High Blood Pressure?
If you have high blood pressure then get your blood pressure monitor out and start a regular system of checks today. Don’t have a monitor? Oops - then get out there and buy one today. Your health really might depend on it.
Blood pressure doctors have more or less come full circle when it comes to home blood pressure monitors. When these gadgets first came on the scene the medical profession adopted them enthusiastically and both hospitals and family doctors began using them on a day by day basis.
Some of the early models had problems with calibration however, and did not always produce reliable readings. Also, the blood pressure readings sometimes varied when checked on machines by different manufacturers. These drawbacks resulted in fewer and fewer doctors recommending them to their patients and the medical profession fell back to recording blood pressure with the old manual cuff and pump up machine.
White coat high blood pressure
Experts have recognised for many years that a patient’s blood pressure is likely to go up simply because they are having it checked by a doctor or a nurse. This is called white coat high blood pressure. As many as one in three of us could be prone to this white coat phenomenon and it sometimes results in people being started on treatment when they don’t actually have high blood pressure in the first place.
The way around this in the past was to check the blood pressure on three or four occasions before deciding if it was actually high or not. This worked to an extent but still left an unlucky few on treatment who did not need it.
Specialist units took to fitting their patients with a blood pressure monitor that they wore for twenty four hours at a time - the readings being recorded and downloaded to a computer for analysis. This twenty four hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring is still seen as the gold standard when deciding about treatment but the systems are expensive and not widely available to family doctors.
Home blood pressure monitors
So - back full circle. The modern batch of home blood pressure monitors that are widely available online and in stores are a league above what we had before. They are more reliable, more predictable and show less variation between the machines. Far from being hesitant about them, the medical profession is now actively promoting their use by all blood pressure sufferers.
If you buy a home blood pressure monitor then my advice to you is to choose one where the cuff fits around the upper arm. Check your blood pressure once a day and use the same arm each time. Record the blood pressure readings in a notebook or diary and use this to show your doctor each time you visit.
I’ve seen many cases where making home recordings allowed patients to either reduce or stop their blood pressure medication.
Are you checking your blood pressure at home? Think about it - it could make a huge difference to your life.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Health and wellness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.