Are your blood pressure meds unnecessary?
Are you on blood pressure meds? Maybe you shouldn’t be.
That’s the message of a new review conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration and reported by only a few news outlets (gee, I wonder why).
A group of independent (meaning they don’t get money from Big Pharma) experts agreed that taking blood pressure meds for mild cases of high blood pressure simply doesn’t reduce heart attacks, strokes, or overall deaths.
They concluded that people are just being over treated for hypertension. Meanwhile tens of millions of people are being exposed to dangerous side effects perhaps unnecessarily. Taking ACE inhibitors can lead to kidney failure. Beta-blockers (which, by the way, are proven to lower blood pressure but NOT your risk of heart attack or stroke) can cause dizziness and impotence. And calcium channel blockers can actually INCREASE your risk of heart attack.
In fact, of the 68 million people who have high blood pressure, MOST of them have mild hypertension. That’s a lot of unnecessary medicating.
So, you’re probably wondering why it took so long for a study to find out which patients can actually benefit from these medications to be conducted. Well when it comes to Big Pharma there’s really no need to wonder.
Of course the drug manufacturers want to medicate as many people as possible, which means they have very little interest in knowing whether it’s worth drugging people with mild hypertension. The easier answer…not to mention the much more profitable one… is this: Drug ‘em all!
The bottom line is that drugs aren’t proven to help people with mild hypertension. But there are three things that will. Exercise, quitting smoking, and the Mediterranean diet can help you get your blood pressure under control. And they can do it without any dangerous side effects. But of course, those approaches aren’t making Big Pharma any money.
P.S. Keep reading for an unexpected solution for food allergies.
Sources:
“Most People Who Take Blood Pressure Medication Possibly Shouldn’t,” Slate (slate.com)
“Getting Blood Pressure Under Control: High Blood Pressure is Out of Control for Too Many Americans,” CDC (cdc.gov)
