CONDITIONS • WESTMINSTER, ARVADA, BROOMFIELD, THORTON & DENVER METRO
High Blood Pressure Treatment in Westminster, CO
High blood pressure rarely has a single cause — and a prescription that lowers the number without identifying what is driving it up is managing a measurement rather than treating a condition.
Nearly half of all adults have high blood pressure. Most are managed with medication alone. For the majority, the root causes — chronic stress, poor sleep, metabolic dysfunction, nutritional depletion, and chronic pain — were never systematically assessed or addressed. Medication is often necessary and important. But it works best alongside the interventions that address why the pressure is elevated in the first place.
Same-Day & Same-Week Appointments Available
WE UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE GOING THROUGH
You may have felt completely fine until the day a routine check told you your blood pressure was high. Or you have known for years and have been on medication that controls the number but has not made you feel any better.
High blood pressure — hypertension — is often called the silent disease because it frequently produces no symptoms at all until it has been present long enough to begin damaging blood vessels and organs. For some people the discovery is a shock. For others it confirms something they already sensed — the persistent low-grade tension, the heaviness at the back of the head, the flushing, the difficulty sleeping deeply. You were prescribed medication and told to reduce salt and exercise more. The number improved. But you were also left with questions that were never fully answered: why does my blood pressure keep going up even when I am careful? Is it just genetics? Are these side effects from the medication going to continue? Is there anything else I can actually do? The answers to those questions — and the interventions they point toward — are what we bring to the table alongside, not instead of, your medical management.
WHAT YOU MAY BE EXPERIENCING
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Blood pressure readings consistently above 130/80 — or controlled by medication but not by lifestyle alone
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Headaches, particularly at the back of the head, especially in the morning
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Flushing, facial redness, or a feeling of pressure or fullness in the head
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Fatigue, difficulty sleeping, or waking unrested
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Dizziness or lightheadedness — either from the blood pressure itself or as a medication side effect
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A sense of underlying tension, anxiety, or chronic stress that medication does not address
THE CONNECTION TO PAIN
Chronic pain and high blood pressure have a bidirectional relationship that is rarely acknowledged in standard care. Chronic pain activates the sympathetic nervous system — the stress response — which raises blood pressure continuously. Anti-inflammatory medications taken for pain, particularly NSAIDs like ibuprofen and naproxen, directly elevate blood pressure and blunt the effect of antihypertensive drugs.
If you have chronic pain alongside high blood pressure, the pain itself may be one of the primary drivers of your elevated readings — and resolving the pain is one of the most effective blood pressure interventions available.
WHAT YOU PROBABLY HAVEN'T BEEN TOLD
High blood pressure is not a disease — it is a symptom. It is the body's pressure gauge telling you that something upstream is driving the cardiovascular system harder than it should be. Treating only the gauge does not fix what is driving it.
THE SEVEN DRIVERS OF ELEVATED BLOOD PRESSURE THAT STANDARD CARE RARELY INVESTIGATES
Blood pressure is the product of how hard the heart pumps and how resistant the blood vessels are to that flow. Both of these are influenced by multiple systems in the body simultaneously. When the pressure is elevated, something — or multiple things — is driving it up. Standard care identifies that the number is high and lowers it with medication. Naturopathic medicine asks what is making it high in the first place. There are usually identifiable, modifiable contributors:
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Chronic sympathetic activation — the stress nervous system permanently elevated from chronic pain, anxiety, poor sleep, or a life that does not have adequate downregulation built into it
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Insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome — elevated insulin directly increases sodium retention, activates the sympathetic nervous system, and stimulates blood vessel wall thickening
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Sleep apnea — the repeated oxygen drops of overnight apnea trigger adrenaline surges that drive blood pressure up progressively, and is present in a significant proportion of treatment-resistant hypertension cases
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Nutritional deficiencies — low magnesium, potassium, and omega-3s all impair the blood vessels' ability to relax, directly raising vascular resistance and blood pressure
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Gut dysbiosis and systemic inflammation — the gut microbiome plays a direct role in blood pressure regulation through nitric oxide production and short-chain fatty acid signaling, and an inflamed gut reduces this regulation
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Cortisol dysregulation — the adrenal stress hormone cortisol directly raises blood pressure and is elevated in people under chronic stress, with disrupted sleep, or with adrenal dysfunction
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Chronic pain and NSAID use — the sympathetic activation from untreated pain and the direct vasoconstrictive and sodium-retaining effects of anti-inflammatory medications both elevate blood pressure independently
Magnesium — the single most overlooked blood pressure intervention
Magnesium is required for blood vessels to relax. It works essentially as the body's natural calcium channel blocker — the same mechanism as one of the most commonly prescribed blood pressure medication classes. Studies consistently show that magnesium supplementation produces clinically meaningful reductions in blood pressure. And magnesium deficiency is extraordinarily common: it is depleted by stress, by diuretic medications that are themselves commonly prescribed for blood pressure, by alcohol, and by the modern processed food diet. Many people on blood pressure medication are also magnesium-deficient, which is reducing the medication's effectiveness and increasing their muscle cramp and fatigue side effects simultaneously.
Magnesium is rarely checked in standard blood pressure management and is almost never supplemented therapeutically despite strong evidence for its effect.
Why "just reduce salt" is incomplete advice
Salt acutely raises blood pressure in everyone, but only chronically in 20% of the population. That's because healthy kidneys can excrete 10x more salt than you can ingest per day. The conventional wisdom to reduce salt is not only incomplete, it can cause harm. Salt-restricted diets often result in elevated heart rate and blood pressure because sodium is necessary for maintaining arterial flexibility. What you haven't been told is that salt restriction forces your body to produce more insulin, which contributes to weight gain, a causative factor of high blood pressure, and can lead to insulin resistance and diabetes. At best a sodium-restricted diet may reduce high blood pressure by 4/2 mmHg.
Increasing magnesium, potassium, and vitamin D-rich foods often has a greater blood pressure effect than sodium reduction.
The autonomic nervous system connection
The autonomic nervous system has two modes: sympathetic (stress — activates the fight-or-flight response, raises heart rate and blood pressure) and parasympathetic (recovery — lowers heart rate, dilates blood vessels, reduces blood pressure). In people with chronic pain, chronic stress, or poor sleep, the sympathetic system is chronically elevated and the parasympathetic system rarely gets adequate activation time. The body exists in a state of sustained partial alarm — and the blood pressure reflects this. Chiropractic care, constitutional hydrotherapy, and breathing-based relaxation techniques all directly activate the parasympathetic system and produce measurable reductions in blood pressure through this mechanism — not through diet, not through medication, but through directly changing the nervous system's resting state.
This is why treating chronic pain is a genuine blood pressure intervention — because pain resolution removes a major source of continuous sympathetic activation.
OUR APPROACH
Conventional care versus our approach
We work collaboratively with patients' prescribing physicians — not in opposition to medication when it is needed. Our role is to identify and address the modifiable contributors to elevated blood pressure that standard care does not have the appointment time or the testing scope to investigate.
The conventional approach
What most patients experience
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Blood pressure measured, found elevated on two or more readings
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Advised to reduce sodium, increase exercise, and lose weight
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Antihypertensive medication prescribed when lifestyle changes are insufficient
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Dose adjusted until number is controlled — medication typically continued indefinitely
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Underlying drivers — insulin resistance, sleep, stress, nutritional status, chronic pain — not systematically evaluated
The conventional approach is the appropriate standard of care for reducing cardiovascular risk. Its limitation is that it almost entirely addresses the measurement rather than the mechanism — meaning most patients remain on medication indefinitely without understanding why their pressure was elevated or whether it could have been different.
What we do differently
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Comprehensive assessment of the identifiable drivers: metabolic markers, insulin and fasting glucose, sleep quality, cortisol pattern, magnesium and potassium levels, gut health, and inflammatory markers
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Targeted nutritional interventions — therapeutic magnesium, potassium, omega-3, and nitrate-rich dietary support — each with evidence for clinically meaningful blood pressure reduction
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Direct autonomic regulation through constitutional hydrotherapy, chiropractic care, and breathing-based techniques that activate the parasympathetic system and lower the resting sympathetic tone driving the pressure up
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Insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome correction — addressing the most modifiable systemic driver of blood pressure elevation in most middle-aged adults
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If chronic pain is present — treating it directly as a blood pressure intervention, reducing both sympathetic activation and NSAID dependency simultaneously
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Collaborative communication with the prescribing physician as natural interventions produce measurable reductions — with the goal of reducing medication burden where clinically appropriate and safe
We do not discontinue or modify patients' medications. Our goal is to make those medications more effective, reduce the dose needed over time where possible, and address the underlying contributors that medication cannot reach.
WHAT MAKES OUR APPROACH DIFFERENT — IN A SINGLE PARAGRAPH
Blood pressure medication lowers the number. Our approach asks why the number is elevated and creates a targeted plan to address each modifiable contributor — whether that is insulin resistance, magnesium depletion, cortisol, sleep apnea, chronic pain, gut inflammation, or vascular nutritional support. For many patients, comprehensive natural interventions produce blood pressure reductions that are clinically comparable to a second antihypertensive medication — with no side effects and the additional benefit of improving overall metabolic and cardiovascular health in ways that medication alone cannot. The goal is not to avoid medication. The goal is to treat the person, not the measurement.
WHEN SYSTEMIC AND PAIN CONDITIONS COEXIST
Pain drives blood pressure up. Blood pressure medication interacts with pain medications. And the internal environment maintaining chronic pain — inflammation, poor sleep, metabolic dysfunction — is the same environment driving blood pressure elevation.
NSAIDs and blood pressure
Ibuprofen, naproxen, and similar anti-inflammatory medications used for pain directly raise blood pressure and reduce the effectiveness of most antihypertensive drugs. Every patient managing pain with regular NSAID use has an iatrogenic — medication-caused — contribution to their elevated readings that resolves when the pain is treated through non-pharmaceutical means.
Chronic pain and sympathetic activation
Persistent pain is one of the most potent continuous activators of the sympathetic nervous system available. A person with chronic low back pain, neck pain, or headaches is running their cardiovascular system under sustained sympathetic drive every waking hour. Resolving the pain removes this constant pressure stimulus — and in many patients produces blood pressure reductions that no dietary change alone could achieve.
IR Sauna for both
Infrared sauna therapy has strong evidence for reducing systolic blood pressure through improved vascular function, parasympathetic activation, and reduced arterial stiffness. It simultaneously reduces systemic inflammation, improves deep muscle relaxation, and supports metabolic health — making it one of the highest-yield interventions for patients who have both chronic pain and hypertension.
Whole person care under one roof
At True Health Centers, we understand that these conditions are not separate systems happening in isolation. They share the same root drivers, and treating them in an integrated plan produces better outcomes for both than treating each independently. We regularly see patients whose blood pressure improves meaningfully after their chronic pain is resolved — because the sympathetic activation the pain was generating is no longer continuously elevating their readings.
TAKE THE NEXT STEP
Your blood pressure is elevated for specific reasons. We find them — and address them alongside your medical care.
We identify the modifiable drivers, apply evidence-based natural interventions, and treat any concurrent pain conditions simultaneously.
Not sure where to begin? Give us a call and we'll help you choose the best first step.