A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR'S excellent stack on the Blood Pressure Scam; relentless monitory & the fraud & scam of over medicalization. Scam Exploring the Forgotten Causes and Treatments of Hypertension and

the Dangers of BP Medications; at least 25% of all hypertension diagnoses are due to inaccurate measurements, and there is still no known reason for why over 90% of people are hypertensive.

The Great Blood Pressure Scam - by A Midwestern Doctor (substack.com)

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‘Story at a Glance:

•Elevated blood pressure is the most common chronic disease, and as the decades go by more and more people are declared hypertensive.

•Remarkably, at least 25% of all hypertension diagnoses are due to inaccurate measurements, and there is still no known reason for why over 90% of people are hypertensive.

•Aggressively treating everyone’s blood pressure is justified under the belief it prevents cardiovascular disease. However, in most cases it has never been proven to reduce heart disease—rather it only leads to a small reduction in strokes (hence why these medications were rebranded to treat “cardiovascular disease”).

•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.

Ever since I first encountered the medical field, something struck me as off about their relentless focus on blood pressure. Before long, I began to notice that the blood pressures the same acquaintances (e.g., relatives or friends) shared with me varied immensely. As I was pondering this, a long-time Eastern spiritual teacher shared with me their belief that the West’s relentless focus on blood pressure was due to it being much easier to measure than blood perfusion (healthy blood flow).

Then, as I became more acquainted with the medical field, I began to notice a consistent pattern—whenever a drug existed that could treat a number or statistic, as the years went by, the acceptable number kept on being narrowed, making more and more people eligible to take the drugs that treated the number.

For example, as I discussed recently, once the statins drugs entered the market (which unlike their predecessors, could effectively lower cholesterol), the acceptable blood cholesterol levels kept on being lowered, and before long almost everyone was told they would die from a heart attack unless they started a statin—despite statins have an almost non-existing mortality benefit (e.g., taking them for 5 years at best makes you live 3-4 days longer) and causing (often severe) side effects for roughly 20% of users. Broadly recommending these drugs hence appears unconscionable, but as I showed in that article, these unjustifiable guidelines were a product of clever pharmaceutical marketing and targeted bribery of public officials.

In this article, I will attempt to show how something similar happened in the field of blood pressure. As this is an immensely controversial position to take (e.g., measuring and documenting blood pressure is one of the most routine procedures during a medical visit), I’ve done my best to clearly present the evidence for this perspective so you can make your own determination.

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Conventional Blood Pressure Perspectives

Since blood vessels are elastic structures filled with fluid, that fluid holds them under 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 (hypotension) is a problem because it prevents blood from reaching the areas where it’s needed (e.g., orthostatic hypotension or POTS describes a common condition where people become lightheaded as they stand up due to insufficient blood being pushed into the brain), but in most cases, medicine instead focuses on the consequences of high blood pressure. Within the existing model, those consequences are:

•Weakened blood vessels become more likely to break open and leak as higher blood pressure pushes against them. 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. Likewise, whenever a critical blood vessel ruptures (e.g., the aorta or one in the brain), once the bleed has been confirmed, the first step in managing it is to lower the patient’s blood pressure (so less blood leaks out) after which they are sent to surgery.

•Excessive pressure on the arteries strains and damages them, causing the lining of the vessels to become damaged and gradually develop atherosclerosis.

•Excessive blood pressure damages the internal organs (termed end-organ damage), leading to premature failure and early death (e.g., from a heart attack or kidney failure).

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.

Unfortunately, that chain of logic has quite a few gaps in it (see if any jump out to you). We will now examine each of them.

Variable Blood Pressure

Blood pressure (BP) is immensely variable. For example, pressures at the periphery (where BP is typically measured), which when studied is found to vary by around 14 points This thus frequently leads to individuals being erroneously diagnosed with hypertension and put on blood pressure lowering medications despite having normal blood pressures (leading to those medications making them hypotensive).

This phenomenon in fact is so common (constituting 15-30% of hypertension diagnoses) that it is often referred to as “White Coat Hypertension,” a name derived from the fact stress is one of the things which commonly elevates blood pressure, and since visiting a doctor is a stressful experience, many patients hence have temporarily elevated blood pressures there. Because of this, the guidelines suggest having patients who are diagnosed with hypertension have multiple measurements to confirm it (e.g., with home blood pressure monitoring). Unfortunately, this often does not happen in practice.

Note: one common source of error when measuring blood pressure is the wrong sized cuff being used for the patient. Another is that patients frequently have significantly different blood pressures in each arm. This helps to explain why it is commonly estimated that 25% of those diagnosed with hypertension do not have it.

Likewise, there is a surprisingly poor correlation between peripheral blood pressure and the central blood pressure inside the aorta. For example, one large study found a significant difference between the blood pressure within the aorta and the arm, and that the aorta pressure had a much stronger correlation to the likelihood of cardiovascular disease.
Note: different classes of blood pressure medications have very different effects on central versus peripheral blood pressure.

What Affects Blood Pressure?

If fluid at a set pressure tries to move through a tube, as the tube shrinks, the pressure it creates (e.g., on the walls of the tube) will increase, while if the tube enlarges, the pressure it exerts will decrease. The body in turn continually controls where blood in the body goes by changing the heart rate and fully or partially constricting the arteries, allowing it to shunt blood to where it is most needed (e.g., by dilating arteries in that area).

Blood pressure is thus a product of two factors: the amount of blood in the arteries and the constriction or relaxation of the arteries containing it.

Note: since arterial BP is greater than venous BP, it’s what’s measured externally (as veins compress long before arteries do and only arterial blood has a signature pulsatile wave created by the heartbeat).

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 (known as the diastolic pressure) and the pressure when the heart contracts (known as systolic pressure). The blood pressure values you see (e.g., 140/90), represent that maximum and minimum.

Note: one reason why this stretching is important is because when the vessels contract back to their normal size once the systolic pressure fades, that recoil pushes blood further along into the circulation.

Blood pressures lowering medications in turn work by loosening the arterial walls, reducing the total blood in circulation, weakening the contraction of the heart, or a combination of all three.

What Causes High Blood Pressure?

Most cases of high blood pressure (

Inverted Causality

Frequently, when you dig into medical myths, you discover that many of the dogmas myths that underlie a popular drug are actually sales slogans a marketing company created. For instance,

Likewise, I’ve previously discussed how:

Atherosclerosis and Blood Pressure

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 (rather than happening long after an elevated blood pressure had had time to damage the arteries). Because of this, each person I asked came to a similar conclusion—the increased blood pressure must be a compensatory mechanism the body is using to counteract the fact it can’t get enough blood to where it is needed (which again is recognized to occur with the kidney).

It should be clear why calcification of the arteries (which stiffens them) also increases blood pressure, as they can no longer expand as effectively and release the pressure within them.

Zeta Potential and Blood Pressure

My original goal with this publication was to bring awareness to

Blood Sludging

Likewise, approximately a century ago, many Western researchers began concluding that blood cells clumping together was a root cause of many illnesses, particularly those where a focal issue created a systemic problem (e.g., burns or cancers). This condition came to be known as “blood sludging” and was quite influential at the time, especially once it became possible to directly observe blood sludging within the body (e.g., by with the appropriate microscope looking at the blood vessels in the eyes), leading to a few discoveries (e.g.,

This is from a chapter in a 1965 medical textbook about circulation.

Additionally, they observed that once the pockets of sludge formed, the pressure build-up caused plasma (the non-cellular component of the blood) to begin leaking out into the tissues (leading to things like edema), and the remaining blood thus became even more concentrated with these sludge pockets.

Zeta Potential and High Blood Pressure

Thomas Riddick (the engineer who pioneered the zeta potential concept) strongly believed that poor zeta potential increased blood pressure and likewise led to atherosclerosis:

Likewise, when their blood was looked at, there was significantly greater clumping, blood cell deformation, and membrane fragility in cells from patients with cardiovascular disease:

Note: Riddick (and those who followed him) frequently treated a variety of heart conditions by

Hypertension and Chinese Medicine

A variety of different schools of thought exist within Chinese medicine. In those that place a higher emphasis on blood stasis, they frequently associate the condition with hypertension. For example, the acupuncturist I know who has the most experience in this area (and frequently discusses it with experts in the field) finds two common patterns in high blood pressure.

Does High Blood Pressure Cause Heart Disease?

Note: much of the research for this section was sourced from

In turn, there are a few major issues with this paradigm:

Note: when this (forgotten)

Sadder still, these numbers are even vastly worse when 130 is set as the threshold instead of 140 (which is what happened in 2017). For example, 77% of adults over 64 meet this threshold and 79% of those over 74 do.

Blood Pressure Mortality Studies

Given the hype around blood pressure, you would assume it had been clearly proven lowering blood pressure improved survival. Unfortunately, as best as I can tell, those studies don’t exist and instead a universal assumption exists that lowering blood pressure is good and hence that if a drug can lower blood pressure, it must be good and should be approved for the market.

Once this trial happened, “heart disease” was changed to “cardiovascular disease,” thereby making it possible to create the perception that treating blood pressure stopped heart attacks while simultaneously concealing the actual benefit—a small reduction in vascular strokes.

Changing Guidelines

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 (outside of a few short term studies which showed a small benefit for people with very high blood pressures). That mindset in turn has defined this field, so as the years have gone by, without evidence to support it, the blood pressure thresholds keep on getting lowered and more and more people are being put on these medications. Because of this,

Note: I found a few errors in the original chart I used and corrected them to match the guidelines. If I missed any please let me know.

To quote

Secondary Effects of Hypertensive Medications

In many cases, the actual mechanism of a drug greatly differs from the purported one. For example, statins are sold on the basis that cholesterol causes heart disease and they lower cholesterol. However, as I showed

Harms of Hypertensive Medications

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.

3:

Under Recognition of Side Effects

While the numbers I just showed are quite concerning, I believe they actually underestimate the rate of side effects as much of that data comes from industry clinical trials which deliberately finds ways to downplay their drug’s side effects. Because of this, I believe independent patient survey’s provide a far better perspective on the rate of symptomatic side effects. Consider for example this 1995 Survey in Sweden which found roughly

Because to these side effects, patients frequently stop taking antihypertensives. For example,

Note: of these patients, 48% received beta blockers, 25.3% received beta blockers and diuretics, and 12% received diuretics only. In the surveys relatives completed, 25% characterized the worsening as mild, 45% as moderate, and 30% as severe, with the most commonly cited deteriorations being an undue pre-occupation with sickness, irritability and a decline in energy, general activity or sexual activity.

Salt

Finally, while it is not a drug, aggressive salt lowering is frequently advised to patients. I personally do not support this approach since:’

The Great Blood Pressure Scam - by A Midwestern Doctor (substack.com)