Hypertension

I have high blood pressure which I have had since my twenties. I had pre-eclampsia when I was pregnant. Over the years I have been on every kind of hypertension meds, and on none at all.

When I was drinking, back in the day, doctors told me that alcoholism was a hidden cause of hypertension. When I got sober, they told me it was smoking or stress or sodium or not enough exercise. Whatever I did was not enough, obviously, since the hypertension did not go away.

This is the problem with so many diagnoses, from Freudian analysis to indigestion, that they are often unfalsifiable on the individual level. Maybe complex PTSD from childhood neglect causes my hypertension and maybe too much sodium causes your hypertension. Whether someone has kidney disease or hypervigilance, insulin resistance or sleep apnea, the doctor will generally stop at the first detected “cause” on the list and tell the patient to go away and sin no more. For forty years they have been running down the list, and all they can do is give me medication that works, somehow, based on years of evidence, often without anyone knowing why. I have quit drinking and smoking and have diligently controlled my sodium intake. I have meditated and exercised, eaten healthily, and slept eight hours per night. My idea of a wild indulgence is meat with some fat on it. None of this has made a noticeable difference.

It’s not that I don’t like modern medicine. I just had a hypertensive emergency for the first time (scary, by the way), and you can bet your ass I went to the ER not to the Holistic Woowoo Clinic. However, they kept me overnight on a EKG monitor, took blood out of me three times, gave me a brain CT scan and chest x-ray, and eventually sent me home with increased BP meds, some orders for heart tests, and a shrug. They don’t know what caused it. I’m lucky I live in a country with socialized medicine, or I would now be bankrupt without even knowing what happened. Worse, I don’t know how to prevent it from happening again.