CONTROLLING BLOOD PRESSURE. The dangers of blood pressure drugs, and the creation of illness

Conventional medicine is obsessed with blood pressure, especially high blood pressure. It is, doctors tell us, connected to heart disease, so they go to great lengths to ensure that our blood pressure falls within some narrow pre-determined parameter.

It is 'medicine by numbers'. The patient may not feel ill, and may have no symptoms of illness. But doctors know best, and antihypertensive drugs are, they tell us, essential for our health.

So what happens next? The patient takes the drug prescribed by his/her doctor - and he/she does get ill! Really ill!

Blood Pressure Drugs - cause dangerous intestinal problem
The journal Circulation (2019: 140: 270-9) have published research undertaken at Imperial College, London, which found the calcium-channel blocking drugs, antihypertensives, increases the risk of diverticulitis, a disease that affects about 65% of people over 85, and can be life threatening. The researchers suspected that the drugs interfered with the ability of intestinal muscles to push food through the gut.

Of course, antihypertensive drugs were already known to cause many more side effects...

• Diuretics are known to cause dry mouth, weakness, diarrhea, hypotension, nausea, headache and stomach upset.
•  ACE inhibitors are known to cause diarrhea, headache, joint pain, fever and chills, troubled breathing and jaundice.
• Beta blockers are known to cause fatigue, dizziness and weakness.
• Calcium channel blockers are known to cause weight gain, swelling in the lower legs, feet, or ankles, constipation, tiredness, irregular heartbeat, coughing, problems with breathing or swallowing, nausea or stomach discomfort, and numbness or tingling in the feet or hands.

So, given that the patient did not feel ill when first given these drugs, it might be expected that he/she will feel ill after taking them. Moreover, the new evidence that calcium channel blockers causes diverticulitis, has only been discovered many decades after they were first prescribed! There may be many more side effects that doctors don't know about.

So, does this mean that doctors will apply more constraint in prescribing antihypertensive drugs in future? On the basis of "First, do no harm"? Will they be more circumspect in giving patients, who do not feel, and probably not ill, these drugs?

Absolutely not! 

The Lancet reported on 7th September 2019 that the latest UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidance, published on 28th August, has recommended that antihypertensive drugs should now be offered to people younger than 80 years with blood pressure reaching of 140/90 mm Hg and above, and a 10% or greater risk of developing cardiovascular disease within the next 10 years. The Lancet concludes that

               "This reduces the 2011 NICE guidelines of a cardiovascular risk level of 20% or more."

In other words, with one stroke of a pen, conventional medicine has significantly increased the number of people who will now be expected to be prescribed antihypertensive drugs. Medicine by numbers, that is, giving drugs to patients who feel well, has been increased.

• So will this increase the number of patients who will develop diverticulitis, and the other known side effects of these drugs?

Yes, of course it will. This is what conventional medicine does - all the time - with all its prescriptions! Doctors prescribe drugs to well people knowing they have side effects that will cause illness. Then they will treat the new illness with more drugs to treat the side effects; and then even more drugs to treat the side effects of each new drug.

This is how conventional medicine creates illness, how they make us sick, why we never get well, why our health gets progressively worse, why chronic disease is now running at unprecedented, epidemic levels.

Learn more about how conventional medicine creates illness and disease by clicking on this link.

Conventional drug-based medicine. The death throes.

• Our doctor's can no longer cope with the demands being made on them by patients.
• Our Accident and Emergency Services can no longer cope with the demands being made on them.
• The NHS demands more and more money

Together, what does this mean? Are we witnessing the death throes of conventional, 'science' based medicine?

This is a heartfelt plea by a doctor, a GP, recently published on Facebook, and worth of note. It has attracted much support and sympathy from the professional medical fraternity.

• Unhappy with your GP?
• Write to your MP. 
• There is absolutely nothing we can do about this at a practice level. 
• We cannot recruit any more GPs. 
• We cannot fund any additional staff.
• We cannot work any longer hours and be safe (bet you didn't know that I often leave work around 11pm and have left at 2am before). My 'part time' 5 session (ie 20h) is approaching three times that in reality. 
• Why do you think we're running late? (Genuine question - I'm interested to know what people think we're doing.) It's because people come with lists. It's because 10 minutes isn't enough. 
• It's because people use appointments that they don't need when actually self-care and time and patience will do the job perfectly well. The human body is designed to cure a lot of things itself, especially infections. 
• It's because we're interrupted, quite legitimately, by phone calls from palliative care nurses wanting to discuss medication urgently for the dying patient; by ambulance crews called inappropriately who are asking us to take responsibility for patients not being taken to hospital; by the coroner asking us for information to try to prevent a bereaved family having to wait for a postmortem before they can arrange a funeral; by nurses who need us to give a second opinion on something that they're already gallantly managing beyond their duty; by urgent prescriptions that need signing because the patient didn't plan properly (we all make mistakes). I could go on. 
• We get brought tea because otherwise we wouldn't drink anything for 5h at a time - morning surgery typically is 4.5-5h, with patients every 10 minutes. 
• Each patient is not just a symptom. They are people with problems, with lives and responsibilities, and we try to treat them holistically. In 10 minutes. 
• It takes the frail old lady 2 minutes to undress so we can examine her, another minute to get up onto the couch, another couple to put herself back together again. That's half the appointment gone. 
• We could do longer appointments, but would have fewer.
• I really do understand the frustrations of the general public - remember I have a family too, who occasionally need to see a doctor.
• But. We are working flat out. There is a reason that there is a shortage of GPs. There is a reason that no one wants to train as a GP.
• If we were genuinely working 9-5 on >£100k then why would there be a recruitment problem?
• No one wants to do it because it's a draining job, very heavy on workload, and we are demoralised and constantly berated by the press and portrayed as lazy and money grabbing.
• If you have ideas on how it could be done better then please share. Genuinely. We are all out.

So what is happening here? Why are our doctors struggling? Why does the NHS need more and more £billions, and each time more resources are found and spent another crisis emerges?

During the General Election in May 2015, the political parties were fighting over how they were going to fund a further £billion for the NHS. Within two weeks of that election parts of the conventional medical establishment were already saying that this massive increase in spending was not enough! And so it goes on!

No-one has yet diagnosed the real problem. Rising levels of expenditure on health. Rising levels of illness and disease. And doctors unable to cope.

This crisis situation in health care provision arises from devoting all our resources in a medical system that relies on drugs and vaccines that are 

1. ineffective (so ailments, illnesses and diseases remain, ongoing and unimproved, so patients come back, time and time again)
2. dangerous (which means patients get 'side effects' from the drugs, which are really new diseases, and so return to their doctors with more serious conditions). 

The result is patients do not get better, they get sicker. Chronic diseases, like arthitis, asthma, allergies, dementia, depression, et al, are at epidemic levels, and rising. And even new diseases, like autism, unknown, or virtually unknown since our love affair with toxic drugs and vaccines began over a century ago, are now affect an increasing number of people. 

So they go to their GP's who cannot cope. So the go to their A&E departments, who cannot cope. And when key medical staff cannot cope, the NHS keeps asking for more and more money. 

But they ask for money and resources for the same failed, and failing medical system. The NHS invests in yet more ineffective and dangerous 'scientific' drugs. More and more harmful vaccines. Even the most successful conventional drugs are failing now, antibiotics and painkillers, to name just two. So, the major tools that conventional doctors have relied on either don't work any more, or they are now known to be too dangerous to prescribe.

So what we get is more patient sickness, and more doctor fatigue.

We are witnessing the death throes of 'conventional' medicine, based as it is on failed drug and vaccine based medicine. Medical science has failed.

But the conventional medical establishment is just too big, and the pharmaceutical drug industry is just too powerful and influential, to allow us to realise it yet.

The penny will have to drop very soon, but until it does, we should have sympathy for those doctors who are trying their best to help us. They are just unable to do so.