Last night a guy called on the toll free line, very hyper, asking for the BreatheEasy music. He told me he’d been a boxer, very fit and muscular, but then quit almost overnight to start his security business. ‘I get out of bed, get in the car, get on the desk, get in the car, get home and go to bed,’ he described his life style. ‘I have high blood pressure, it’s 190/120!’ ‘That’s quite high, haven’t you been to your doctor?’ I asked. ‘Yes, but I don’t like to take the medication, I am desperate to try the natural way, breathing naturally to lower my blood pressure.!’ Still sounding very stressed, I asked him how old he was. ‘Early thirties,’ he said. ‘I also have an enlarged heart, and I’m too scared to go back to find out I might die soon.’ After a long talk, we agreed it’s best to change life style, go to the doctor and talk about options and last but not least, do the breathing exercizes to get his blood pressure under control.
An enlarged heart is not a disease in itself but a physical sign of accompanying diseases. Those diseases are myriad and will be listed below. Not all conditions lead to an enlarged heart, and treatment will depend on the underlying cause:
Alcoholism; Amyloidosis (an abnormal protein deposit in organs and tissue); anemia; arrythmia; cocaine and crack abuse; heart attack, heart disease and heart valve disease;
autoimmune diseases; thyroid disease; high blood pressure and many more. However, recently it has been understood that athletic endurance training such as marathons and Iron Man challenges in all it’s variations may cause an enlarged heart. Just as body muscles are being worked, the heart is a muscle and reacts to training or overtraining by becoming larger. Even medications can be responsible for an enlarged heart. Pregnancy, viral infections and nutritional deficiencies are further causes.
Tomorrow I’ll be talking about symptoms of an enlarged heart and what to do about it. But like my late night caller insisted, he wanted to lower his blood pressure naturally. You can’t go wrong with it. It will also relieve his stress, an obviously related cause for his high blood pressure. By the time we were finished, he was breathing much lighter, much slower and he was a bit more hopeful again. Good luck to him. It’s a commitment to his own well being and health.
