Cayenne Pepper – for medicinal use?

[Robin FarwellStudent]

I read that Cayenne Pepper is helpful for someone who may be having a heart attack or a stroke.  Can anyone provide any  personal stories to support this benefit?

[Jenn KROONStudent]

This would be interesting to know. I’ve just begun my herbal studies, but somewhere in my memory I thought I heard cayenne was a vasodilator, and if so, could be why they are saying it can help with heart attacks, but maybe not strokes so much, as they come in different forms. When I worked as a paramedic, we gave nitroglycerin along with baby aspirin with suspected/confirmed MI(myocardial infarction: heart attack).Nitro is a fast acting vasodilator and helped give some perfusion back in the vessels around the heart if they had a clot in one or more. It also could tank BP if you didn’t monitor it.

Some strokes can be hemorrhagic, where a blood vessel in the brain leaks or bursts, so it wouldn’t be good to take a vasodilator then as you open up the vessels and allow easier blood flow which would cause more blood loss in the brain. If it was an embolic stroke (blood clot in vessel) it could help. But even as a medic I didn’t mess around trying to diagnose what kind of stroke it was, it was more important to diagnose a stroke in and of itself, then get them to the hospital for more definitive care we could not provide in the field.

This would be interesting to know! Maybe Doc or somebody has some insight into using cayenne for this.

[Author]

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