Traditional Blood Pressure remedy!

[Michael Alexander]

Found this amusing....

My Forklift driver, a short little Ovambo chap, has been bitchin; about high blood pressure..... he wanted leave, to go see the Witchdocter, er traditional healer, who wanted to cut certain veins on the side of his face and back and bleed him for awhile, I guess in order to get the pressure to drop..... ANyhow, off he went got cut and drained and reckons he is now cured...

Me , being of european decent, sniggered  at the whole thing, went online and  researched this....Hells bells, there is a whole group of people that follow this..... there is even a facebook group for it... LINK: http://www.facebook.com/pages/For-High-Blood-Pressure-Sufferers-Simply-Cut-Yourself-and-Bleed-for-a-Few-Minutes/109996585683017?v=stream

Are we too westernised? Is there any truth in this?

Just my 2 cents

Ps.... Pepe, don'y Hijack the topic into a stemcell thing ...hehehehehe!   

[Paul (Pepe) Freemantle]

  I won't Hijack this Topic Mike. This is helerious 

[Dalene Steenkamp (Coetzee)]

Serias !! ....  Huh .....   

[SandyB]

Mmm  bloodletting was a common middle ages remedy for a variety of ailments ,, prob is  if you chronically high blood pressured  you soooner or later gonna run out of blood  to have pressure with  da da ,,,  I get this mental picture of my one colleague  who has all the lifestyle diseases including high BP ,,, some days  his fingers look like pork sausages ,, I get this mental image  of pricking the pork sausages and seeing the pressure release ,,,
Then again another  middle ages  remedy  was trepanning ,, drilling a hole into the skull to relieve pressure  or deal with fractures insanity etc ..
Also the attaching of leeches was popular at one time  also to bleed the patient ,,
Leeches have  recently made  a medical comeback for a variety of  conditions  as have maggots for dealing with necrotic  or highly  infected  flesh  as they only devour the   bad stuff  leaving behind the  healthy tissue and allow healing  of the  wound to take place ,, 

[Andrew Darné]

I saw that about the maggots... gross but real. I wonder whether that came to be from structured experimental research or by coincidence??

[Andrew Darné]

Another help for high BP is daily consumption of garlic. Yeah... gross, the smell. There are alternatives or remedies for the worst of the pong, besides giving up your social life and all your friends.
I'm not sure just how effective it is alone but apparently it helps.

Bertie..???

[Dalene Steenkamp (Coetzee)]

Have also heard that eating raw potatoes helps to keep the blood pressure down.  Don't know what ingredient in the potatoe does is, but apparently it works ...  ????

Andrew, all I can say about the maggots is that the boys 'farm' with them these days ...  you get lotsa money for breeding worms ...  he he 

[Michael Alexander]

For what it's worth I spoke with my driver this morning and he is starting to feel worse again..... told him to go and see the quack and get some bp pills.... reckons the quack says he does not need them....

[Paul (Pepe) Freemantle]

Cause his been treating the systems (draining blood LOL) and not the cause.