Taking Care Of Your High Blood Pressure: Fill & Download for Free

Yes, untreated high blood pressure can shorten your life; if you are lucky.Christopher Murray from university of Washington, Seattle first brought out the concept of DALY. Till then we, as doctors, believed that preventing early demise was most important agenda.Murray conceptualised that in a society if life expectancy is, say 80 years, and a person dies at 70, the period lost because of his early demise is 80 - 70 = 10 years (Years of Life Lost YLL). Now if this person became disabled at age 50, lets say paralysed because of stroke, he is bedridden from age 50 to 70; the years lived with disability (YLD) is 70 - 50 = 20 years.DALY (disability Adjusted Life Years DALY) is sum of YLL + YLD (here 10 + 20 = 30 years).Death is certainly the worst thing that can happen to anyone; but in India, disability is a bigger challenge, since it creates a much larger financial burden for the family. The stricken disabled member don’t generate income but entails huge cost for treatment in the absence of universal free healthcare in India.Look at the data published by Lancet.The Y axis shows disability, the X axis death.The two red circles; one show low-back-pain. A disease that is high on disability index but zero death (it abuts the Y axis). In contrast the other red circle is lung cancer. It has high death rate, low disability, because highly invasive aggressive lung cancer kills fast; before even disability sets in.Now look at the same graph below.Hypertension (high blood pressure) is at the top right corner. It has the highest kill rate (heart attack, cerebral hemorrhagic, heart failure, acute kidney failure) and the highest disability rate (Stroke and chronic Kidney disease).In case you are still not convinced, come to our hospital dialysis unit or the physiotherapy unit. The disabled stroke survivor and the kidney-failure patient tethered to thrice-a-week dialysis will tell you their story and ask you to be careful. These are the people who survived a hypertension damage, and live to tell their story.For a trained medical personnel with a BP apparatus, it takes under 5 minutes to record a blood pressure.Provided you decide to get checked.Most readers would just upvote and go to sleep.

It feels amazing.Back in 2007 my mom had taken a shower, she suddenly started to feel dizzy and started vomiting. I told her that I'm calling an ambulance, she told me not to. I waited for two minutes to see if she'd calm down, she kept vomiting like anything. I dialled 911 and calmly explained to them everything that was happening to her, they immediately sent an ambulance.The paramedics checked her blood pressure on the way to the hospital and it was really high for a woman her age. They rushed her into the ER and got all the IVs started and started treating her for high blood pressure. The doctor told her that if she had come in even one minute late, she could have suffered from a stroke or a brain hemorrhage. She came home the next morning with medicine and was passed out for the next three days. She would only wake up for food and to use the bathroom.The second incident was just this August 2013. My mom suffered from another high blood pressure attack, she had the same symptoms that she had in 2007. Except this was different, her legs were like jelly, she couldn't walk. I called an ambulance despite her telling me not to.She was in the hospital for a week and we found out that she had a stroke and if she wasn't treated on time, she would have become paralyzed. She came home after a week and I have been taking care of her. I've been watching her diet, medicine, and checking her blood pressure twice a day.As most of you know, my mom is really important to me, she's my best friend, and I wouldn't be able to let her pass on. She's really special to me and has been my motivator these past eight years, obviously I'm going to be her motivation until she lives.

Wrong Concepts that can affect You.-Headache! must be high blood pressureHigh BP generally don’t cause headache.Unlike popular belief, most headaches are not because of high BP. Rarely a very severe blood pressure elevation can cause headache by creating ‘cerebral edema’ or stroke, but uncomplicated blood pressure generally doesn’t cause headache.-Don’t eat sugar. You will get diabetesEating sugars don’t make you diabeticDiabetes is caused by either reduction of insulin secretion or reduction of its effect on the tissues. A diabetic patient can have undue rise of blood sugar if he takes lot of sugar, but sugar intake per-se doesn’t cause diabetes.-Eat carefully, avoid junk food. You will not get cholesterolEating a balanced diet doesn’t ensure normal cholesterol60 percent of blood cholesterol is manufactured by endogenous pathway. So stopping / avoiding fat in diet doesn’t ensure that you cholesterol will be normal for sure.-Doctor told me to take one tablet, just to be safe, I just take half.Low dose medicines are not necessarily safer.Lower dose of medicine may not have a therapeutic effect since effect of a drug is linearly related to its dose. In contrast side effects are often non-linear. A person allergic to penicillin can have reaction at even the minuscule dose of it but such a dose will do him no good.-Pricking pain at one point in chest is dangerousNot at all. Pricking, localised pain, that increase on deep breathing is generally not heart related. If you can point your pain to an area less than a square centimeter, the pain is unlikely to be cardiac-I have a pain in the lower jaw especially when I walk; may be a bad tooth.Pain going to the jaw on exertion is almost always heart pain.Jaw discomfort on walking; don’t fix up an appointment with the dentists. Go to a cardiologist.-I am a diabetic; recently I started feeling exhausted.I am an asthmatic; recently my asthma has worsened.Both these symptoms may point to a cardiac symptom. Silent attacks are seen in diabetes and chronic asthma, who may not feel chest pain, but extreme exhaustion or worsening asthma.-Take care. These facts may be helpful.