Medical Marijuana Can Help Treat Hypertension
When you have elevated blood pressure, you may experience symptoms such as:
- Dizziness
- Headache
- Nausea and vomiting
- Blurred vision
- Shortness of breath and chest pain
Hypertension can also lead to anxiety, stress, and depression. Certain high blood pressure medications can have side effects marijuana can help with as well, such as muscle cramps, sleep disturbances, and tremors. Cannabis can also help to reduce nausea.
What is Hypertension?
High blood pressure is also called hypertension. It’s a common ailment where the blood pressure in your arteries persistently gets too high. The pressure depends upon how much blood your heart pumps and its resistance in your arteries. The narrower your arteries and the more blood pumped by your heart, the higher your blood pressure gets. Hypertension can lead to serious health issues, such as heart disease.
Hypertension, simply put, happens when your blood pressure is higher than usual. What qualifies as high blood pressure might depend on age, body weight, body fat percentage, etc.
An increased blood pressure, i.e., hypertension, can be highly damaging to the human body. Its typical symptoms include nosebleeds, irregular heart rhythms, and vision changes. Severe hypertension can cause fatigue, vomiting, anxiety, muscle tremors, and nerve damage.
Chronic hypertension over a sustained period can lead to an increased risk of heart attack as the heart thickens due to the need for pumping more blood into the body. Light-headedness and severe headaches are the slightly less severe effects.
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How Does Marijuana Help Treat Hypertension?
In discovering how marijuana helps treat hypertension, it is crucial to establish that the research on how marijuana affects your body is inconclusive at best. Despite that, promising signs have been seen that indicate more clarity on the health effects.
The consensus on smoking is that it is harmful as it increases inflammation and potentiates the clogging up of arteries which can lead to a stroke. In the case of medical cannabis, this does not happen. This is because THC, the mind-altering chemical in marijuana, is known to promote vascular inflammation and oxidative stress in artery walls.
The research conducted by many professionals has shown results that are contradictory to this. Dr. Ran Abuhasiri conducted a 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring study at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Numerous patients were evaluated, and it was ascertained that in older adults, a significant reduction in both systolic and diastolic blood pressure was seen in a 24-hour timeframe. The downfall in blood pressure reached its lowest point at the 3-hour mark.
More details of this experiment were published in the National Library of Medicine. The average age of the patients was 70.42, with an uncertainty of almost five years. 53.8% of the participants were female. At the routine 3-month check-up, the mean systolic and diastolic blood pressures had decreased by five mmHg and 4.5 mmHg, respectively. These numbers show a massive improvement in the blood pressure of these patients.
This is what gave rise to Medical Marijuana. Marijuana can have over a hundred chemicals, but those variants that have high quantities of CBD (cannabinol) are found to have next to no intoxicative properties.
Can Marijuana Help With Hypertension?
Marijuana has been proven to reduce the heart rate and lower blood pressure in many patients. Most of the research examines the effects that CBD has on hypertension. And studies have shown that CBD-dominant strains of medical marijuana help the heart not have to pump so hard; therefore, your blood pressure gets lower.
If you or someone you know has hypertension and can use the medicinal benefits of medical marijuana, have them contact All Natural MD in Florida as they can help you get through all the required red tape. In business since 2016 and over 15,000 patients and growing.