Posted on

Pillar of Salt

Genesis records the first health warning about sodium. Lot’s wife, fleeing the burning city, looks back and turns into a pillar of salt. Read it as a warning about attachment, about the price of facing the wrong direction. Then read it as prophecy. Three thousand years later, a whole food supply did the same thing to its eaters. We became the preserved: cured, brined, and held in place by the leading cause of death in the country.

Continue reading → Pillar of Salt

Posted on

One Thirty Over Eighty: How America Lowered the Hypertension Line While Europe Held Steady

A single edit to a single table turned tens of millions of healthy Americans into patients overnight. The question is whether the line was drawn for them or for the people who bill them. In November of 2017, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association released a clinical guideline that ran to roughly four hundred and eighty pages, and somewhere in the front matter they moved a single number. The threshold for diagnosing high blood pressure fell from 140/90 to 130/80. Nobody’s artery changed that day. No chest tightened, no vessel narrowed, no symptom appeared. And yet, by the arithmetic of that one revision, about thirty-one million Americans who had been healthy the previous evening were now classified as having a chronic cardiovascular disease. National prevalence of hypertension climbed from near thirty-two percent of adults to near forty-six percent between one edition of a document and the next, and among adults under forty-five the rate more than doubled. Nothing about the population’s arteries had changed; only the boundary of the word had moved.

Continue reading → One Thirty Over Eighty: How America Lowered the Hypertension Line While Europe Held Steady

Posted on

Preventative Medicine, or the Manufacture of Patients?

There is a sentence every American patient has heard at the dentist’s chair, the cardiologist’s office, the primary-care visit, and the pharmacy counter. It arrives in a tone of grave responsibility: We caught this early. What follows is a crown, an echocardiogram, a statin, a stress test, a referral, a follow-up appointment, and a copay. The word “preventative” has come to function as a moral shield around a billing code. To question whether the recommended intervention is necessary is treated as ingratitude toward a profession that, the implication goes, only wants to keep you alive.

Continue reading → Preventative Medicine, or the Manufacture of Patients?

Posted on

Side Assaults and Medication Induced Nightmares

If you are on maintenance medication for depression or your heart or some other long-term illness, one thing you should always be aware of when taking a new medication is its effect on your dreams.  Your doctor may not care about your fruitful dream state, but you care because you must. Your dreams are the pathway to a prescient future.

Sometimes, the medicine-induced dream-influencing doesn’t happen for a few months, or the fitful sleep arrives in dribs and occasional drabs that leads to a dribbling memeing.  I discovered, through trial and error, and the momentary comparative experience, that Benicar, my blood pressure medication, was indicating horrific nightmares for many months.

Continue reading → Side Assaults and Medication Induced Nightmares

Posted on

On Getting an Echocardiogram for Your Heart

If you have high blood pressure, you should be prepared to have an echocardiogram for your heart and you must accept that such a test will become a permanent, and ongoing, part of your life.

Continue reading → On Getting an Echocardiogram for Your Heart

Posted on

The OMRON 10 Series Home Blood Pressure Monitor Review

If you suffer from high blood pressure, you know how important it is to closely monitor your blood pressure at home.  For around $70.00 USD, you can buy the OMRON 10 Series home blood pressure monitor and give yourself of ease-of-mind while wincing throughout the monitoring process.

Continue reading → The OMRON 10 Series Home Blood Pressure Monitor Review