Blood pressure medications can do more harm than good
Treating mild hypertension causes hypertension
Did you know that there are some 68 million people in America diagnosed with either mild – Stage 1, hypertension or high blood pressure? Blood pressure numbers used to diagnose hypertension and pre-hypertension are systolic (the top number value of 140-159) and diastolic (the bottom number value of 90-99). The very latest Cochrane Collaboration review which provides independent analyses of medical data, suggests that many patients with Stage 1 “pre”hypertension are over-treated and subjected to the myriad of possible harms of drug treatment without benefit. The review even found that about 9% of all patients treated with blood pressure medications discontinued treatment due to adverse effects.
A very recent study is now turning 30 years of medical dogma and 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 applying blood pressure medications to anyone stumbling anywhere near the mark of 140 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 treated 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 a patient 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 “pre-disease”-such as “pre-hypertension” or “pre-diabetes.”
Big Pharma loves the profits of starting people on a medication when they only have a risk factor and there is no evidence of actual disease. This multiplies Big Pharma profits by getting more people on even more medications for far longer periods of time.
Find the cause of disease 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. But finding the causes of the symptoms unfortunately involves sincere diet and lifestyle changes. 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) and targeted nutritional supplements.
Sources for this article
- http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e5511?tab=responses
- http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD006742/benefits-of-antihypertensive-drugs-for-mild-hypertension-are-unclear
- http://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/tag/disease-creep
Authored by Cancer Nutritionist Craig Stellpflug NDC, CNC, Dayspring Cancer Clinic Scottsdale, AZ
Copyright 2012 Craig Stellpflug© Permission is hereby granted to copy and distribute this article but only in its entirety