Hindawi Publishing Corporation Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Volume 2012, Article ID 284847, 6 pages doi:10.1155/2012/284847 Review Article Control Strategy on Hypertension in Chinese Medicine Jie Wang and Xingjiang Xiong Department of Cardiology, Guang’anmen Hospital, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Beijing 100053, China Correspondence should be addressed to Xingjiang Xiong, 5administration@163.com Received 20 August 2011; Accepted 25 September 2011 Academic Editor: Keji Chen Copyright © 2012 J. Wang and X. Xiong. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Hypertension is a clinical common disease, with high mortality and disability. Although there have also been signiﬁcant advances in therapeutic concepts and measures, it has shown a certain value and signiﬁcance in the treatment of Chinese medicine. The control strategy on hypertension is described from the following aspects such as diﬀerentiation of symptoms, pathogenesis, formula syndrome, and herb syndrome. As the common clinical manifestations of hypertension are dizziness, headache, fatigue, lassitude in the loins and knees, and so on, the pathogeneses of them are analysed. The author found that the main pathogenesis of the disease is heat, excessive ﬂuid, and deﬁciency, which occurred incorporatively and interacted with each other in patients. Although the pathogenesis of the disease is complicated, the distribution of formula syndromes and herb syndromes is regular. The common formula syndromes include Banxia Baishu Tianma Tang (Decoction of Pinellia ternata, Atractylodes and Gastrodia elata), Da Chaihu Tang (Major Bupleurum Decoction), and Liu Wei Dihuang Wan (Pill of Rehmannia). And the common herb syndromes include Tian Ma (Gastrodia elata) syndrome, Sheng Di Huang (Radix Rehmanniae) syndrome, Niu Xi (Achyranthes Root) syndrome, and Chuan Xiong (Ligusticum wallichii) syndrome. 1. Introduction Hypertension is a clinical common disease, with high mor- tality and disability. Additionally, it is also an independent risk factor for stroke, coronary heart disease, heart failure, renal insuﬃciency, peripheral vascular diseases, early death, and many other major diseases [1]. In numerous studies, it is shown that around 30% of the population died from cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events, in which 62% of acute stroke events and 49% of cardiovascular events were directly caused by hypertension. There are about 1 billion hypertensive patients in the world. It was demonstrated that there were about 200 million hypertensive patients in China with more than 10 million patients increased annually [2, 3] in Cardiovascular Report 2006 in China. The antihyperten- sive treatment has made great progress in modern medicine. The therapeutic drugs include six classes of antihyperten- sive agents and ﬁxed compound preparation. There have also been signiﬁcant advances in therapeutic concepts and measures, including paying more attention to the control of earlier-stage hypertension and elevated systolic blood pressure, optimization of combination therapeutic scheme, and new strategy of antihypertensive treatment combined with lipid-lowering therapy [4]. Despite the availability of six classes of antihypertensive agents, control of blood pressure and improving patients’ quality of life remain unsatisfactory, and “three lows” status quo, low awareness, low treatment, and low control, still exist. As the complexity of hyperten- sion, there are still some issues to be resolved. For instance, most patients are prescribed single or combined antihyper- tensive drugs for long-term even lifetime. It also has been conﬁrmed that the emergence of adverse eﬀect and irrational drug use increase the diﬃculty and dissatisfaction in treat- ment [5]. Currently, it has shown a certain value and signiﬁ- cance in the treatment of Chinese medicine. Now the under- standings of hypertension in Chinese medicine and control strategies with classical prescriptions are described as follow. 2. Differentiation of Symptoms Symptoms are not only the basis for syndrome diﬀerential diagnosis but also the therapeutic targets. As Chinese medicine had no idea of blood pressure originally, it treated