Blood Pressure High and Blood Pressure Pills Not Working? Doctor Luo Dalun: Blood Stasis Is Likely Blocking Your Blood Vessels
Patient search terms: high blood pressure / hypertension / blood pressure medication not working / elderly high blood pressure / dizziness / invigorate blood and resolve stasis
Corresponding medical names: primary hypertension · blood stasis obstructing the collaterals pattern
Opening: high blood pressure is your body’s way of “raising the alarm”
Mention high blood pressure, and most people’s first reaction is “quick, take medicine to push it down.” But Doctor Luo Dalun says that before you rush to lower the pressure, you first need to understand one thing: why is the blood pressure high in the first place?
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: I’ve said before that high blood pressure seems to be the body’s protective mechanism. It’s a disorder, but in a certain sense it’s also a protective mechanism. When your body falls out of balance — when you’ve gone against the laws of nature, causing deficiency and damage, or blood stasis, or other problems — the body gives you an early warning: the blood pressure goes up. At that point, it’s impossible for you to keep doing whatever reckless things you were doing. So it’s like an early-warning system.
What pushes blood pressure “up”? The list of causes
Doctor Luo walked everyone through the causes of high blood pressure, and each one corresponds to a type of person:
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: High blood pressure has many causes. What are they? Deficiency and damage — kidney qi insufficiency, which can include kidney essence insufficiency or kidney yang insufficiency. What else? Liver qi stagnation and liver fire flaming upward — these are also causes. Some people have extremely heavy turbid phlegm — heavy phlegm-dampness — which can also raise blood pressure. And among modern people, many also have blood stasis (yu xue) — and this blood stasis is an important cause of high blood pressure.
What exactly is blood stasis? — Blood that has left the vessels, and “traffic jams” inside the channels
When you talk about blood stasis, many people think “you can’t see it, you can’t touch it.” Doctor Luo explains that in Chinese medicine, blood stasis actually comes in two forms:
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: One kind is called blood that has left the vessels (li jing zhi xue) — if you fall down and your arm turns bruised, why is it bruised? The capillaries broke, the blood came out and stayed under the skin, and you can see the bruise. That’s blood that has left the vessels. The other kind of blood stasis never leaves the vessels — it stays inside, but it moves slowly and gets stuck somewhere along the way. That’s also blood stasis. So the blood stasis we’re talking about here is mostly the kind caused by blocked channels and sluggish circulation.
Why does blood stasis push blood pressure up? — A rubber hose that’s been pinched
Blood stasis clogs the blood vessels — so how does the pressure rise? Doctor Luo offered an easy-to-understand analogy:
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: When a blockage appears somewhere in the body, the body knows — it’s blocked, so what do we do? The body starts trying to add pressure to the blood, attempting to force its way through the blocked tissue, to push through that spot. At that moment, the rest of the body feels the blood pressure rising — the pressure has become greater. It’s like a rubber hose carrying water: if you pinch the end of the hose a little, you’ll see the whole hose start to bulge — because the pressure inside has gone up. You’ve blocked the passageway, and that’s exactly the same principle.
Two familiar phenomena: blood pressure drops after drinking, and drops after exercise
Quite a few friends with high blood pressure have told Doctor Luo about this strange experience: after a drink, the next morning’s reading is lower. Others say after running or exercising, the pressure comes down. Why? Don’t rush to conclude that alcohol is a good thing — this actually confirms the principle above:
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: After drinking alcohol, the capillaries open up. First, the blood flows through more easily. Second, when capillaries open in some places, they act like reservoirs — the total amount of blood being used by the body increases, which is like opening up the tributaries, so the pressure naturally comes down. Exercise works the same way — the capillaries open, blood circulation speeds up, everything passes through smoothly, and the blood pressure drops. So from these phenomena you can see: as long as the blood channels are unobstructed, the blood pressure comes down. In almost every case of high blood pressure, you can find some kind of blockage somewhere.
A personal case: Mother’s blood pressure spiked past 200 — why did the pills fail?
After the theory, Doctor Luo told a story from his own life — his mother’s illness, which completely opened his eyes to “blood-stasis-type high blood pressure.”
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: My mother once had high blood pressure. Sometimes it would suddenly shoot up for no obvious reason — up to 200, which is very high, and once it hit 210. She would suddenly feel dizzy, with all sorts of physical discomfort. This happened about twice. The first time I went home, I found her blood pressure extremely high and she felt terrible. What to do? I remembered that my mother had had chronic nephritis. When she had chronic nephritis, I had already studied high blood pressure — many patients with chronic nephritis have elevated blood pressure along with it.
How does Western medicine handle this? High blood pressure damages the kidneys, so you take blood pressure medication to lighten the kidney’s burden. The problem is — the medication didn’t work.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Some blood pressure medications simply don’t work for certain people. When my mother took blood pressure pills, they did nothing at all. At the time there was a drug called Diovan (valsartan) — as a first-line medication for kidney patients, it’s very safe, but it had no effect on my mother. Why? I had just learned the kidney-treatment method of the late Master Zhao Shaoqin in Beijing — Master Zhao believed that kidney disease involves stasis of the kidney essence, with damp-heat stuck inside. When the kidneys are blocked, blood flows through them more slowly, and the filtration efficiency drops. The body knows this very well — so what does it do? It adds pressure — it forces more blood to rush through the kidneys quickly to be filtered. That’s how the blood pressure gets pushed up.
Once the root cause is found, the solution follows:
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: At that time I said, stop trying to lower the pressure — stop the blood pressure pills. What to do instead? Invigorate the blood and unblock the collaterals; cool the blood and invigorate the blood — keep using Master Zhao Shaoqin’s formula. As a result, her blood pressure slowly came down, and as her kidney condition improved, the blood pressure eventually returned to normal.
What’s even better, this formula later “rescued an emergency.” Years afterward, my mother’s blood pressure suddenly shot up again — no medication worked, and even the doctors were startled and didn’t know what to do:
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: I knew my mother had a history of kidney disease, so I immediately prescribed this cooling-the-blood and invigorating-the-blood formula to unblock the collaterals. After one dose, the blood pressure began to drop the very next day, and it quickly returned to normal — it only took a few doses; as I recall, maybe two or three doses and she was completely back to normal. Later it happened once more, the same way — the kidneys had a problem again — and using this blood-invigorating, collateral-unblocking formula, the blood pressure came down quickly. This is an extreme example: kidney blockage caused high blood pressure. But other parts of the body can also become blocked — the heart, the brain, the channels, the limbs, the hundred joints, the five viscera and six bowels — all of them can get blocked.
The older you get, the more blood stasis you have — stasis grows in proportion to aging
Why do so many elderly people have high blood pressure? Doctor Luo says it’s directly connected to the laws of aging:
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: As age increases, the circulation of the blood declines. The older you get, the more blood stasis you accumulate. Blood stasis and aging are directly proportional — this is a very promising frontier topic in medical research. Even among healthy people, as blood stasis gradually increases, by old age the standard for high blood pressure is gradually raised upward as well — that’s a normal phenomenon. But if an elderly person’s blood stasis becomes too severe, the blood pressure will exceed the normal range, and then problems start.
How should the elderly take care of themselves? — Aspirin and the “Three Treasures for the Elderly”
Since blood stasis is a major driver of high blood pressure, what should elderly people do? Doctor Luo’s advice is very concrete:
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: I recommend that elderly people maintain some blood-invigorating, stasis-resolving treatment over the long term — Chinese medicine or Western medicine both work. On the Western side, Western medicine advises elderly people to regularly take low-dose aspirin. On the Chinese medicine side, we suggest regularly taking san qi powder, dan shen powder, with a little American ginseng powder — in many places this is now called the “Three Treasures for the Elderly.” If the elderly can stick with it regularly, taking small doses little by little — no need for big doses or violent attacks — they can keep their qi and blood flowing smoothly, and eliminate one major cause of high blood pressure: blood stasis.
The famous formula Bu Yang Huan Wu Tang: tonify qi and resolve stasis at the same time
When it comes to formulas that invigorate blood and resolve stasis, Chinese medicine has many famous ones. Doctor Luo singled out one in particular: Bu Yang Huan Wu Tang (Tonify Yang to Restore Five-Tenths Decoction).
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Bu Yang Huan Wu Tang was created by the famous Qing dynasty physician Wang Qingren. Wang Qingren placed tremendous importance on blood stasis — he spent almost his entire life discussing it. He believed that when a person’s upright qi (zheng qi) is insufficient, there is no strength to push the blood along, and blood stasis easily results. So the most important herb in Bu Yang Huan Wu Tang is huang qi (astragalus) — huang qi tonifies qi and drives the blood forward — and then you add the other herbs that invigorate blood and resolve stasis. Some elderly people don’t boil it as a decoction at all — they steep it in hot water and drink it like tea, tonifying qi on one hand and invigorating blood and resolving stasis on the other. This works very well for blood stasis caused by qi deficiency. I also often boil this formula and have people who have both blood stasis and qi deficiency soak their feet in it — elderly friends are mostly qi deficient, so you tonify their qi and at the same time invigorate the blood and resolve stasis. That’s a very good approach.
💬 Note from Doctor Luo: There are many similar formulas — I’ve discussed Tao Hong Si Wu Tang (Peach Kernel and Safflower Four Substances Decoction) and others before. Among the blood-invigorating, stasis-resolving formulas, Chinese medicine holds many treasures. When there’s time in the future, I’ll introduce them to you one by one.
Ending: a one-sentence summary
High blood pressure doesn’t appear out of nowhere — first find the “blockage point” of blood stasis and dissolve it. Once the blood channels are unobstructed, the body no longer needs to force its way through by raising the pressure.
What to take away
- High blood pressure can be driven by blood stasis. When the vessels are blocked, the body pressurizes the blood to push through — the pinched-hose principle. If your blood pressure medicine isn’t working, stasis is one of the first things to consider.
- Blood stasis grows with age. Stasis and aging are directly proportional, which is why hypertension becomes so common in later life.
- Maintenance for the elderly: low-dose aspirin on the Western side, or the “Three Treasures for the Elderly” — san qi powder, dan shen powder and a little American ginseng powder — in small doses, taken steadily over time.
- The proof is in the case: Doctor Luo’s mother’s blood pressure, pushed up by blocked kidneys (chronic nephritis), would not respond to Diovan — but cooling the blood, invigorating the blood and unblocking the collaterals brought it back to normal in two or three doses, every time.
- A formula to remember: Wang Qingren’s Bu Yang Huan Wu Tang (Tonify Yang to Restore Five-Tenths Decoction) — huang qi tonifies the qi to drive the blood, combined with stasis-resolving herbs; drink it as tea or use it as a foot bath for qi deficiency with blood stasis.
Compiled from Doctor Luo Dalun’s health lecture “On High Blood Pressure Caused by Blood Stasis” (Yu Xue Dao Zhi De Gao Xue Ya).