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.

Losartan. Is this the silent end for this anti-hypertensive drug?

Losartan is a well known, and frequently prescribed antihypertensive drug. It is supposed to treat hypertension, high blood pressure, and we are told it can prevent illnesses such as stroke and myocardial infarction.

Yet over the years it has also been associated with causing cancer, although typically this has never been accepted by the conventional medical establishment.

In the USA, Losartan, and some similar drugs in the same class, have recently been recalled when it was discovered that the drug contained 'a cancer-causing agent'. It has been described as a 'voluntary' withdrawal, and all the reports I have seen suggest that this is a problem with a particular batch of Losartan, and not a general problem. The USA drug regulator, the FDA, has said:

               "Patients who are on Losartan Potassium Hydrochlorothiazide should continue taking their medication, as the risk of harm to a patient’s health may be higher if the treatment is stopped immediately without any alternative treatment."

               "Patients should contact their physician or healthcare provider if they have experienced any problems that may be related to taking or using Losartan Potassium Hydrochlorothiazide."

I was first told about this by Jayney Goddard, President of the Complementary Medical Association, for which I am grateful. It has certainly not been covered by the national media, although there are many reports on the internet by independent websites. These reports all seem to indicate that the problems arose from a particular batch, but I don’t think this is correct - although pharmaceutical drug companies, and the FDA, might want this to be the message. Jayney does not agree, and she has explained her position forcefully to her members/

               "We STRONGLY disagree with this advice from the FDA, as it is hughly unlikely that a patient wil experience 'any problems related to taking or using Losartan Potassium Hydrochlorothiazide', given that if they are affected by the carcinogenic substance that these tablets contain, they are unlikely to experience any symptoms for some time!

So what is known about Losartan. The first thing to say is that it has long been associated with cancer, and also the usual, routine denials made by the conventional medical profession that there is any such connection. I looked at my own records, and found this link from May 2013.

Blood pressure drugs cause cancer. It reported that Losartan had come under attack by a senior regulator at the FDA, Thomas A. Marciniak, who sought stronger warnings about these 'angiotensin receptor blocker drugs', or ARBs. The article stated that the drug was taken by millions of people and generated $7.6 billion in USA sales in 2012. Dr Marciniak said that some doctors agreed that the drug "may be linked to higher cancer rates". But 'top' FDA officials said that the evidence did not support the link. One, Ellis Unger, then chief of the drug-evaluation division, called the complaints a "diversion" and is quoted as saying "We have no reason to tell the public anything new."

So I went further, and did a web-search on 'cancer' and 'Losartan' and it became clear that the suspicion about a link with cancer has been around for some time. For example this article, "Blood Pressure Drugs Linked to Cancer Risk, was published by WebMD in June 2010, and stated that

               "A study published online in The Lancet Oncology states that although there are no major safety concerns associated with ARBs, a previous trial had reported a significantly increased risk of fatal cancers in patients receiving the ARB candesartan compared with a placebo."

A similar article appeared on MedPage Today, also in 2010. It referred to a meta-analysis of nine published studies where angiotensin-receptor blockers (not just Losartan, but many more in its class) were associated with "a modest but statistically significant 8% increase in the relative risk of a new cancer." The article goes on to discount the seriousness of these findings by saying that "there was no increase in the risk of dying from cancer, perhaps because follow-up in the trials was too short, the researchers said online in The Lancet".

So, in both articles, as always when a drug is first linked to serious disease, there were the usual attempts to discount the evidence - "there are not major safety concerns" and "there was no increase in the risk of dying from cancer". And, as usual, there were other attempts to discount the link with cancer entirely, as is the case here, in 2011.

Angiotensin receptor blocker drugs have been known for about 120 years, but were developed mainly in the 1970's and 1980's. So these widely used, and highly profitable anti-hypertension drugs, have been given to patients for some 30 years or more. And for at least the last 10 years the conventional medical establishment has known that they were linked with cancer. So during this time how many patients have taken the drug and developed cancer?

And how many of these patients knew that the drug they were prescribed caused cancer? To find out I looked up the Patient Information Leaflet for Losartan potassium 100 mg film-coated tablets. The word cancer does not appear anywhere on the leaflet. So I looked at the Drugs.com website, often a good source of information (but recently taken over by a consortium owned by drug companies), and discovered that whilst a whole host of the most serious 'side effects' were listed, cancer was not mentioned.

So is the recent US recall of Losartan a problem with a particular batch? Or is this this another dangerous pharmaceutical drug that will be quietly withdrawn, forgotten, with as little publicity as possible. This is what has happened to so many drugs in the past. And this is certainly a possible, even a likely outcome for Losartan. This is what the conventional medical establishment do, routinely. They protect the safety reputation of their drugs until it is no longer possible to do so, and then they drop them - as quietly and as secretly as possible!

Pharmaceutical companies also try to ensure that the damage done to a profitable drug is as limited as possible. So although this recall has been done in the USA, Losartan has not been withdrawn in Canada, in Europe, Australasia, or indeed anywhere else, as far as I can see. It is likely, therefore, that drug companies will continue to sell it wherever in can, wherever it is allowed to, at least for a few years!

The precautionary principle?

First, do no harm?

Conventional medicine appears never to have heard of these concepts!