When the leading cause of death in the United States is heart disease, you can bet the country will look to the pharmaceutical industry to solve the problem. This is why we’ve seen the increasing rise in prescriptions for beta-blockers.

Most of us have at least heard of this term, but for those who don’t know, beta-blockers is a term used for a class of drugs that treat heart-related issues by slowing the production of the hormone epinephrine, which, among many other functions, helps to regulate the heart beat. Up until recently, beta-blockers have been viewed as an effective treatment for people with hypertension (after all, the lower the heart rate, the lower the blood pressure).

But according to recent body of evidence published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, beta-blockers may do more harm than good.

Researchers from Columbia University looked at heart rate data of several thousand people who at the time were undergoing different treatments for their high blood pressure (For the study analyzed, approximately 34,000 were given a beta-blocker, approximately 30,100 were given a drug or agent meant to treat hypertension, and a little less than 4,000 were given a placebo).

While the beta-blockers reduced the participants’ heart rate levels more than the placebo or the high blood pressure agent, it also increased their risk of dying through heart attack or stroke and also increased their risk of heart failure.

This sounds an awful lot like those black box warnings that now come on anti-depressants bottles, warning of increased risk of suicide. In both cases – beta-blockers and anti-depressants – the thing that something’s designed to treat can actually increase the risk of a person succumbing to that which the treatment is trying to defeat!

Fortunately, there are alternatives to beta-blocker treatments, ones that yield similar results but without the accompanying risk or side effects.

One such alternative is chamomile tea, one of tea’s many elixirs that have been shown through study after to study to help regulate blood pressure.

Another natural alternative is Passion flower. Passion flower has been used as a natural sedative for many years – stretching all the way back to 16th Century Peru. In addition to its effectiveness in lowering blood pressure, it has other “relaxation” qualities, such as calming the nerves, reducing spasms, relieving anxiety, inflammation and pain as well.

While the headline of this article’s title intones “shocker,” the results of this study are no real shocker to me or any other natural health professional or their adherents. The list of side effects for taking beta blockers are a mile long; it’s a wonder the risk assessment of beta-blockers on hypertension levels took this long to uncover.