Blood-pressure baloney - part 2 In the last edition of the Daily Dose, I told you about how the mainstream medical establishment has high blood pressure all wrong. It seems that after the better part of a century researching it, they still can't figure out whether it's a disease in itself - or simply a symptom of the arterial clogging that's proven to be a precursor to coronary heart disease. But regardless of the fact that they aren't even sure what causes hypertension, they're throwing drugs at it like they're absolutely certain that one of them is the cure…
Fifty years ago, we used diuretics, which work simply by reducing your blood's volume by purging you of excess water and salt. These actually worked pretty well at reducing blood pressure (not that you necessarily want that) - and with relatively few side effects. But somehow, they weren't good enough. So the big drug companies came up with the Beta-blockers, the Calcium Channel Blockers (CCBs) - and nowadays the fancy-schmancy (and expensive) ACE Inhibitors. Why so many medications for the same health problem? Because drug companies make most of their money via the exclusive patent rights to a drug - which they hold for 20 years from the time they first start developing it. After that, anyone can market a generic version of the same drug, and the original manufacturer loses its monopoly on that section of the market… What that means is this: If every drug company can patent a new and different hypertension drug (or if the same company can do it three or four times in a row), they ensure themselves of total market dominance and control over the drug's price - at least temporarily. It's simple capitalism. There's just one small problem: Are the new drugs any better than their predecessors - or just different enough to warrant a separate patent? It's a good question - one that more doctors should be asking their drug reps. When it comes to blood pressure medications in particular, the evidence is inconclusive. In fact, two separate peer-reviewed studies - one published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the other in the New England Journal of Medicine - recently concluded precisely the opposite of one another (!) with regard to the effectiveness of ACE inhibitors vs. ordinary diuretics. Hmmm. But leave it to the Associated Press to conclude, based on this disparity, that you need MORE THAN ONE of these drugs to combat hypertension. I'm not kidding, that's what they reported in a recent article - which was probably picked up by hundreds of news sources nationwide, prompting God knows how many people to demand from their doctors a new-fangled drug "cocktail" for hypertension… When all they may really need is a diet rich in Omega-3 fats, lean on carbs and trans-fats, and drinking water that's devoid of chlorine (which causes microscopic arterial tears that trap and hold cholesterol, boosting blood pressure). But unless they're reading this, the drugs are what they'll likely end up living (or dying) with. How sad is that? Watching my diet - and not popping pills,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
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