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Friday 11 October 2019

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.