Natural News article by Craig Sunday, October 28, 2012
(Natural News) There are some 68 million people in the U.S. who are diagnosed with either high blood pressure or mild – stage 1 hypertension. The blood pressure numbers used to diagnose these two conditions are systolic (top number) value of 140-159 and diastolic (bottom number) value of 90-99. This latest review conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration, which provides independent analyses of medical data, suggests that many patients with stage 1 hypertension are over-treated and subjected to the possible harms of drug treatment without any benefit. They even found that close to nine percent of patients treated with blood pressure meds discontinued treatment due to adverse effects.
A very recent study is now turning 30 years of medical dogma along with the associated drugging on its head. The latest independent experts now report that blood pressure drugs used to treat mild cases of high blood pressure not only do not reduce heart attacks, strokes, or overall deaths, but that they come with a litany of nasty “side effects” from loss of libido to sudden pain, urinary infections, asthma symptoms, insomnia, depression, coughing, rashes, dizziness, drowsiness, constipation, diarrhea and on and on. One of the “side effects” of these unnecessary medications is death. (There are no such thing as “side effects,” they are ALL EFFECTS)
Treatment without benefit
For decades, doctors have been liberally prescribing blood pressure medications to anyone stumbling near the mark of 140 in systolic blood pressure. Big Pharma has also managed to officially get the blood pressure rate limits artificially lowered so as to include more patients in the medication range, which has proven to be far more injurious than helpful. But don’t expect Big Pharma to act like they’ve done anything wrong or change their money-mongering ways.
Many medical doctors simply assumed that treatment of stage 1 hypertension helped the patient without even questioning if there would be any benefits. In most clinical trials, patients with any rate of hypertension from mild to severe were simply lumped together, thereby missing critical information. The fact remains that in reviewing thousands of mild hypertension cases, the Cochrane Collaboration found that no benefit was detected in the use of drugs to treat mild hypertension along with the possibility that the drugs cause net harm. Furthermore, there was also a non-significant trend toward more heart attacks among medicated patients.
Big Pharma drugs do not make cures, they make repeat customers
The best way to assure that a patient comes down with a disease is to treat with drugs before it is a problem. There is an actual medical term out there called “disease creep.” Disease creep happens when patients with risk factors for a condition or even just a mild case of a disease are treated and drugged with the same medications and treatments as patients with severe cases. In these cases, it is easy for deleterious drug effects to overwhelm any benefit. Jay Siwek, editor of the journal American Family Physician, notes that disease creep can be seen in the recently created concept of “predisease” – such as “prehypertension” or “prediabetes.”
Big Pharma loves their profits. Starting people on a medication when they only have a risk factor and there is no evidence of actual disease multiplies Big Pharma profits by getting more people on even more medications for far longer periods of time.
Find the cause and fix it
All symptoms of disease are just – symptoms. Symptoms have causes and only treating symptoms is like trying to bail out your basement while broken pipes are still running water. Finding the causes of symptoms unfortunately involves sincere diet and lifestyle changes – not just popping a pill. There are a lot of more effective, evidence-based approaches to treating high blood pressure, such as exercise, smoking cessation, following a Mediterranean diet, going gluten free, avoiding environmental toxins, removing heavy metals (like dental amalgams) along with targeted nutritional supplements.
Sources for this article
- http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e5511?tab=responses
- http://summaries.cochrane.org
- http://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/tag/disease-creep
Read the live article here: https://www.naturalnews.com/037722_blood_pressure_medications_worthless.html
About the author:
Craig Stellpflug is a Cancer Nutrition Specialist, Lifestyle Coach and Neuro Development Consultant at Healing Pathways Medical Clinic, Scottsdale, AZ. With 17 years of clinical experience working with both brain disorders and cancer, Craig has seen first-hand the devastating effects of vaccines and pharmaceuticals on the human body and has come to the conclusion that a natural lifestyle and natural remedies are the true answers to health and vibrant living. You can find his daily health blog at www.blog.realhealthtalk.com and his articles and radio show archives at www.realhealthtalk.com