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Had a bit of a wake-up call this week. Last year I was feeling generally unwell and went to the doctor and they said I had very high blood pressure. I was resistant to being put on medication, so I changed my diet and increased exercise. I don't use gyms or anything organised, I have always had manually demanding jobs and walked a lot, so am reasonably fit for my age. Anyway, I shed over 20 lbs, improved my diet and felt a lot better. 

This week I went for a six-month check so they could see how I was doing. Annoyingly my blood pressure had gone up. The nurse took it four times to make sure then said it was worryingly high and she needed to speak to the doctor about it. She came back and said he had prescribed meds for me and I needed to take them straight away as I was now at very high risk of heart attack or stroke. I asked how this could be when I had done all that they told me to and she said that sometimes it is just genetics. 

So here I am stuck taking blood pressure meds and the cold reality that I am now officially old has slapped me in the face. I think it is that that pisses me off more than the actual health implications themselves. Hopefully the meds will work and I will still be here posting bollocks for a few more years yet!

Firstly, sorry to hear this Sonny.  Losing weight and improving your diet should have at least helped I would have thought, like you said.  The thing that annoys me about the response from the health care professional is that they appear to have done absolutely no investigation.  The culture in our health industry of “just take these pills” without looking to the root cause of the issue is just so frustrating.

I had a similar conversation last year when I had been unwell with some breathing difficulties and had been for some blood tests.  THREE MONTHS later the doctor’s surgery phoned me to say they had found some marginally high markers on my kidney function and that my cholesterol was higher than it should be.  Within 2 mins of the call the advanced nurse practitioner was talking about putting me on Statins.  I politely told him to Foxtrot Oscar.

I know they are trained professionals but they are only lapping up what big pharma funded studies tell them, or worse when it comes to diet they are just using data from research funded by food companies to justify their “healthly” products.  Just look up Ansell Keys and his “research” into how fat was bad for us all and so he undertook a study (paid for by Mr Kellogg and friends if memory serves me correctly) to show that meat, lard, butter and high fat content foods were bad for you.  He studied 22 countries.  15 of them disproved the theory as those with predominantly carbohydrate based diets all had similar health markers in their populations.  What did he do?  He kicked those 15 out of the study and therefore two thirds of his research base was just dismissed because it would not meet the criteria that his investors were looking for to justify pushing their branded diets.

Thanks, Vinny. I completely agree that corporate manipulation and influence has completely undermined faith in not only medical professionalism, but any kind of public service, whether it is food production, news reporting, even car emissions ratings. Is it any wonder that there is such a proliferation of mistrust nowadays when the system has proved itself time and again to be untrustworthy, working to benefit the corporate world and perpetuate the status quo that suits the rich and powerful rather than working in the public interest.