I don't understand why no one tells you this. What am I going to tell you about high blood pressure? This could solve most high blood pressure problems in five minutes.
What's more, I don't understand why when you feel bad and your guard is down, they give you a pill, wait 20 or 30 minutes or give you an injection and when the pressure drops, you go home feeling better but repeating the cycle over and over again. . This happens every day in every guard on the planet.
And I'm going to tell you something from my position as a cardiologist, this is wrong and can be resolved in most cases. If we took five minutes to explain to you and you took 5 to 10 minutes to listen to us, and that is what we are going to do today. Therefore, if you have a hypertensive family member or if this happened to you, this talk is very important and will not last more than 13 or 14 minutes.
Let us begin. If you are here it is almost certain that this happened to you. On any given day you were feeling fine, but in the afternoon or evening you started to feel strange, your neck hurt, your head hurt, you were like floating, some patients say, or you just felt strange.
What did you do? Did you take your blood pressure when you took your blood pressure? Boom!
160 high, 100 701 809 095. Low panic. Because?
Because you think it could probably give you a stroke, a heart attack, or worse. Death. What did you do then?
You went to the medical ward, they prescribed you a pill and they sent you home again without having solved any problem, only having treated the fever, so to speak. Surely they sent you to the cardiologist and that is where I receive the patients and explain to them the same thing that I am going to explain to you. I tell my patients every day in my office and I also treated these patients when I was on duty in the General Guard before becoming a cardiologist.
The big problem with all this that I told you is the lack of knowledge. If you knew what was happening to your heart and what was happening to your body and how you could treat it at home, you wouldn't have this problem. We know so many things about geography, mathematics, we know about politics, we know about social issues, we know many things, but we don't know how our body works and especially we don't know when something can harm us and when it can't, and this is very simple, I'm going to go very fast.
High blood pressure or hypertension? This is the question you have to ask yourself. Do I have high blood pressure or do I have hypertension?
Let me explain the difference to you and not if you are thinking that I bought my cardiology degree. I did not do my residency in one of the best hospitals in the Argentine Republic, the Central Military Hospital in Buenos Aires. High pressure and here I need you to get involved, for you to imagine and think about what I am going to tell you, because it is very important that we reason.
Imagine that you are doctors, you are on medical duty, a patient comes to you who sadly had a traffic accident. That patient is very anxious and in great pain because of the accident and because he broke his arm. Of course, the first thing they do is take the vital signs and they find that the patient has 160 170 180.
I ask you a question and I need you to think about it very carefully. They are going to lower that patient's blood pressure with a pill or they are going to give them medication to treat the pain and they are going to try to resolve the fracture in the arm. If you at home answered that you are going to treat the pain, that you are going to call the traumatologist and that you are going to resolve the fracture of the arm.
This is correct because the answer is here. What is the objective that our heart has? Our heart has the following objective.
When we are happy, very happy, the birth of a child, when we exercise, when we have a headache, when we have an argument or any reason, the heart tries to increase the amount of blood in the body so that the You have your muscles and you can exercise them so you can run or flee as they say. So what does he do? It increases the number of beats per minute, increases heart rate and increases the force with which it contracts.
This is called increased tropism. In addition, our body will divert blood to the organ that needs it: brain, kidney, muscle, etc. All of this will cause the blood to It hits the walls of the blood vessels and we, when we measure it, can measure whether it hits hard or hits slowly.
When it hits hard we have high pressure and when it hits slowly we have normal pressure. What does this mean? May your heart go in everyday situations .
Increase and decrease pressure according to your body's needs. That is to say, if you go for a walk this afternoon and go up a slope, your blood pressure will increase and it is okay for it to do so. If you have an argument this afternoon, the pressure is going to increase and it's okay for it to do so.
If your head hurts a lot this afternoon and you take your blood pressure, you will have high blood pressure. If you are very happy you will have high blood pressure. If you go down the stairs you will have high blood pressure.
If you exercise and drink coffee, if you drink mate, if you smoke, almost everything increases blood pressure. And this is not bad. It is a response of the body.
And there you will tell me Doctor, but I know a person who had a blood pressure of 180 and he had a stroke, he had a heart attack. I'm going to explain to you what happens and I'm not crazy, believe me you will understand it now with this other concept of hypertension. What is hypertension?
Hypertension is a clinical syndrome, a disease, a condition where our heart, our blood vessels, our kidney and many other systems in our body do not regulate blood pressure correctly. That is, the patient will always be hypertensive, regardless of what they are doing. And this is the key.
That is to say, the patient will be calm watching TV in peace, we will take his blood pressure and it will be high, High as much as more than 140 90 according to most guidelines. Some American guides say a little less, even for those who didn't understand, it is more than 14 nine. And this has to happen every day.
All the time, because it is our body's mistake to keep our blood pressure high. That is, that pressure is not responding to any day-to-day situation in the body. The pressure is simply high.
And do you know what happens when the pressure is high, maintained over time? Every day our brain is damaged, our heart is damaged, our arteries, our aorta are damaged, our entire body is damaged. Hypertension sustained over time damages our body.
That is why, if you go to see me in the office, you will find that when you come and tell me Doctor, on Wednesday I took my blood pressure. I was 180, that's why I came. What I am going to do?
I'm going to take your blood pressure in the office, but I'm going to send you home to take your blood pressure for five or six days, because I'm not so interested in that day when you had high blood pressure, but rather in what happens every day. in the same situation when you get up before drinking coffee, before drinking mate to see how your blood pressure is. And there we are going to take an average.
Because? Because on Wednesday, when you had 180 pressure, your head could simply hurt. You could have slept badly the night before, you could have been distressed.
This is what happens to the majority of patients who go on call and that is why it is not good to lower the pressure. Now imagine giving the fractured patient a blood pressure pill and sending him home. You're not going to be solving anything.
On the other hand, we have to give the hypertensive patient pills and lifestyle changes on an ongoing basis so that he can continue. That's where many patients get scared and call me doctor again, but my aunt had a stroke and her blood pressure was 200. That's where I tell you, your aunt surely had a stroke and that stroke increased her blood pressure and not the other way around.
And surely she already had high blood pressure for many years before, so her brain was damaged. Most strokes, heart attacks, kidney damage, aortic damage, are not the fault of the pressure that increased that day, but of the pressure that increased for a long time before. With some exceptions, hypertension does not cause stroke, with some exceptions.
When the pressure is excessively high. There is a pathology called hypertensive encephalopathy, where the pressure is to blame or, for example, aortic dissection, where the high pressure is rupturing the aorta. But this is rare and in these cases, we do lower the pressure.
On the other hand, in stroke, in common stroke, for example, due to a clot, We don't even lower the pressure unless it is very high, because the pressure will even help your brain get oxygen. So look at the difference and that's where I want to tell you what to do and give you some final advice. Suppose today you take your blood pressure, your pressure is at 170 or 17 nine and you feel bad, you feel like your head hurts a little.
Did you sleep poorly last night, do you feel strange? Let your guard down or wait. The only reason you should go to the Guard is if you have serious symptoms, which are chest pain, shortness of breath, an unbearable headache, the worst you have ever seen in your life.
And in case you don't have a migraine, it is clear because many patients have migraines that part of your body falls asleep. Look why I am sending you to the guard in this case, because you have high blood pressure or because I think you have something else. If you answered because I think you have something else, then you are correct.
I'm putting you on guard because I think that chest pain could be a heart attack, because I think it is. Numbness of the entire arm or drooping of one side of the face. It could be a stroke, because I think that shortness of breath could be a lung thromboembolism, a heart attack or another more serious illness.
I'm not so interested in the pressure you had that day because I consider hypertension in most cases as an accompaniment to the disease and not as the cause. And that is where the conflict comes. But then why do they treat my blood pressure?
Because we said high pressure maintained over time is very damaging. On the other hand, the pressure that spikes sharply, for example, because you went to the gym, because you went for a run, because you had an argument, will not harm you. The pressure normally has to be close to 12.
8 or below 14. 9, unless you are a very adult patient, then up to 15 can be tolerated. However, in some conditions you can have some peaks, especially when you are exercising or when you are nervous for any reason.
I'm going to give you some final advice. And one last detail, my final advice, don't get obsessed with pressure. Many of my patients have them take their blood pressure at home for a week, then I make lifestyle changes, which I will tell you about.
And then generally the doctors, when they manage to have the pressure at 12 eight, what do they do most days ? They start taking their blood pressure, every day they become obsessed and if it doesn't give them 12, eight or 13, eight, they get nervous and when they take it again they have 14, they have 15. They should not be slaves to their blood pressure.
Once your blood pressure is controlled, you do not need to take your blood pressure, except in rare cases. And if you are discharged at 15, 16, nine, 9. 5, etc.
, in that case you have to take four or five days and take that to the cardiologist or clinician so that he can make a calculation and tell you if you are hypertensive or not. You are hypertensive. If you are not hypertensive you will continue with your healthy life.
If you are hypertensive, on the other hand, it will make changes to your lifestyle habits. Changes like exercising. That's right, even if you are hypertensive, losing weight, stopping smoking, consuming less salt will significantly improve your blood pressure.
If that can't compensate your pressure. In general they will add pills. And here comes a crisis doctor.
But the pills are bad, they have many side effects. When you have high blood pressure every day the problem is serious and will destroy your heart. Much more serious than the side effects that those pills that we know are safe could have.
Your doctor will likely start you on two pills at the same time that are mixed into one. I'll call you a week later to see how your blood pressure is. Make a small adjustment.
He will surely see you once a month and if everything is fine, then he will see you once every six months, every one year, depending on what he considers. So don't obsess them with pressure. Knowing how to perfectly distinguish between high blood pressure and hypertension and being able to reduce calls to the emergency room because we had a bad day.
That is very important and that will reduce the attention in the health service and the problems later, because on the day that you went with high blood pressure, because you had a headache and they gave you medicine, the next day you will be dizzy because you didn't need medicine for your blood pressure, you needed your head to stop hurting. I hope you found this talk useful and informative. This is what I tell my patients every day.
Now I hope to know what is the next topic you want us to do. I send you a big hug from our part of the world. Bye Bye.
