We
have already posted on this, but here we get the clinical details.
Thus if you wish to cleanly get of your blood pressure pills, it is
likely that a strong dose of garlic will serve nicely. Since these
pills often impact male sexual performance, finding an effective way
to switch to garlic may have serious appeal.
How
this may apply to other drugs remains unknown but the direct effect
of strong doses of garlic is apparent here.
It
also strongly suggests another reason the Mediterranean diet has been
so heart friendly. Maybe it is time to go back to rubbing a full
clove of garlic into a slice of toast.
In New Study
Posted
on:
Wednesday,
September 25th 2013 at 3:15 pm
Written
By:
A
groundbreaking new study published in Pakistan
Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences has
revealed that garlic is at least as effective as the blockbuster
blood pressure lowering drug atenolol in reducing systolic and
diastolic blood pressure in patients diagnosed with essential
hypertension, a condition linked to the #1 cause of death in
developed countries.[1]
Hypertension is
called a 'silent killer,' as it often goes completely unnoticed,
along with the decades long subclinical march of atherosclerosis that
is largely the cause of elevated blood pressure, often culminating
suddenly in a deadly cardiovascular event such as a heart
attack or stroke.
Researchers
at the Department of Pharmacology, College of Pharmacy, King Khalid
University, Abha, Saudi Arabia gave test subjects either, one of five
doses of garlic (300/mg, 600/mg, 900/mg, 1200/mg, 1500/mg) in divided
doses per day, a tablet of atenolol, or a placebo, for 24 weeks.
Blood pressure readings were recorded at weeks 0, 12 and 24.
The
study results showed significant decreases in both systolic and
diastolic blood pressure in both dose and duration dependent manner
in all the treatment groups. The results of the treatments on
systolic blood pressure were reported as follows:
###
The
results of the treatments on diastolic blood pressure were reported
as follows:
###
As
can be seen by the results, in each garlic treated group, significant
reduction in systolic and diastolic blood pressure were observed when
compared with atenolol and placebo. In
fact, the higher doses of garlic (1200 mg/1500 mg) were technically
superior to atenolol in lowering blood pressure.
Discussion
It
is a rare thing to find a human clinical study comparing a natural
substance with
a drug. In pharma/farm
comparisons like
this, the stakes are often extremely high, as natural substances like
garlic, which are commonly used as culinary spices, are relatively
safe and affordable, whereas multi-billion dollar blockbuster drugs
like atenolol are
expensive, have many side effects, and are only acquired through a
prescription from a physician. If the
natural substance is found to be at least as effective as the
synthetic compound, it undermines faith in the
conventional, drug-based
model of medicine which
has asserted near totalitarian control of medical practice by
requiring that statements of medical fact, including claims of drug
or plant medicine effectiveness, be made only after running the
multi-million-dollar gauntlet of repeated randomized, double-blind,
placebo-controlled, clinical trials. As a result, the modern medical
system obeys Napoleonic legal principles, namely, what it does not
explicitly permit is forbidden.
This
means that unless a substance like garlic is confirmed through human
clinical research to work for a particular health condition, its use
could easily be construed as illegal by regulatory bodies like the
FDA.
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