Blood Pressure Secrets: Saving Lives Through Precision and Prevention with Dr. Ellie Campbell

What’s Inside This Episode?

• Hidden Risks of Blood Pressure: Why most blood pressure readings are inaccurate and how to ensure proper measurements.
• Oral Health and Cardiovascular Disease: The direct link between gum disease and plaque in the arteries.
• Critical Labs for Prevention: Five essential tests to identify inflammation and oxidative stress.
• Functional Medicine in Action: How magnesium, meditation, and personalized care can prevent deadly events.
• The Power of Collaboration: Why working with biological dentists is crucial for complete cardiovascular prevention.

Resources and Links:

• See the Full Transcript here
• Download our FREE Guide to Cardiovascular Risk Assessment
• Join the Next-Level Health Practitioner Facebook group here for free resources and community support
• Visit INEMethod.com for advanced health practitioner training and tools to elevate your clinical skills and grow your practice by getting life-changing results. 
• Want to learn more about testing and preventing heart disease?  Check out this episode.

Dr. Ellie Campbell’s Resources and Links

• Get the Book – The Blood Pressure Blueprint: A comprehensive guide to understanding and improving blood pressure health.
• Visit Dr. Ellie Campbell’s Website: Explore her innovative approaches to cardiovascular health and more.
• Check out the AMA Map Hypertension Website to help your practice improve blood pressure control
• Connect with Dr. Ellie Campbell on Facebook: Join her mission to educate and empower through better cardiovascular care.

Dr Ellie Campbell’s Bio

Dr. Campbell is a native Chicagoan, and a graduate of the University of Illinois, the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, and the Medical College of Georgia. Board-certified in Family Medicine for 30 years, she also holds certification from the American Board of Integrative Medicine.

She is a solo physician with specialty interests in interdisciplinary collaboration, Functional Medicine, Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement Therapy, reversing chronic disease, cardiovascular disease prevention, natural treatments for high blood pressure, the oral-systemic connection, and Vitamin D. She also enjoys live theater, gardening, healthy cooking, hiking, travel, and playtime with her husband, three adult daughters, and 2 100-lb dogs.

 

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Transcript

Dr Ritamarie 

Welcome back to the podcast. I’m super excited to have you here and to be here with a special guest today. So did you know that the way that most doctors, health practitioners of all sorts, whether they’re nurses, doctors, conventionally trained practitioners, they don’t take blood pressure the right way. And today we’re going to talk about that, and we’re going to talk about what’s wrong with that. And we’re going to talk about the importance of knowing your blood pressure and having accurate readings, so that you can take action in the way that you’re supposed to.

 

So I am super excited to introduce you to a doctor who has been in the forefront of studying blood pressure and studying some of the other causes of cardiovascular disease. She’s a primary care doctor, and she became passionate about helping people to get their blood pressure under control through lots of different means based on her own experiences. She didn’t set out to be a blood pressure expert. We can ask her some of the reasons that came about. She’s the author of The Blood Pressure Blueprint.

 

She’s been in practice for over 30 years as a family health, family practitioner, and her specializations come from various places. She has an integrative medicine specialization, and she’s passionate about using functional medicine, bioidentical hormones, and whatever it takes to get someone well, Dr. Ellie Campbell’s going to do it. So welcome, Dr. Ellie.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (01:51)

Thank you so much. It’s my honor to be here with you and to chat with your audience a little bit about a subject that I came to sort of accidentally. I mean, I think as a healthcare professional, we all measure blood pressure. We go to every doctor, many dentists, some eye doctors and get our blood pressure checked. We can go to the fire station and get our blood pressure checked. We can go to the drug store and get our blood pressure checked. 

 

We know somehow it’s a meaningful number, but what we didn’t know, I don’t think, is that for many people, a rising blood pressure is the first red light on their dashboard that there’s a metabolic problem beginning, that they’re having dysregulation of their hormones, their kidneys, their insulin, their glucose, and their nutritional status, and something is amiss, or their blood pressure wouldn’t be climbing up. 

 

And so, you know, we believe that vital signs are vital, and in my office, we measure vital signs every day, multiple times a day on all the patients. So I started a journey. Should I tell the story of Dee to your audience? Should I tell that story?

 

Dr Ritamarie (03:01)

Yeah, I think that’s a great place to start. Then, I loved the story that you told about how you came to write a book called The Blood Pressure Blueprint. So go ahead and share that story.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (03:12)

I’m a family physician, right? I love to take care of families. Cheryl came to see me at age 42, infertile, not able to have a second child. The fertility doctors told her that her eggs and her husband’s sperm were incompatible and together they could not have a child. And she said, well, that doesn’t make any sense to me. We already have one kid. I think you’re not right. And she heard through the grapevine, I might be good with hormones. 

 

So she came to see me, and we worked hard to detoxify her, balance her adrenals, balance her thyroid, get her settled back into her body again, and lo and behold, she got pregnant after we were repleated her magnesium and vitamin D and progesterone and did all those things. And she had a beautiful baby boy. And so now she has two children. Her family is complete. Her life is wonderful. 

 

And she says, I think you need to see my mother. My mother is having a lot of hormone trouble. My mother’s complaining of hot flashes and night sweats and she’s in her seventies, but she’s still not balanced. Can you help her? And I said, that would be my honor. You know, as a family physician, that’s like the highest honor somebody can give you when they pull in a family member into the practice because now I have three generations of the same family to take care of. 

 

 So we took care of Dee. She was estrogen deficient. She was progesterone deficient. She was testosterone deficient. She was hyperlipidemic. We took care of her according to the evidence-based guidelines. She had high blood pressure, which we took care of according to the evidence-based guidelines, and everything seemed to be going great. She had more energy. She felt good. Her sex life was great, because she had this much younger boyfriend that she needed to keep up with for her line dancing and four-wheeling and gardening and keeping the books in the family business, all the things that she did as a grandmother to this family. 

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (05:00)

And then one day, Cheryl called me panicked and said, “Mother did not show up for work today.” I ran over to the house. I knocked on every door. I looked in every window. And finally, I found Mother on the floor next to her computer crumpled into a little ball breathing, barely alive, and I called 911. 

 

She suffered a massive stroke. She was paralyzed on one side of her body, and I took her to the hospital. And I felt terrible because I know that strokes are a consequence of high blood pressure and high cholesterol, but we controlled those, I thought. And yet she had an event anyhow. And I was like, wow, that feels really bad to me. 

 

So she did not qualify for clot-busting emergency erasers that can sometimes be given if you get to the hospital within an hour of a stroke. They sometimes can give you a lytic drug that breaks open the clot and like a magic eraser takes all the deficits away. She didn’t qualify for that. She did qualify for long-term rehab, so she went to the stroke rehab center across the street and around day five she suffered this complication. It’s called hemorrhagic transformation, and it happens when the little tiny blood vessel that was damaged by the stroke burst open.

 

It causes a brain bleed, and she developed a severe intracranial brain hemorrhage, and Dee died. And when I got that phone call that Dee had died from a brain stroke, a bleeding hemorrhage, I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. I felt like somebody took my breath away, because I had been entrusted to provide care to this grandmother as she took care of her children and grandchildren. 

 

We followed the best evidence-based guidelines, and it happened anyhow. I felt like my system had failed me. I felt like I failed the patient who was terrible. And so I spent the next three years doing everything that I could do to search out the source, the cause. What did I miss? What did I do wrong? What did I not understand about treating high cholesterol and treating high blood pressure that I missed that I should have known?

 

Dr Ritamarie (06:55)

And I want to just interrupt you there for a second, because just the fact that you did that is unique in this world of medicine, right? Because we get, this is what I was told to do. I did it, it didn’t work, so be it next. And the fact that you took that time to really research it and see what could I have done better has subsequently helped and maybe saved the lives of the people that you took care of after that, because now you have more information. So I just wanted to commend you for that.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (07:27)

Thanks. Well, you I think that’s really true. I mean, I did not want these deaths to be in vain. And I used her as a catalyst to learn more and understand better the underlying physiology of atherosclerotic vessel disease so that I could know what did I do or not do? What could I have learned? 

 

And what I learned changed the trajectory of my career. It changed the trajectory of every patient that follows deep, because now for nine years we have had zero heart attacks and zero strokes in the practice. So there’s a secret to be taught, right? And I can’t keep this secret to myself, and in Dee’s honor, I don’t want to keep that secret to myself. I want to tell your audience, I want them to learn it, and I want everybody else on the planet to learn it. And what have you learned?

 

Dr Ritamarie (08:16)

Absolutely, absolutely. And I love that. I love it too, because it’s reinforcing. We have health practitioners in our audience here who are from all walks of life. Some of them are new. They’ve taken health coach training. Some of them are nurses and doctors who’ve been in practice for 30, 40 years and are finding that their systems are not necessarily serving their patients. Their patients aren’t necessarily getting better.

 

Maybe they’re keeping some people alive. Maybe they’re not keeping some people alive, but they’re frustrated with the tools and are looking for more tools. So we definitely want you to share some of the things you learned.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (08:50)

We’re spending billions of dollars on cardiovascular disease. And the more money we spend, the less change we make in its outcomes, because we have more people with vessel disease than ever before, more cardiovascular disease. It remains the number one killer in our country for men and women. Women always worry about our breasts. We always worry about breast cancer. And while I don’t want to diminish that in any way, seven times more women die of heart disease than die of breast cancer.

 

And so it is preventable in most cases. Heart attacks are optional, and strokes are stoppable if you’re willing to get the tests and do the work.

 

But your practitioner has to be informed and know which tests to order. And so I embarked on this journey to understand what tests those might be. And what I learned was that the number one hidden risk factor to the number one killer in our country is poor oral health. And if we have bleeding gums, gum disease, gum bacteria, tooth infections, those bacteria get in the bloodstream, and they make plaque in our arteries, in our hearts, in our brain. And these mouth bacteria can literally cause plaque rupture that can lead to these events. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (10:12)

So plaque in the mouth leads to plaque in the arteries, in the heart and the vessels.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (10:20)

Yes, yes, it’s the same process. It’s bacteria, biofilm, inflammation markers, cytokines, tumor necrosis factor alpha, white blood cells. It’s all in plaque in the mouth, but it’s also in plaque in your arteries.

 

Dr Ritamarie (10:34)

So I just want to reinforce for everyone listening, right? We do comprehensive histories. Those in functional medicine are like trying to put all the pieces together that maybe we didn’t learn how to do in conventional history taking and all that. But we need to be asking a thorough oral health issue. And if you are seeing people face to face, even on Zoom, you can look in their mouth. You can ask about the fillings. You can ask about pain in their gums. You can ask about bleeding gums. You can ask about dental surgeries, can ask about root canals. 

 

There’s so many things that you can be asking people about to give you that, huh, and you have a family history of heart disease, and you have an LP(a) elevation, or history of that. Whoa, we’ve got to do some things here now to prevent you from having plaque in the mouth leading to plaque in the cardiovascular. Yeah.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (11:28)

So when I now take a history, I do past medical history, past surgical history, family history, social history, OB history, and now dental history. And I ask those questions just like you did. And I didn’t use to do that, but I think it’s so critical. It doesn’t take but a few seconds. Do you have pink in the sink? Do you have any teeth that hurt? Have you had any dental work? If the answer’s “no,” then you move on. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (11:54)

Exactly. And for us, those of you who are listening, who are in our programs, in our nutritional endocrinology training program, if you go back to module three, I think it is, and history taking, we have a whole section on dental history. We have a sheet that you can use. You don’t even  have to take the time. You just have people fill out and show you what kind of dental problems they’ve had. So I really appreciate you focusing on that.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (12:16)

Yeah. So when I learned that, I called Cheryl, and I said, “Cheryl, three years ago when your mom died, I have a question. Do you think it’s possible that she had a dental problem? Could she have had bleeding gums, or a tooth that wasn’t right, or a crown that broke, or anything that you can think of?” 

 

She goes, well, yeah. She said, Mother had a toothache. She had been to the dentist the week before her stroke. The dentist put her on antibiotics and told her he needed to cool off the infection for a little bit, before he took her tooth out. It was scheduled for a dental extraction, but she never made it that far.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (12:56)

She never got to that appointment. Had I known then what I know now. I would have had leading indicators in blood work that would have given me a clue likely that she was festering an infection weeks, months, or years before it became symptomatic. And now that I check markers of oxidative stress and inflammation, I would have known to have her on higher antioxidants, put her on some particular supplements that lower oxidative stress. I would have put her on supplements or prescription drugs to optimize her LDL particle numbers and size, which I didn’t know to do back then.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (13:38)

And so we would have shifted her burden of plaque such that when she got an infection, it wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back. Right. And the same thing happened during the COVID pandemic, because I’d been doing this now for about five years. And all of our patients that come to see us have an assessment of their oxidative stress and inflammation, because we were able to keep those numbers under such good control. We had zero deaths from COVID in our practice either. Because why?

 

We went into the pandemic prepared to handle this major stressor to their physiology.

Dr Ellie Campbell (14:15)

So, I decided after studying this and learning this, I joined the American Academy for Oral and Systemic Health. It was an organization of about a thousand dentists and hygienists and five medical doctors. But I’m like, huh, oral and systemic health, systemic health is more than the dentist. 

 

I think some medical people need to be in this organization. And they’re like, thank goodness we’re looking for doctors to refer our patients to. So I’ve been working aggressively to try to bring awareness of that organization to medical practitioners who are aware of an oral connection so that they can cross refer to these dentists because according to some studies up to 50% of dental patients have no primary care provider. So it’s a ripe referral source for any practitioner who’s looking to grow their practice to have a relationship with a dentist who understands these relationships as well. 

 

So after I got that news that this was the trigger for Dee. I’m like, I can’t keep this to myself. I got to start telling people. So I started going on podcasts and webinars and lecturing at Continuing Medical Education and Continuing Dental Education for dental hygienists, for dentists. I’ve done a webinar for the American Dental Association. A medical doctor talking to the American Dental Association is kind of a big deal, right? I said, I can’t reach that many people this way. Maybe if I wrote a book, I could reach people. 

 

So a dental hygienist and I worked really hard together to try to write a book, and it was it was an okay book. It had a lot of really good information, but it was also kind of boring and so we pitched it to over 80 publishers and nobody wanted to publish this book. It was called something like Mouth Wellness, and it was not very catchy, and it wasn’t very helpful, and I learned that people don’t really care about their mouth health. They don’t know that they need to care about their mouth health and so they don’t google it. They’re not searching for it. It doesn’t accidentally drop into their awareness. 

 

So I went back to the drawing board, and I threw that book away, and I started all over again. I went on Google, and I said, well, what do people want to learn about? And this is right prior to pandemic. Nine out of 10 years in the top 10 health searches, blood pressure came up in the top 10.

 

Well, certainly oral health affects blood pressure and certainly blood pressure and oral health together affect cardiovascular disease. So maybe I should write a book about blood pressure, because people might be interested enough to pick it up. And I’m going to hide inside the cover. You have the reading material, once they get started, hints about therapeutic lifestyle changes and all the functional medicine, foundational things: eat clean food and drink clean water and exercise and pray and meditate and supplement and all those things that we do as foundations. 

 

And then I have a whole chapter about oral and systemic connections and how the mouth bacteria lead to atherosclerotic plaque, and how the dental enzymes get in the brain and all these things. So I wrote the book called The Blood Pressure Blueprint. It’s really a Trojan horse book. It’s really a book about oral health and functional medicine.

 

Dr Ritamarie (17:33)

disguised in blood pressure.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (17:35)

And it’s disguised as blood pressure. So people might actually pick it up and read it. And so far it’s doing okay. It’s been an Amazon number one bestseller. I’ve sold in 14 countries. So I’m really happy with it.

 

Dr Ritamarie (17:46)

That’s awesome. And my people love it. Those of you who are listening, probably have heard me talk about it before. You might’ve even heard Dr. Ellie talk at some of our conferences, because that’s what I picked up. It’s like, yeah, blood pressure. I know what I know about blood pressure. I don’t need to learn anything more about blood pressure. I’ve been in functional medicine for over 30 years. I know what I’m doing. 

 

But when you said about the oral connection, that hit me, because both of my parents died very young. I think I’ve told you this before, of sudden death from heart attacks, like 56 and 64. They were very young, very young by my standards, because I’m older than both of them right now. But my dad, he had a full set of dentures at 64 when he passed away. I mean, his teeth were horrible and rotted out, and his father, same thing. And his father lasted a little longer than he did, but died of a sudden heart attack at 72. My mother, I don’t remember much about her teeth, right? But I know that that was probably a big part of it and nobody caught it. 

 

Nobody caught it, and they just suddenly went. So, you know, if you want to protect people, this is a big piece to be looking at. And I know that when I first talked to you about it, we were going to do a whole podcast on blood pressure, and we ended up doing a whole podcast on the oral connection. And now we’re trying to do a podcast on blood pressure, and we’re going back to that.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (19:13)

They’re so integrally connected. So when I decided I was going to write about blood pressure, I had to do a little research to make sure I was doing blood pressure, keeping up against the current guidelines. Current guidelines had changed. The definition of blood pressure is now different than when I was taught it.

 

Dr Ritamarie (19:30)

You mean definition, you mean the elevation?

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (19:33)

Yeah, what is a normal blood pressure? What’s hypertension? We used to have a category called normal, a category called pre-hypertension, and a category called hypertension. Now we have normal elevated high blood pressure stage one and high blood pressure stage two. So the guidelines changed. A normal blood pressure is now 119 over 79 or less. 119 and 79 or less.

 

Dr Ritamarie (20:03)

So if either of the systolic or diastolic are elevated, you’re considered in the next category.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (20:09)

Correct, because 120 to 129 and less than 80 are still okay. That’s elevated blood pressure. It’s not yet hypertension. But 130 or above 80 is hypertension. 130 or 80 or higher. So if you go to the doctor with a blood pressure of 110 over 81, you’re hypertension stage one. Anything over 80 is hypertension stage one.

 

Dr Ritamarie (20:38)

Let me ask you this though, and I’m going to play devil’s advocate here. Do those guidelines come about from drug companies trying to get more people to qualify, or is there really evidence that there is a danger at somebody being 119 or 110 over 81?

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (20:57)

I think the answer is yes and…. So yes, there is evidence that these numbers matter. We used to say 140/90 and now we say 130/80, and the reason is data. The reason is that there are more events, more heart attacks and more strokes in people who have these blood pressure readings. They get the numbers down in the clinical research trials, not by doing what we do, not by repleting magnesium, and practicing meditation, and changing your salt to a pink or gray salt with minerals in it instead of using that white toxic stuff.

 

That’s not how they were treated. They were treated with drugs. So many of those studies were sponsored by drug companies. So I think that it’s a yes, and. There is evidence that those numbers matter. But if somebody comes to see me with a blood pressure of 110 over 81, I’m not writing a blood pressure drug prescription. Absolutely not. We’re giving them a year at least to change their lifestyle. We’re going to send them home with a home blood pressure monitor and make sure that that’s the highest that it gets, that it’s not 190 over 101 at home.

 

right? Because that might institute a more aggressive treatment protocol. But for a mild elevation like that, that gives us a grand opportunity as functional medicine practitioners to detoxify them, optimize their bowel function, optimize their hormone function, optimize their mineral status, optimize their nutritional state, right? And often optimize their sleep. And when we do those things, often they lose weight, their blood pressure comes under control, they feel better, everybody wins, and everybody wins, except the drug company, because we haven’t prescribed anything.

 

Dr Ritamarie (22:50)

And we don’t want them to win. We want them to go find some other things to do with their lives, because we don’t need them anymore. So, I want to just also go back to you mentioned a whole bunch of stuff, right? You mentioned magnesium, and I didn’t hear you say vitamin D, but that’s probably a big part of it as well. And meditation and food and all that. Is there any one or two or maybe even three of the top areas that you find to use if somebody says, I can’t do all of that, give me the top three.

 

Is there universally a top three, or is it more related to each particular person and where they’re at?

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (23:25)

I think it’s individualized, but I would say, if I had a Venn diagram of what’s most in the middle, there probably are three things. Magnesium deficiency, and to me, that’s a serum level less than 2.2. So I like to keep the magnesium level in the upper quartile of the reference range.

 

Dr Ritamarie (23:45)

Right, do you do the red blood cell magnesium as well?

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (23:47)

I don’t do red cell magnesium. And the reason I don’t is because one of my mentors, Russell Jaffe, Dr. Jaffe from PERC Labs, is a PhD, MD guy. He’s one of the smartest people I know. He has some of the most experience. And he said he did lots of studies comparing serum and red blood cell magnesium. And over and over and over, if the patient was in the top quartile of the lab reference range, they had a normal serum red cell magnesium level.

 

Dr Ritamarie (24:16)

So you didn’t want to bother spending the extra money. Yeah.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (24:19)

So why spend the extra money to get something that you can get from a serum that’s much cheaper?

 

Dr Ritamarie (24:22)

But then keeping it at a tighter range, not going, here’s the range, and you’re over here, so therefore you’re okay. No, here’s the range, and you’re up here, therefore it’s okay. 

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (24:31)

You have to be in that top end of the reference range. So, magnesium deficiency would be number one, undiagnosed or undertreated sleep apnea is number two. And number three would be inflammation from the mouth, which is why we keep circling back to the mouth.

 

Now I have blood markers that I do as part of my Cleveland Heart Workup that look for oxidative stress and inflammation. And there are five in particular that have significant oral health connections. Myeloperoxidase, Lp-PLA2, lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2, high sensitivity C-reactive protein, galectin-3, and pro-BNP. And I could give you literature studies if you cared to see them all, but those tests indicate vascular inflammation.

 

But those tests also can indicate periodontal or endodontic inflammation. And so when I see those markers as leading indicators, I’m like, OK, I’m going to do carotid ultrasound. If your ultrasound is suddenly worse than the last time we did it, it’s probably a vascular inflammation. But if it’s not, and these markers are newly inflamed, you probably have a gum or tooth problem. We need to go see the dentist and get that fixed.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (25:53)

And now that I aggressively do that, we don’t see events. We see lots of gum problems. We see lots of teeth problems. I can’t tell you how many dozens of teeth we’ve had to have pulled in this practice. It hurts my heart to have a tooth pulled. It feels like an amputation of a body part. But if an amputation of that small body part can save your life, then we have to go for it, right?

 

Dr Ritamarie (26:14)

Yeah, go for it. Yeah, you have to go for it. And all of those tests you mentioned, none of them are routinely done by your conventional MD out there. The only one that might be close to being routinely done is the CRP, but other than that, nobody’s testing those other markers.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (26:32)

Right, Cleveland Heart Labs offers them. part of the panel. Boston Heart Labs offers them. They’re part of the panel. I think Spectrum and some other labs offer similar testing as well. So it’s not that it’s not out there. It’s just that 1% of medical doctors order these tests.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (26:52)

That means 1% of all the doctors out there who have the potential to save lives with leading indicator blood work, 99% aren’t doing it. And that’s why cardiovascular disease remains the number one killer in our country.

 

Dr Ritamarie (27:07)

Right, because we’re not catching it until after it happens. As you know, 50% of the cases or more, people don’t even know they have a problem until they die, like my parents, boom, right? This is something where we want to be able to predict it early on. I mean, yes, we’d like to know if you’re on the road to rheumatoid arthritis, and your joints are going to hurt in five years, but oftentimes, even if you don’t take care of it early on, your joints hurt in five years and then you take care of it. You don’t die.

 

So this is something that prevention is critical for, not just optional, better, critical.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (27:45)

Stroke is the number one leading cause of disability in our country. And in some ways, sudden death is a blessing compared to a severe hemipyretic stroke that takes out your brain, your speech, and your swallow. So now you can hear things, but you can’t speak, because garbled words come out. You can’t swallow. Somebody’s got to feed you or a feeding tube. You’re paralyzed and you’re in a wheelchair and somebody’s changing your diapers.

 

What a humiliating, devastating, horrible complication that is. And if it’s preventable in even one person, then I’ve done good work on this planet. And so I would like to see more and more people do this. And let’s go back to talk about blood pressure really quick because I do want to talk about blood pressure.

 

Dr Ritamarie (28:28)

Yes, and one more thing I want to just say, because you said you have some studies, and I would love if you have links I can stick in the show notes for people to research. That would be awesome. Or if it’s in your book, just tell me it’s in your book.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (28:41)

Okay. Maybe not, because I think the myeloperoxidase studies are more recent than when we published. We saw it, but they didn’t have research to publish. It was a clinical observation, but now there’s research.

 

Dr Ritamarie (28:55)

Now there’s research, beautiful. Beautiful, because people need to see that to be able to take it to their doctors and say, look, you’re putting me at risk by not running these tests. I need these tests done.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (29:06)

And the dentist, that’s the other, that’s why I lecture to so many dental groups. It is because I say, I want you to know the vocabulary of what the medical doctors, 1% of us anyhow, are testing so that when I send a patient to you, it doesn’t seem like it’s an inappropriate referral, right? 

 

If I send a patient to you with elevated CRP and myeloperoxidase, they have an apical infection until proven otherwise. Find me the infected tooth. Hunt and hunt hard, because a typical dental exam, poke, poke, poke, look, look, look, maybe take some bitewing x-rays, it won’t find it. Bitewings only look at the biting surface of the teeth where cavities are. It doesn’t look at the tooth roots. 

 

You have to have a higher index of suspicion and either a very high-end panorex x-ray or a better cone beam CAT scan in your office to be able to do this and identify this, because it’s not typically evident on clinical exam.

 

So when we find it though, and we often do, now we have a treatment care plan that reduces the oxidative stress, reduces the inflammation, and reduces my patient’s risk. So I love that.

 

Dr Ritamarie (30:17)

I love it. I love it.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (30:19)

So I told you I had to go back, I was going to write a book about blood pressure. I had to make sure I was following the best guidelines, making sure I was keeping up to date, and I was doing all the right things. 

 

First thing I had to relearn was what was blood pressure, because I was going by 140/90 and that’s too high, that’s not normal. Now we’re 130/80 with an elevation and a bit of a warning at 119 over 79 or higher. So that’s a thing. Then we talked about the technique of how we measure blood pressure.

 

And the American Medical Association publishes this little thing. And everybody should have one of these posters in their office. And you can get it at the AMA map hypertension website. I’ll give you the link. And it’s the seven simple test tips to get an accurate blood pressure reading. It’s also in the book. I go over these one by one by one. But if you just have the poster in your office, now you’re sure that you and your team are doing it properly.

 

So the first thing is, do not have a conversation within five minutes of checking your blood pressure, because talking or even actively listening to that really interesting conversation the receptionist is having with that person about, you found blood in your what? It can raise your blood pressure 10 points, listening too hard and chit chatting, chit chatting about how are the kids? Everybody’s great, did your kid get that scholarship? That can raise your blood pressure 10 points. So we don’t want to do that. We have to zip it, before we check our blood pressure.

 

Next mistake I made was not having my patients have an empty bladder. So our typical standard operating procedure in the office was for the patients to come into the reception area of the office. They’re greeted by the receptionist, the girl that answers the phone. They’re handed their consent forms for the day or whatever paperwork they might need to do, up-to-date medication and supplement list. They fill that stuff out. It’s given back to the receptionist. Receptionist, once she receives it, sends a chat message to the medical assistant in the back that your patient is here and ready. 

 

Medical assistant walks up, greets the patient, chit chat, chit chat, walks back to the exam room, sits in a chair, checks their blood pressure, checks their temperature, their pulse ox, all their vital signs, weight, height, and then says, you need to go to the bathroom and give me a urine specimen. While you’re gone, I’ll let Dr. Campbell know that you’re about ready to be seen. And they’ll go to the bathroom, pee in a cup, and then we both meet back in the exam room. And that was our protocol.

 

Well, it turns out that having a full bladder can add 10 points to your blood pressure. 10 points.

 

So I’m like, huh, that’s interesting. I wonder how that is. I mentioned it at a lecture to a urologist who does prostate treatment. And he said, wow, that explains it. I said, what? He said, I do prostate procedures for men with enlarged prostate. And I would notice that after they completed their procedures, their blood pressure was often 10 or 15 points lower after I was done. Now I understand that they had chronic urinary retention and their bladders were never empty, so they never got a truly accurate blood pressure reading. So interesting. 

 

The next mistake I made is, I’ve never had my blood pressure properly checked, because of this problem. Never in my career. Why?

 

Because I am vertically impaired, I am 5 feet, 0.6 inches tall. And when I sit in a chair, my feet don’t touch the floor. I can’t sit in a chair all the way back. If I lean forward to get my feet on the floor, my back is not supported. If I have an unsupported back, it can add 6 millimeters.

 

If my feet are not on the floor, and they are dangling, it can add 8 millimeters of mercury. So bottom to the bottom, back to the back, feet on the floor is the proper way to have your blood pressure measured. And I have never been offered a step stool for my short little legs to sit on. And I frequently will have my blood pressure checked while I’m sitting way up high on the top of an exam table with my legs dangling.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (34:40)

My ankles are in my demure way, right, so that I look like a lady, and I’ve just added eight points or 16 points to my blood pressure readings. We’re not having a supported back, not having my back bottom to the bottom and not having my feet on the floor while my ankles are crossed. 

 

The next mistake we often make is that we don’t use the right blood pressure cuff size. There’s very specific guidelines if you go into your paperwork that you got with your blood pressure cuff, it’ll tell you there’s a little chart. Measure the patient’s arm in inches or centimeters. This many inches needs this size cuff. This many inches needs this size cuff. And most of us get a pediatric cuff, an adult cuff, and a thigh cuff. We mostly get three cuffs with our blood pressure machine. So my arm is too many centimeters across for the normal blood pressure cuff.

 

So that’s a little too snug. And if they put the wrong blood pressure cuff on my arm, it can raise my blood pressure up 10 millimeters of mercury ,because the cuff is too snug. All right, they’re going to jump up to the next larger cuff size. They’re going to put a thigh cuff on me. Well, my humerus is too short for a thigh cuff. It goes up into my armpit and cuts off my circulation. comes down into my elbow crook. It’s not the right size. And using the wrong size cuff can add 10 millimeters of mercury.

 

So there’s a trick. Welch-Allen makes an adult long blood pressure cuff. It’s the normal width of a regular blood pressure cuff. It’s just longer. So it gets around our arms. And in today’s day and age, anybody with a body mass index over 28 or 29 probably needs an adult long blood pressure. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (36:25)

Yeah. Or somebody who’s a bodybuilder. Right? You get these big biceps and triceps. 

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (36:27)

Or even a bodybuilder. So if they come to your office in the middle of Michigan in winter, and they’re wearing a wool sweater that grandmother knitted, and you try to check their blood pressure over the top of their clothing, you can add 50 points of false blood pressure readings from clothing over there. So you have to have a bare arm that’s the proper size cuff that’s held in the right position. 

 

Your elbow should be bent and your arm should be at heart level. The nerves shouldn’t be holding it up high to measure your blood pressure. You shouldn’t be dangling it down low. It should be at heart level and supported. So that’s the proper way to check a blood pressure.

 

Dr Ritamarie (37:16)

So it sounds like those chairs, those seats when you get your blood drawn, right? They have that little thing that goes across.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (37:22)

Right. They’re doing it right. As long as you’re tall enough to have your feet on the floor while you’re checking. Right. So those are the seven things. Don’t talk, empty your bladder, support your back, uncross your legs, support your arm, put it on a bare arm, no clothing, and use the correct cuff size.

 

And those are the new seven. They’re not new, they’re 2017. But I didn’t get the memo, you didn’t get the memo. Most doctors didn’t get the memo that the American Heart Association, CDC, and American Medical Association. They came up with these guidelines to standardize office blood pressure checks. So this is the right one.

 

Dr Ritamarie (38:01)

But nobody got the message. So how is this supposed to be happening? And at the same time, they tightened the controls. So a 10 point variation can take you from normal into early hypertension, just like that, just because of a poor technique.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (38:21)

Right, exactly. Which is why I’m on the mission now to help people to properly measure their blood pressure, and just like I would never give a diabetic an insulin protocol for one finger stick blood sugar that they did in my office one morning.

 

That doesn’t make any sense. I would never put anybody on a blood pressure pill for a one-time reading that I got in my office one time. I need the data. So the wearables are coming out. They’re getting better and better. Pretty soon we’re going to have blood pressure oximetry that will be able to measure the blood pressure through skin patches and or smart watches. We’re not there yet. Do not trust your Apple watch.

 

Dr Ritamarie (39:06)

I’ve got a watch that said it takes your blood pressure.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (39:10)

Don’t trust it. It’s not that we’re close to the cutting edge, but we’re not quite there yet. They’re coming up with Bluetooth communication so you can upload your data to your computer without even touching anything. It just goes in, and we can get tons of data because some people are high at night. Some people are high in the morning. Some people are high after stress. Some people are high after eating. Some people are never high except when they go to the doctor’s office. That’s called white coat hypertension.

 

Dr Ritamarie (39:39)

And how much white coat hypertension is based on bad technique?

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (39:41)

Right exactly. I don’t know the answer to that study, but I’ll bet it’s a lot.

 

Dr Ritamarie (39:48)

I bet it’s a lot, and I bet it’s a lot. And here’s the thing. This is what I always think about white coat hypertension. You know, maybe you’re nervous, because you’re going to the doctor, but you’re also nervous when you’re, you know, sitting in line waiting for a kid to come out of school. When you’re having your kid in for a doctor’s appointment, when you’re getting upset at your boss, right? Anything that causes that sympathetic overload is probably also elevating it. And if you’re a typical person, 24/7, you’ve got something that’s elevating your blood pressure.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (40:20)

Right. So do you want to take a drug, or do you want to retrain your sympathetic nervous system?  

 

Dr Ritamarie (40:25)

That’s why we’re here, right? It’s because we don’t want to give people drugs or take drugs. We want to help people retrain their sympathetic nervous systems and balance their nutrients, balance everything.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (40:38)

Yes. And your sympathetic tone stays up very high if your adrenals are wacky, and you need B5, B6 and vitamin C for your adrenals. So sometimes those can treat hypertension, because they’ve treated the adrenal stress. Sometimes it’s more about parasympathetic biohacking. It’s learning proper breathing techniques. It’s learning meditation. It’s learning how to be still. In today’s society, we have forgotten how to just just be still. listen. Just be. 

 

If we learn how to do that again, and it’s only one generation removed, it’s not that long ago, we used to sit at the bus stop and just sit and look. Look at the sky and the trees and the birds. Now we’re on our feet. Dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit, right? 

 

We can’t go 30 seconds without picking up our phones. We’re not still anymore. and this can be a huge driver of blood pressure elevation, not only the sympathetic drive from the constant dopamine, but also the EMF exposure.

 

So, we want to learn to separate ourselves from these things where we can, because we know in neurology, nerves that fire together wire together. And the longer you stay in that sympathetic high tone, the more you’re going to stay in it. The more you can retrain your body to be still and quiet and parasympathetic, rest and digest, the better off everything is going to be for your blood pressure, your digestion, your sleep, your sex drive, everything.

 

Dr Ritamarie (42:16)

Right, everything, everything. And it’s not that hard. I mean, yes, you’ve got yogis who can meditate for an hour here and there and an hour several times a day. But simple techniques like heart math, where you can get from sympathetic to parasympathetic in two minutes or less like that. And it’s constantly retraining your body to do that before you eat, to do that before you go into a stressful meeting, to do that regularly throughout the day.

 

So your body just naturally flows into that parasympathetic dominant state, makes all the difference. Awesome.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (42:48)

Yes. So we do those things, and now we don’t need doctors for high blood pressure. And you know, I think that if we use high blood pressure really as that red light warning system that says something in my body is amiss, let me see if I can figure it out. Am I deficient in magnesium? Am I too sympathetically driven? Am I not sleeping at night? Many of your practitioners probably do four point cortisol tests.

 

Dr Ritamarie (43:14)

Yep. Yeah. We either do DUTCH tests or DUTCH with the cortisol awakening response. So they’re doing the urine and the, yeah.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (43:20)

So let me give you a tip, or pearl, that I have learned throughout the years. If I do a four point salivary test, and my morning cortisol is nailed to the ceiling off the chart high, and all the other ones are normal, normal.

 

But that first one, I’m like, did you wake up in a startle? Why is your morning cortisol so high? No, I’m a great morning riser. I don’t need an alarm. As soon as my body senses that it’s 6 AM. My eyes are awake. I’m alert. I’m ready to go. It’s just how I wake up. No. Cortisol nailed to the ceiling is sleep apnea until proven otherwise.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (43:57)

They are in a high stress response all night long. And they often have TMJ issues, because they are pushing their jaw forward as a self CPR mechanism to pull their tongue out of their airway and open their throat, so they can breathe. So when I see high morning cortisol, that’s a sleep test. That’s the next test they get.

 

Dr Ritamarie (44:22)

Awesome, wow. And there’s home sleep tests now. You don’t even have to go and spend overnight in the hospital. There’s one other question that I wanted to ask you about nattokinase. We have a lot of people who are, you know, it got very popular during COVID because of microclots and all that. But do you use that as part of a regime for some people for blood pressure management?

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (45:07.755)

Also, please note, these are different.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (44:44)

Yes, ma’am, we do. And we use it a lot when people have atherosclerosis, because we’ve seen it is typical for our patients. We track serial carotid ultrasounds. We look at the actual plaque, the speed bumps of the little plaques in the artery. But we also measure the thickness of the IMT, the intima media thickness space. 

 

Plaque forms about 99% behind the drywall, before it actually ruptures and causes a clot that leads to the event. And that clot is not cholesterol, that clot is blood clot. So when that cholesterol is inflamed and gooey and hot, full of inflammatory cytokines, lipopolysaccharide, myeloperoxidase, and all those other things in those white blood cells, we can track that on an ultrasound. And we watch in our practice, these IMTs shrink over time, less, less, less, less, over time.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (45:41)

And so the patient’s risk is getting less, less, less. And nattokinase, in our experience, helps accelerate that reversal. My nurse did a very deep dive study. She went into a whole bunch of companies. We got their package inserts and their certificates of analysis from the various different companies that sell nattokinase. And we came up with one called Nattovena that says it has 4,000 units of nattokinase per capsule.

 

But certificate of analysis, COA, case after month after month after month, it’s well over 5,000 units. So it has more nattokinase than on the label. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (46:22)

More in the capsule than on the label, which is the opposite of what you usually find when you find disparity.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (47:27)

 

Right. They’re more generous with their nattokinase, which means it’s stronger than every other one out on the market, just about, at a lower cost per unit. So Nattovena is the one that we use the most. One capsule twice a day between meals, should be on an empty stomach, because if you’re taking the enzyme with your meal, it digests your food instead of your plaque. 

 

Dr Ritamarie (46:44)

Right, instead of digesting clots. We want to digest clots. Thank you very much. Right. Awesome. Awesome. Lots to unpack here. Thank you very much for reiterating the whole connection. The labs, those five labs, so make sure that you’re doing those five labs. I’m going to reiterate to make sure I have them all down: Myeloperoxidase, Lp-PLA2, CRP, HSCRP, galectin, and ProBNP. 

 

So those are the five you want to make sure that you’re doing anytime you’re suspicious of the mouth. You know, they have a dental history, they’ve had root canals, they’ve had history of toothaches, and they have a risk factor for cardiovascular. Absolutely run those tests. That might be $200 worth of tests. It might not even be that depending on which lab you use. 

 

Ideally, make sure you’re testing their blood pressure right. Make sure that they get the list. It’s in the book. You can take a copy, take a picture with your phone ,and give it to your clients, or give it to your doctor to say, this is how I want it done. 

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (47:50)

This is what the AMA tells me that I need.

 

Dr Ritamarie (47:52)

That’s even better. Cause it’s got more clout than Dr. Ellie.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (47:55)

Right? We’re not here to shame anybody. We’re here to educate. So be kind about it and say, guess what? There’s a new way to do blood pressure. And I didn’t know about it. Now you can know about it too.

 

Dr Ritamarie (48:05)

Now, you can know about it. I really like it, and please give me a step stool, because I’m vertically impaired. That’s awesome. And then there’s some other stuff, and maybe we’ll have you back to talk about the oral DNA testing and the microbes in the mouth, because there’s so much to unpack there that I think is awesome.

 

Dr Ellie Campbell (48:25)

So make sure you have a good relationship with a biologic or holistic dentist so that you can cross-refer back and forth, talk the same language, and save lives together, because no cardiovascular prevention team is complete without a medical provider, a dentist, and a hygienist on board.

 

Dr Ritamarie (48:42)

Perfect. Thank you so much. We’ve been talking to Dr. Ellie Campbell. She’s brilliant when it comes to the whole cardiovascular system, the blood pressure, her book, The Blood Pressure Blueprint is amazing. And I just can’t thank you enough for sharing this. This is life saving information. There it is, The Blood Pressure Blueprint. I have mine on Kindle, but I refer to it a I put everything on Kindle so I can carry it with me, right? I can’t carry a stack of books like that high, I can carry my phone and I can look things up on Kindle. And I’ve referred so many of my patients and so many people that come to our events to get that book. It’s a life-changing book. 

 

So thank you, thank you, thank you. And thank you all for listening and for being part of this movement that we’re all part of to change, to reinvent the healthcare system, because we know it needs reinvention. And we know that some of the things that are still taught in medical school are outdated and archaic, and we need to update that, so that people are truly getting the care that they deserve. 

 

Like Dr. Ellie and I, we’ve both, we’re dedicating our lives to helping people. That’s why you’re listening, because you are, too. And you want to always have up to date information in order to do that. So visit our site at INEmethod.com. You’ll get lots of great information there. Check out the show notes. I’ll put in whatever references that Dr. Ellie has mentioned, her book, the links to her website, her social media and all that, because she’s a wealth of information. You can tell by listening to her that she has the heart for this. 

 

We need to have the head and the heart to be good practitioners. We need critical thinking skills, but we need compassion to do what we do. And to do what Dr. Ellie did when she lost a patient and said, what did I do wrong? What could I have done differently? How could I have saved her life, so I can save other people’s lives from there?

 

I very much appreciate you being here. And if you want other information, check out our other videos and until next time, shine on.