High Blood Pressure

I don't know if it's to laugh or to cry: according to a study released at a recent meeting of the American Heart Association that was geared to High Blood Pressure Research, many doctors are simply not up to snuff when it comes to treating high blood pressure, which is, of course, a leading risk factor for stroke, kidney failure, heart attacks, and whole host of other problems you really don't want to get, and which in one form or another (either as defined hypertension, or in its new-fangled guise of pre-hypertension) is said to threaten the health of up to 60 % of the population.

So you'd-a-thunk, at least I did, that every doctor worth his salt (which is, of course, to be avoided when you have high blood pressure) would know the latest guidelines - rules developed by the consensus of expert panels - about the best treatments for high blood pressure.

But apparently, many don't.

In fact, it was downright scary to learn how many doctors, 64 %, who all said they knew the guidelines, but were ignoring them in the real world anyway.

Now, there is a confounding factor in this study of 22 doctors and 900 patients (all of whom clearly had blood pressure levels that everyone would agree are too high), namely that the patients were all black men and this study was done in Texas.

So it could be argued - although the researchers who did the study don't make this argument - that there is an element of racism involved here and that some doctors in the Lone Star state just don't treat blacks as vigorously as they would Caucasians.

But if you eliminate the racism card, or at the very least discount it, the bottom line is that many doctors don't see the need to treat a condition that you, as a patient, might feel requires treatment, so it behooves all high blood pressure patients to