Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Exploring the Forgotten Causes and Treatments of Hypertension and the Dangers of BP Medications

Many of the misunderstandings with heart disease arise from the fact that impaired circulation or damage to the blood vessels will cause blood pressure to go up and their correlation being misinterpreted to instead believe high blood pressure causes cardiovascular disease.

In this article, we will discuss the actual causes of high blood pressure, the dangers of commonly used blood pressure medications, the safest pharmaceutical and natural ways to reduce blood pressure directly, and our preferred methods for treating the underlying causes of high blood pressure.

Blood pressure in turn is typically measured by determining how much external force is needed to exceed the artery's pressure and compress it so that blood no longer flows through it.

Low blood pressure is a problem because it prevents blood from reaching the areas where it's needed, but in most cases, medicine instead focuses on the consequences of high blood pressure.

This for instance is why Emergency Rooms aggressively lower the blood pressure of patients who show up with symptoms of "Hypertensive emergency" such as a severe headache and a significantly elevated blood pressure.

Because of this, high blood pressure is viewed as one of the greatest preventable causes of cardiovascular disease and thus a chief focus of all medical visits is ensuring a patient achieves a sufficiently lowered blood pressure.

There is a surprisingly poor correlation between peripheral blood pressure and the central blood pressure inside the aorta.

Since each beat of the heart pushes blood into the arteries and hence increases the pressure within them, two different blood pressure values exist-the baseline pressure and the pressure when the heart contracts.

Most cases of high blood pressure are what is known as "Essential hypertension" or "Primary hypertension" which is a fancy way of saying "Elevated blood pressure without a known cause." More importantly, the fact there is no known cause for most cases of elevated blood pressure has been a widespread belief in medicine for decades.

Does rising blood pressure damage arteries, or does damage to the circulation raise blood pressure? For example, significant plaque within the artery that feeds the kidney raises blood pressure, so why does that have to be an isolated example?

Many of us initially became suspicious of the existing blood pressure paradigm because we noticed that circulatory impairments would proceed or occur in tandem with elevating blood pressures.

Second, the health of the cardiovascular system to a large extent depends upon the lining of the blood vessels being able to secrete nitric oxide, which in turn dilates the blood vessels, locally decreasing blood pressure and regionally increasing blood flow.

Since high blood pressure has been observed to occur in association with heart disease and significant vascular issues such as severe headaches, strokes and organ damage can occur when blood pressure is significantly elevated, which then improves once the blood pressure is rapidly lowered, that led many to suspect high blood pressure might be the cause of heart disease-especially since blood vessel damage never occurs in low-pressure areas of the body.

Much of the current dogma on this issue is based on a longstanding study that "Found" a linear relationship between blood pressure and the risk of death-meaning that continually lowering blood pressure decreases one's risk of dying.

One of the most pivotal moments began in 1973, when due to no studies existing that proved lowering a moderately elevated blood pressure reduced one's chance of dying, a massive, decade-long, public study was conducted in the United Kingdom where 700,000 people were contacted, and ultimately 17,354 patients between the age of 35-64 years of age who had blood pressures below 200 were selected to take a beta blocker, a thiazide diuretic or a placebo.

When the blood pressure craze took off, there was a rush to bring the blood pressure lowering drugs to market before their benefit was actually proven.

This is particularly unfortunate for the elderly as due to their calcified arteries, they both have the least ability to tolerate insufficient blood pressure and simultaneously are the most likely to have elevated blood pressure.

In the case of blood pressure medications, very different degrees of benefits are seen from their use despite them creating the same drop in blood pressure.

A 2007, eight year long double blind study of 42,418 subjects found that when two different types of blood pressure medications were used, there was no difference in their effect on blood pressure but simultaneously, found their rate of preventing heart failure varied by 18% to 80% depending on the drug, leading the investigations to conclude: "Blood pressure reduction is an inadequate surrogate marker for health benefits in hypertension."

The typical management of blood pressure is to use a combination of drugs until they collectively achieve the desired blood pressure and simultaneously to switch out drugs that cause too many side effects for the patients to tolerate them.

Given the high inaccuracy of blood pressure measurements and the patients often being put on excessive hypertensive medications, these symptoms affect many blood pressure medication users to varying degrees.

Virtually every awake physician I know gradually reached the conclusion that the current hypertension paradigm was flawed and hence became much more conservative when they would directly treat blood pressure while simultaneously having a large focus on reversing the causes of high blood pressure rather than trying to treat it with medications. 

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-great-blood-pressure-scam

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