back to 160/85, being attributed to white coat syndrome.
At one point after that I was on 5 different BP drugs when I read a Mercola article on sleep apnea and suggested to my doc that I should be tested whereupon the results showed that within a five hour span, ( the finger monitor fell off) I had stopped breathing 250 times with my blood sat down in the low 80s. Testing showed that due to that low oxy sat I had developed secondary polycythemia. Discovering a cause, I requested a gradual reduction in the drugs I was on until now, I'm down to two with decreasing BP and the excess red blood cell problem having been resolved with judicious use of a CPAP machine.
That's most of my story, and hopefully, anyone reading it will recognize the seriousness of sleep apnea and take the appropriate steps.
My husband's blood pressure had gone way too high for a period of time, prompting a vast overreaction from a very highly regarded cardiologist (insert eye roll) who immediately wanted him on some very sketchy drugs. My gut was that it was his migraine meds causing it, which she said was not possible. Turns out, it was indeed possible. We got him on a CGM and went on a simple whole food low /no sugar eating plan, no caffeine/alcohol, exercise, sunlight, cold plunge, sauna, you name it. He lost 30 lbs and got rid of literally all of his health problems over 8 months (he still has high cholesterol but has no blockages so we don't really worry about that anymore). After 25 years of migraines, hasn't had one in two years now. He also rehabbed his frozen shoulders to streamline position with a stretching program on Youtube. The body desperately wants to heal itself.
To add my little bit of knowledge to the understanding of the heart, about 30 years ago Goethean Scientists in Switzerland tried to argue that there was a separate biological force driving the blood. The reasoning was that in all physical pumps - both centrifugal and positive displacement (like pistons) - the peak pressure precedes the peak flow. But in the heart peak flow comes first.
I now believe they did not look closely enough. Suppose a child is playing by a stream 1 inch deep. The child dams the stream with bricks 4 inches high. Some water spills through the gaps and around the edges but the water builds up and eventually overflows the bricks. The depth of water is its pressure. It was 1 inch water gauge and now it is 4 inches water gauge.
Pressure is created by *impeding* a flow. A centrifugal pump accelerates the inlet water and throws it at the casing. The casing impedes the flow and that is where the pressure builds rapidly. By analogy the heart is _not a pump but the impeller of the pump. The aorta and pulmonary artery generate pressure by impeding the flow. Therefore the heart contains no significant pressure and that is why the apex of the heart (pointy bit at the bottom) is paper thin. It does not need to resist a zero pressure, only stop the blood spilling out.
If you watch the Helical Heart video on youtube you see that the heart is one continuous, helical band of muscle. When it beats it wrings like a dish cloth in a plastic bag, driving the flow of blood from the apex upward toward the arteries.
Over the years I too have read some of the same from different sources.
From most of the sources, their main conclusions were that the heart regulates blood flow, it doesn’t produce it. If the heart was actually a pump it would not be strong enough to pump the blood completely through the legs and arms.
I've been realizing the problem of chronically high cortisol. This makes blood vessels stiff and thins out the smooth muscle that makes blood vessels work. Smooth muscle is vital for proper blood pressure.
Anyone with belly fat has high cortisol. It isn't that hard to fix.
Since I've been addressing this with a cortisol reset, blood pressure has been falling, not just for me but for my students.
I expect to have fully normal blood pressure within a few months.
Why would you not mention and I know that you know this because of your post about sunlight. UVA Light is the solution along with NIR light and UVB. NOW REMEMBER uva and uvb need skin contact as UVA light stimulates nitric oxide production which is a vasodilator and lower BP. why no mention of this is mind boggling?? Of course ophthalmologist and dermatologist demonize sunlight so everyone e stays inside and scrolls like zombies and get atropic bone white skin. Go outside and ground to the earth and never miss another sunrise. Build a solar callus to the sun so you can handle more UVB AND Your mitochondrial chronic disease will magically disappear and you raise your the hormone D In your body.
Being honest with medical history also encourages BP hallucinations. I stopped taking BP meds 5 years ago, but at my last teeth cleaning, the dental hygienist measured BP after asking whether I still took BP meds.
She nudged me that 140 was too high, and I told her in a polite way to STFU. She didn't get the hint, though, and later cajoled me with a rehearsed speech after I elected to not get a flouride treatment, lol.
My father had a heart attack back in 2000. His doctor, at the time, put him on various things, including a statin, sans Vitamin D, and an angiotensin receptor inhibitor or blocker - I forget which. In recent years he'd be standing, talking, and just drop in his tracks. I took a look at his meds, knew his BP was low, and discovered the ARB/ARI. I had my sister, a nurse of 30years experience, go with my father to have his meds reviewed by his GP. The bastard had never done any sort of audit/review. As a consequence, my Father was taken off the ARB/ARI but the GP did not get him off the statin. I ensured that he was taking Vitamin D, though.
So yeah, a prime example of the over medication to which you referred.
Friend of mine went through a period where she had very high BP - regularly 180 systolic. At one-point she was on six different BP meds and she was only in her early 30s at the time. She was overweight so there was a bit of a dismissive attitude - if she really wanted to do something about it, she could. It turned out she had Conn's Syndrome. Surgery removed the tumor and voila, BP down. It took a couple of years though. Too few are curious about the underlying cause.
Current update on the DMSO project:
I made a huge oversight and forgot to specifically search for DMSO results from Iran while doing the foreign component of the final DMSO search once the US declared war on Iran. This was a massive oversight because Iran cut the nation's internet, and there are going to be about 150 DMSO studies which be impossible to access or view until it's restored and the servers it were on come back (somewhat similar to how Ukraine was one of the most common places doing DMSO research, but it all stopped once the war started).
I am working on the English only results of the final search (non-english, besides from Iran, are done) and am now at 2016, so hopefully by the end of the week 2025 will be finished: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=120&q=intext:%22dmso%22+-intitle:DMSO+-mtt+-dimethyl+-dimethylsulfoxide+-cryo*+-synthesis+-oxidation+-Swern+-PCR+-NMR+-photoresist+-ligand+-extraction+-polymerization+-catalysis+-pKa+-swelling+-battery+-reduction+-chromatography+-solubility+-film+-gel+-solvation+-simulation+-dissolution+-electrolyte+-complex+-nanoparticle+-composite+-fabrication+-coating+-adsorption+-perovskite+-electrochemical+-deposition+-corrosion+-vitrification+-separations+-crystallization+-formulation+-dispersion&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_ylo=2016&as_yhi=2016&as_vis=1
I also have a 17,724 page document of Chinese Studies which needs to be run through AI and pared down (China's database is terrible, so the only functional way to work with it was to run each page of results for "dmso" through AI to flag possibly relevant studies, then copy and paste the sometimes lengthy summaries given for each of them into a word document, then subsequently sort that document). This looks like a lot, but I think it will be much faster to go through than a lot of other things I've had to do and people are helping me on it.
I feel I may have still skipped some foreign spellings of DMSO, and I may need to re-go through ~30,000 results at some point in the future, but outside of that, I think the hardest part of the project is done and most of the relevant literature on DMSO has now been compiled in one place.
Beyond that it is still a bit surreal the current war with Iran is taking place, and while there were a lot of signs this was going to happen (e.g., Trump mobilizing a war fleet to go there) I fully admit I never imagined this would happen (which goes to show I live in a bubble too). That said, on February 17th, in a reply to Trump's daughter celebrating the Chinese New Year, one commenter noted that years of the Fire Horse correlate with wars, violent revolutions, and major natural disasters, and I was continually thinking about that until the war started.
(That post can be found here https://x.com/MidwesternDoc/status/2027663113605030267 )
The hazards of war.
Remember that God is the orchestrator of it all…..pieces seem to be falling into place….Revelation.
Great article
As a current patient being treated for hypertension, this article is an eyeopener. Eleven years ago, at 60 YO, I was diagnosed with high BP and prescribed HZT. I only took it for a couple of weeks with no follow up GP visit, deciding that I was too young for frequent doctor visits to be my new job as I had seen so many in my age group doing. Life went on, Covid happened, and my skepticism of the HC industry only reinforcing my decision to stay away from doctors, even though my Doc is an old school GP that actually still does home visits. At 69 YO, I started losing my cognitive ability and feared Alzheimers and dementia were creeping up on me so scheduled a doc visit. My initial BP was 220/100 ! After a few minutes, it dropped back to 160/85, being attributed to white coat syndrome.
At one point after that I was on 5 different BP drugs when I read a Mercola article on sleep apnea and suggested to my doc that I should be tested whereupon the results showed that within a five hour span, ( the finger monitor fell off) I had stopped breathing 250 times with my blood sat down in the low 80s. Testing showed that due to that low oxy sat I had developed secondary polycythemia. Discovering a cause, I requested a gradual reduction in the drugs I was on until now, I'm down to two with decreasing BP and the excess red blood cell problem having been resolved with judicious use of a CPAP machine.
That's most of my story, and hopefully, anyone reading it will recognize the seriousness of sleep apnea and take the appropriate steps.
My husband's blood pressure had gone way too high for a period of time, prompting a vast overreaction from a very highly regarded cardiologist (insert eye roll) who immediately wanted him on some very sketchy drugs. My gut was that it was his migraine meds causing it, which she said was not possible. Turns out, it was indeed possible. We got him on a CGM and went on a simple whole food low /no sugar eating plan, no caffeine/alcohol, exercise, sunlight, cold plunge, sauna, you name it. He lost 30 lbs and got rid of literally all of his health problems over 8 months (he still has high cholesterol but has no blockages so we don't really worry about that anymore). After 25 years of migraines, hasn't had one in two years now. He also rehabbed his frozen shoulders to streamline position with a stretching program on Youtube. The body desperately wants to heal itself.
To add my little bit of knowledge to the understanding of the heart, about 30 years ago Goethean Scientists in Switzerland tried to argue that there was a separate biological force driving the blood. The reasoning was that in all physical pumps - both centrifugal and positive displacement (like pistons) - the peak pressure precedes the peak flow. But in the heart peak flow comes first.
I now believe they did not look closely enough. Suppose a child is playing by a stream 1 inch deep. The child dams the stream with bricks 4 inches high. Some water spills through the gaps and around the edges but the water builds up and eventually overflows the bricks. The depth of water is its pressure. It was 1 inch water gauge and now it is 4 inches water gauge.
Pressure is created by *impeding* a flow. A centrifugal pump accelerates the inlet water and throws it at the casing. The casing impedes the flow and that is where the pressure builds rapidly. By analogy the heart is _not a pump but the impeller of the pump. The aorta and pulmonary artery generate pressure by impeding the flow. Therefore the heart contains no significant pressure and that is why the apex of the heart (pointy bit at the bottom) is paper thin. It does not need to resist a zero pressure, only stop the blood spilling out.
If you watch the Helical Heart video on youtube you see that the heart is one continuous, helical band of muscle. When it beats it wrings like a dish cloth in a plastic bag, driving the flow of blood from the apex upward toward the arteries.
Over the years I too have read some of the same from different sources.
From most of the sources, their main conclusions were that the heart regulates blood flow, it doesn’t produce it. If the heart was actually a pump it would not be strong enough to pump the blood completely through the legs and arms.
Interesting!
I've been realizing the problem of chronically high cortisol. This makes blood vessels stiff and thins out the smooth muscle that makes blood vessels work. Smooth muscle is vital for proper blood pressure.
Anyone with belly fat has high cortisol. It isn't that hard to fix.
Since I've been addressing this with a cortisol reset, blood pressure has been falling, not just for me but for my students.
I expect to have fully normal blood pressure within a few months.
Why would you not mention and I know that you know this because of your post about sunlight. UVA Light is the solution along with NIR light and UVB. NOW REMEMBER uva and uvb need skin contact as UVA light stimulates nitric oxide production which is a vasodilator and lower BP. why no mention of this is mind boggling?? Of course ophthalmologist and dermatologist demonize sunlight so everyone e stays inside and scrolls like zombies and get atropic bone white skin. Go outside and ground to the earth and never miss another sunrise. Build a solar callus to the sun so you can handle more UVB AND Your mitochondrial chronic disease will magically disappear and you raise your the hormone D In your body.
Being honest with medical history also encourages BP hallucinations. I stopped taking BP meds 5 years ago, but at my last teeth cleaning, the dental hygienist measured BP after asking whether I still took BP meds.
She nudged me that 140 was too high, and I told her in a polite way to STFU. She didn't get the hint, though, and later cajoled me with a rehearsed speech after I elected to not get a flouride treatment, lol.
My father had a heart attack back in 2000. His doctor, at the time, put him on various things, including a statin, sans Vitamin D, and an angiotensin receptor inhibitor or blocker - I forget which. In recent years he'd be standing, talking, and just drop in his tracks. I took a look at his meds, knew his BP was low, and discovered the ARB/ARI. I had my sister, a nurse of 30years experience, go with my father to have his meds reviewed by his GP. The bastard had never done any sort of audit/review. As a consequence, my Father was taken off the ARB/ARI but the GP did not get him off the statin. I ensured that he was taking Vitamin D, though.
So yeah, a prime example of the over medication to which you referred.
Good article. What do you tell your patients to do to lower their BP?
Friend of mine went through a period where she had very high BP - regularly 180 systolic. At one-point she was on six different BP meds and she was only in her early 30s at the time. She was overweight so there was a bit of a dismissive attitude - if she really wanted to do something about it, she could. It turned out she had Conn's Syndrome. Surgery removed the tumor and voila, BP down. It took a couple of years though. Too few are curious about the underlying cause.
I need to cancel subscription, have contacted you with no response. Will contact credit card company
I am wondering how you would suggest a patient reduce anxiety that is the culprit in increased BP…
Thank you for all you do.
An excellent article on a complex topic!
Your tireless work is much appreciated!
Easy Does It.
What's DMSO again?
Thank you and God bless.
High Blood Pressure and Simple Kidney Cyst connection? More Elderly have Simple Kidney Cysts, and more Elderly have high BP.
Possible gene connection between renal cysts (kidney cysts) and high blood pressure from an Iranian population
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23907112/
Over and Over I see after doing a google search of "simple kidney cyst high blood pressure" that simple kidney
cysts over 2cm (as folks get older) and/or multiple simple kidney cysts cause high blood pressure.
Here is just one sample, but, there seems to be dozens of studies saying the Sam Ting.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23389415/
More of the Sam Ting results out of South Korea.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4192792/
There are also studies showing that draining the larger simple kidney cysts has lowered the average blood pressure of patients.
This makes sense from High School chemistry. pV=nRT (the ideal gas law)
And also because of this recent discovery on BP sensor system in the body?
A recent discovery on Blood Pressure control in the body.
https://www.uvahealth.com/news/uva-health-finds-blood-pressure-barometers/