"30 million Americans who woke perfectly healthy yesterday morning are now suddenly in need of expensive
hypertension treatments after the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology decided to lower the definition of "high blood pressure" to 130/80 from the previous trigger of 140/90. According to Reuters, the change means that nearly 50% of American adults, or roughly 100 million people, now suffer from high blood pressure."
Funny - in the study presented they also showed that with blood pressure under 120/80 you had a higher risk of kidney injury or failure and fainting. So they're going to bring down your normal blood pressure to very low blood pressure and then..guess what? Give you meds for it.
Absurd
Sounds like a trick to get more sheep into the doctor's office to buy poisonous pills they happily take.
Actually, I think that if people are dumb enough to buy this, they deserve their fate. If someone goes to a check-up and the doctor tells them they need medication for high blood pressure when three months ago they were just fine, they can just tell the doctor to go f..k himself!
If you're too lazy to do some research about your own health...
It's ridiculous how much the peddle prescription drugs here in the United States of America. Instead of suggesting a change in diet and an active lifestyle to help with blood pressure, they automatically want to sell you drugs. It's pathetic. I feel bad for the thousands of people who are victims of these lies.
You have very low threshold for calling it high bloodpressure. Here doctors are OK with bloodpressure up to 150/95. We call everything below 140/90 normal, and between 140-160/90-100 mildly elevated..And exercise and diet is usually tried long before medication.
It just doesnt add together that you keep lowering the threshold and pumping people full of meds, while they are fatter and more unhealthy than ever.
Same with mental disease and drugs. An insane amount of young people are labelled "mentally ill" each year, and young people on psychopharma increases every year. And they change it so that almost any behavior is considered an illness. You're angry? anger problems. You're sad? Depressed. You're stressed out? ADD. You're not content? Anxiety.
Normal human emotions are considered a disease, and kids walk around believing that feelings are a disease.
Big pharma cant make money if everyone healthy ! Its sad but true
Word!
So much of the medical industry is pure qwackery. Why are both the old and new high blood pressure cut offs round numbers? If it were actually based on science you would probably end up with something like 133/78.
Yeah. It's mostly BS. Sure, high BP is a symptom that you're not living healthy. But there is not real reason to start using meds unless you are in a very complicated state. Diet (Stop eating fucking sugar all the time), exercise and less bad stress. I'm sure that works on most people.
Agreed on the diet advice. Sugar and other refined carbohydrates are a major issue.
All manual blood pressure cuffs are measured in round numbers (they go up by twos). In a lot of studies (like the ones that set these standards), practitioners will take manual blood pressure on patients so they can see/hear for themselves where their blood pressure it at.
If an automatic/digital blood pressure cuff is used, it will give measurements that go up by ones and results in odd numbers sometimes.
See? Not that crazy.
By round numbers I meant to the nearest 10.
Oh! My mistake. I guess I'm a little unclear what the problem is with that. Generally parameters for lab values, vitals, and so on are based on rather large data sets, and the official normal range is set based on what trend your're seeing.
So a person with a heart rate below 60 tends to start experiencing problems, and a person with a heart rate above 100 tends to also start having problems. So, 60-100 bpm is a normal heart rate. Are there people who do fine outside those parameters? Absolutely! Medicine is not a one size fits all proposition.
Still, it's good to have a starting point, so you can be alerted to look for certain things in a patient if a vital sign (like blood pressure) is outside the norm.
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I wouldn't be so quick to discount the research the AHA does on hypertension and heart failure. While there's certainly room for healthy debate, and standards of care do change back and forth sometimes, ultimately healthcare providers try to go where the evidence leads them.
If the load on the heart stays too high over time, pre-hypertension can develop into something much less treatable.
Also, try to remember that hypertension, when caught early, doesn't always have to result in anti-hypertensive meds (which aren't poison, btw). Changes in diet and lifestyle can lead to the sort of overall cardiovascular health that those of us in healthcare WANT people to have so that they don't have to keep coming to the hospital or use expensive medications.