Power to the Patient! (Blood Pressure Monitors in general)

Name: DarkLady

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Product:	Blood Pressure Monitors in general
Date:	22.09.01 (138 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None unless you have sufficient knowledge to draw a reliable inference from your findings

Disadvantages: Very innacurate, Expensive

We're all so clued up about medical matters nowadays aren't we? We all devour the health pages in our favourite magazines, some of us even buy the magazines where every page is related to health and fitness. So when we worry that something isn't going quite as perfectly as we would like it's very natural to put our new knowledge into play. Go to any chemist and part with fifty to a hundred pounds and you'll get a nifty little gadget with a diary and a special case to keep it in so that you can monitor your blood pressure at home without the need to bother the doctor. Good idea, innit?
Blood pressure is the pressure exerted on the walls of the blood vessels by the blood as it circulates, everyone has a blood pressure, even dead people have one, not much of one but they've got one (obviously their blood isn't circulating but it exerts a pressure just by sitting there). It is related to the total circulating volume and the total resistance it encounters from the blood vessels. The blood pressure is greatest during ventricular systole (systolic pressure) this is when the heart is pumping the blood out of its large chambers and lowest during diastole (diastolic) when the heart is relaxed. The pressure is recorded as a systolic/diastolic and a normal blood pressure is something in the region of 120/60 mmHg.
So you're worried about your blood pressure? Daddy died of a stroke, Mummy has angina, you like a fag now and then and drink a bit too much. Maybe you've been reading the medical pages in the Sunday Times mag. You look for the signs, runny nose? Headache? Green spots on the tongue? Shivering? Seeing little green fairies? Actually most people with high blood pressure have no signs and symptoms at all. So you go to the quack and have it taken, you dash all the way there and sit, tensely in the waiting room having exchanged a few unpleasantries with the gargoyle at the front desk. When he comes to take your blood pressure he in
forms you that it is 160/80 and that you should come back next week and have it checked again.
Well blood pressure is extremely variable, lots of things change it and the mad dash to the surgery, the confontation with the receptionist, the frustrating waiting around and the sheer nervousness a lot of people feel on visiting the doctor will all have conspired to send your blood pressure sky high. So all is not yet lost.
I might add that coronary heart disease is one of this country's biggest causes of mortality, the doctor might tell you this as well as he makes illegible notes in his special code before prescribing you something that you will take to make you wee. You will spend the rest of the week feeling thirsty and constantly licking your lips between desperate attempts to find public loos.
Understandably worried, you cut all the fat out of your diet so that you are existing on those funny polystyrene rice cake thingies. You join a gym and go to Mark's and Spencer's to get a tracksuit. You think of buying a blood pressure machine, just to keep an eye on it.
Now you are taking your blood pressure with your machine (which cost you over fifty pounds). You take it in the morning, at lunch and before bed. One day you get a high reading. What do you do? What conclucions do you draw? So you take it again. This time the reading is low. Are you worried yet? You should be. You have obviously bought a very unreliable machine. Many nurses use automatic devices to check blood pressure in the hospital, theirs are expensive devices, calibrated regularly and designed for accuracy and consistency of results. Despite this expense and painstaking design the nurses, in their wisdom will manually check an abnormal reading because they have learned through experience that these machines commonly let you down. The one you have bought from the local chemist is not likely to give a totally accurate reading, nor is it likely to be very consistent in the qu
ality of results. So you should be worried, because you have spent a hundred pounds on an unreliable bit of electronics which gives you misleading readings.
What would you do if you got a couple of high reading, would you take extra medicine? Book yourself in for a check up and wait two weeks for the appointment? Do you phone an ambulance? The fact is that unless you are a doctor you're probably not going to know what to do and in truth none of these courses of action would be right or wrong because you are acting on the assumption that the readings are correct and we know how unreliable the device is don't we? Besides all that, if you are over fifty it is almost "normal" to have an "abnormal" blood pressure.
As a nurse I am glad when patients show an interest in their treatment and take charge of their own health but my advice to you is to take the money you were thinking of ploughing into this comparatively useless purchase and buy a gym pass. Your heart will thank you for it and you'll sleep easily in the knowledge that you're doing all you can to keep yourself healthy rather than worrying over what that last reading meant.

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