Hey Sunday,
Considering the state of my memory, I would not remember if I had already written about it either, lol!
Yes, I have tried herbs, from a TCM doctor, along with acupuncture, and on my own with things like hawthorne. No help. Samento, the Lyme herb I took for four years, did lower my BP a little bit.
In fact, even conventional medicine failed with the first TEN medicines they tried!
For four years I struggled with high doses of minerals as my only treatment, and that only helped a little, but it did help. Then I happened to read a small article in a fibromyalgia newsletter about how clonidine can help some fibro patients with both pain and overstimulation, but it is a strong blood pressure lowering med, so the many who have low BP can't use it. I took the article to my doctor and asked to try it. It worked immediately, and also got me off all pain meds, permanently. I don't even take Tylenol now, and I used to take Darvocet daily.
My cardiologist thinks that because clonidine is also an anti-seizure med and is the only med that lowered my blood pressure, it is very likely that my Lyme is the cause of the high blood pressure, but he has no idea how, except that it may be related to the sympathetic dominance in the autonomic nervous system that Lyme causes. This was a big change in opinion for him, since he always thought it was genetic before, since both my parents had high BP, and most of my other older relatives on both sides had high BP as well.
Clonidine is considered a last resort and a "bad drug" by most doctors since it has a viciously dangerous rebound effect. You do NOT want to be too late with a dose! For me, it's been a necessary and helpful evil, but I would not recommend it to anyone as a first choice for high BP treatment. Most people who take it use transdermal patches for this reason, to prevent rebound. I can't take them, becaue my ins. won't pay for them, and because I am allergic to plastic bandages, and 51% of people who use transdermal clonidine have allergic reactions to the bandages, which then translate from the bandage to the drug itself. If that happened to me, it would leave me up the creek without a paddle.
klutzo