Strengthening Your Heart

Dr. Walsdorf loves to help patients who come in with heart-related issues. The heart is such an important organ, and can often get stronger when a patient is treated using his four part healing system. When Dr. Walsdorf treats patients who have been told they have heart problems, he notices that they are often very afraid of doing anything different than what their medical doctors recommend.

However you should know that there is controversy with many of the drugs used for heart problems – diuretics, beta blockers, calcium channel blockers and cholesterol lowering medications. Dr. Walsdorf will not tell you to go off your medications, but as your health improves with his care, your medical doctors will often realize that at least some of your medications will no longer be needed. As you probably know, all drugs have side effects.

It is always important to remember that Dr. Walsdorf unlike his medical colleagues does not treat diseases. He does not treat heart ailments, hypertension and atherosclerosis as such. He treats a person who has these problems. He works to strengthen the lining of the blood vessels that have atherosclerosis, he works to find ways to lower your blood pressure naturally, he knows that high cholesterol is just a symptom of problems that the giving of Lipitor or other medications clearly does not address.

Dr. Walsdorf knows how important the heart is to your health and the fear that a heart condition can put into each of us. That is why he has a special program to help patients who come in with heart-related health problems.

The four interlocking parts of his program are:

Nutritional- Biochemical Health

There are many nutritional factors that influence the heart – and the extension of the heart throughout the body, your blood vessels. As your cardiovascular system, these hundreds of miles of elastic tubing work to bring nourishment to every cubic inch of your body. Atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, strokes, hypertension, as well as a weak or even an over-compensating, hypertrophic heart are all symptoms of something going wrong in this system.

Simple vitamins are typically not enough to help renew cardiovascular health. Still it is not uncommon for Dr. Walsdorf to recommend a special form of magnesium for many patients with heart or blood pressure problems. Magnesium is one of the most benign of all minerals. Dr. Walsdorf will often tell his patients that magnesium is involved in more biochemical reactions than any other mineral in our bodies. It tends to relax the nervous system. Many blood pressure medications adversely affect magnesium levels. Many diets are low in this mineral as well. Does your current doctor talk to you about these things? If not, you may want to complement his or her care with that from Dr. Walsdorf.

As Dr. Walsdorf will often say, “keep it natural”. While you may think your Centrum or other one-a-day vitamins are giving you an abundance of natural health-giving components, they often give high amounts of imbalanced factions and highly refined, man-made versions of what should be natural vitamin-like substances. These can actually be dangerous to a patient with heart disease.

There are time-honored herbs that he employs, such as Hawthorne berry that work to strengthen the heart’s muscles, other natural tonics that add elasticity to the vascular vessels so they might more easily lose their stiffness, permitting blood pressure to lower naturally on their own. If you are a patient with cardiovascular problems, you do not have to buy into the idea that drugs are all that can help your body; Nature is filled with a storehouse of nutrients that Dr. Walsdorf can help you to know about!

Strengthening the “Chi” of the Heart

One of Dr. Walsdorf’s strengths is his ability to integrate Eastern and Western medicine. Acupuncture relates organ health to the “chi” within an organ. Dr. Walsdorf has written extensively on how this chi is affected by how we move on a daily basis. He has developed a special exercise program expressly for his Organ Health patients.

When you are a patient of Dr. Walsdorf and you have heart problems, Dr. Walsdorf will probably give you special exercises that strengthen the chi of the heart. These exercises come out of the 4 Element Yoga that Dr. Walsdorf has developed over his 30 years of practice.

As you work within this important realm of health, Dr. Walsdorf will analyze your breathing patterns and teach you breathing techniques that will make your body stronger and dissipate stress. That is one reason why your posture and even the way you walk and breathe have a great influence on your health. Your heart is in your chest, influenced by the dynamics of what is going on there. Breathing clearly is an important human process that is centered in this area.

You will learn that the way you use your muscles pumps your acupuncture circuits. Dr. Walsdorf and other doctors have discovered that your heart is particularly vitalized by shoulder-related activities. One reason that Dr. Walsdorf encourages his patients with heart problems to walk using his special “Walking Tall” system is because the chi of the heart is particularly helped by this kind of walking.

Posture and Alignment

Can you see how your posture affects your heart? While it may not be the central reason for your heart-related issues, poor posture will definitely affect the heart. Further, as most doctors will tell you, there is often a coming together of a variety of factors that leads to heart issues. The physical strain put upon the heart by your posture is clearly one of them.

This is why Dr. Walsdorf will work with you to help you strengthen your posture.

When there is a lack of alignment – often due to postural issues – there is a greater amount of “structural fatigue” within the tissues of an organ, like the heart. Rarely do medical doctors think in terms of this structural fatigue and alignment issues when they think of organ pathology. However there is evidence pointing to a role that alignment and structural fatigue plays in the health of all our organs.

As it turns out, there are a variety of structural levels to an organ, which this structural fatigue can cause problems. The most important one is the level of fascial fibers that attach from the outside of an organ like the heart to cartilage and skeletal bones – so that the organ itself is positioned correctly. As the structural fatigue forces within an organ are released by Dr. Walsdorf’s therapies, the long-term structural strains within that organ can be reduced enough so that the organ can more easily begin renewing itself.

Dr. Walsdorf’s special walking exercises also help improve the postural and alignment issues that may be impacting your heart. These will often involve an increased emphasis on your heel strike – which helps to bring the body backwardly – instead of forwardly onto the tissues of your heart.

Nerve Energy Therapies

Every organ depends upon nerve energy to be directed, organized and put in synch with the rest of the body’s parts. There are two parts to Dr. Walsdorf’s Nerve Energy Therapies. One is his Chiropractic adjustments to the spine, and the other is his Cranial-facial Technique.

The important thing to know is that your heart receives its nerve energy from important spinal centers, particularly the upper thoracics. Spinal adjustments can help improve the flow of that nerve energy. Cranial-Facial Technique is a gentle technique to help eliminate higher level tensions and helps the vagus nerve.

These higher-level tensions block the energy flow from the brain downward into the body. You will learn how to direct your nerve energy into blocked parts of your body, even toward relaxing tightened blood vessels, which often are at the root of high blood pressure. As your nerve energy gets stronger, the power of your Innate Intelligence is able to move into organs like your heart.

I’ve been on blood pressure medications but still always kind of felt like my heart wasn’t quite right. Dr. Walsdorf used Nutrition Response Testing and found that I needed some special nutritional supports. After taking them for a few months, my heart started feeling less strained, my blood pressure got lower. I’ll be talking to my medical doctor on cutting down on my heart medications. I’m even losing weight as part of his program.

Peter R.