Understanding Blood Pressure in a Healthy Way

Story at a Glance:

• Blood pressure diagnoses have exploded as guidelines repeatedly lower thresholds, resulting in half of American adults now being “hypertensive” despite minimal evidence justifying this, and erroneous diagnoses frequently occurring.

• Despite aggressively treating it, medicine still does not know what causes high blood pressure. As a result, it overlooks that impaired circulation elevates blood pressure and attributes the ensuing damage to “high” blood pressure rather than to insufficient blood flow to the tissues.

• Excessively low BP from over-treatment is dangerous, increasing risks of fainting, falls (especially in the elderly), kidney injury, cognitive decline, ischemic strokes, and mortality.

• Different blood pressure medicines have very different risks and benefits. Because doctors are unaware of this, they frequently push patients to take inappropriate medications and then deny that life-impairing side effects are happening.

• This article will explore the core issues with the conventional framework of blood pressure and what we must know to reclaim cardiovascular health.

Ever since I first entered the medical field, something struck me as off about the relentless focus on blood pressure, and over time I noticed that the blood pressures people reported to me varied widely. While pondering this, a talented practitioner and mentor once told me that the current medical paradigm fixates on blood pressure because it’s easier to measure than blood perfusion (healthy blood flow).