OK, you got me started again!

[bassFishingWNY]

Our health? Take killer drugs , or go without?

I met Bobbi when I was about 35-years-old. It was love at first sight. She was a redhead and weighed about 100 pounds. We remained friends through the years--marriages, divorces, children and now grandchildren. The last time we saw one another, about ten years ago, she looked pretty much the same--still tiny and beautiful--but she had a "medical problem": high blood pressure.
But because of her physiology, Bobbi couldn't tolerate the powerful anti-hypertensive drugs. So she, unwillingly, became an interesting experiment in: "What happens to a patient with a seriously elevated blood pressure if you do nothing?"
I checked in with her recently and she's doing just fine. She's "50-something" (I think close to 60, but I didn't dare ask) and still has very high blood pressure. So if someone like Bobbi can do just fine without medication for over a decade, why are the health "experts" out there suddenly so hot and bothered to get even more people on them by lowering the already ridiculous hypertension guidelines?

I think that most doctors are forgetting (if they ever knew at all) that hypertension isn't actually a disease in itself--it's only a symptom of some other malfunction in your body. It's possible that the elevated blood pressure is a protective effect, enabling the heart to get the blood to all the tissues in spite of the disease, whatever that may be. But since we still haven't figured out what that reason is, most physicians just throw drugs at the symptom and consider the problem solved when the high blood pressure goes down.
The problem here is that just because the drugs have made the hypertension go away, that doesn't mean you're "cured"--or even safe, for that matter. People taking blood pressure lowering medications inevitably feel worse on the drugs. You would think this would signal to the doctor that he's making the patient worse, and that the pressure is elevated for some good physiological reason. But most likely, he'll just continue to prescribe away.