Everyone aged 55 and over should be taking drugs to lower their blood pressure, a London-based expert says.
Epidemiology expert Professor Malcolm Law said blood pressure drugs cut the risk of heart attack and stroke even for those with normal blood pressure.
Thus spake the Professor Law as reported by the Beeb. This wibble is being repeated on the box as I type – and the “keep down salt” mantra is once more being trotted out, despite it having no basis.
Having recently celebrated my 51st birthday, I am rapidly approaching the age whereby medics want to routinely medicate me for my own good. They can take a hike. If I am suffering from an illness, I will, indeed, take medication. If I am not ill, I will not. I live a reasonably healthy lifestyle, exercise moderately and eat a balanced diet. If I suffer a heart attack or stroke, well, that’s just tough luck. I am not, repeat, not going to dope myself up just in case.
Professor Law, an expert in epidemiology at the Wolfson Institute at Barts and The London School of Medicine, said: “Beyond a certain age, we’re saying everyone would benefit from taking drugs that lower blood pressure.”
When we get older, our risk of dying increases, oddly enough. The older we get, the more likely we are to die; this is an inescapable fact. I do not want to live forever, and I accept that one day, my body will call it a day and pack up. Heart attack, stroke or whatever, makes no difference, life is a disease from which none escape alive. Get used to the idea. I will not benefit from drugs that lower blood pressure because I have no intention of taking them – unless that is, I have a specific problem with blood pressure; which I don’t.
Professor Law said the universal use of blood pressure drugs should be seen as analogous to vaccinating the entire population in the event of a flu pandemic.
No, it isn’t. Vaccination in such cases would be a rare event to deal with a specific outbreak – not the same thing at all.
There was no case for trying to assess who was a top priority, he said, when everybody was potentially at risk.
Just as we are all at risk of walking under a bus. We live, we get older, we die. Get over it. When I see a GP, I am routinely subjected to a blood pressure check. That is sufficient. If there is a problem, the GP will advise me accordingly.
In fact, Professor Law said giving everybody blood pressure drugs would minimise the risk that people would be alarmed when told they needed to take the medication.
What alarms me, frankly, is when a medic thinks that treating the whole population for a disease that they might have – but might not, is in some way, a good idea. There is, however, a word of common sense:
Mike Rich, of the Blood Pressure Association, said: “Prevention is better than cure, but there are other proven ways to prevent high blood pressure such as healthy eating and regular exercise, which have other health benefits too.”
“There is a danger that these important lifestyle factors could be overlooked in favour of ‘popping a pill’.”
Quite.
Longrider, thanks for yet another oppertunity to swell and blow and PREEN.
At 60 I do 111 reps apiece of all the USMC “Daily 16” floor exercises, four sorts of pushups, various crunches and so forth. Also, I am at fifty overhand pullups and sixty-five underhand, shooting for 111 of these each also, and I run a half mile each day.
The benefits?
The satisfactions of a sneering egotism and, in my case, the very good chance of the mother of all haemorrhagic strokes, which means at thirty-odd miles from any hospital that I shall hopefully be dead and safely in Hell /before/ The Pricks can resuscitate me as a carehome plaything.
longrider – your post is spot on as usual. but Bodwyn’s reply is pure gold. Sir, i could manage 12 pull-ups in the territorial army, 20 years ago. your stated fitness level is extraordinary. i have a decade and a half before i’m your age. i am a fat, slothful smoking yob, all sails set for wibbledom in an oxygen tent. but no more – you have shown another Path, via your (justifiably) incredible levels of smugness and arrogance. a new day dawns. see you in hell.
richard, you at least I perceive I owe the gift of at least some honesty in all this…when I get to seventy-three or eighty-two of the so-called “bomber” (ass-in-th-air) pushups, I usually have to pause in place for a few puffs in order to finish. As to the cross-crunches, I usually make sixty-five or seventy-three or so to right or left, switch sides and then go back for the difference each way.
And, no, I’m sorry this stuff does not reduce ones midriff, not at this age, but I do have just about the most /well-trained/ potbelly in these parts anyway. To LOSE weight one must eat less, this is as we say here “a “crock of” you-know-what and, frankly, I’d rather do more reps.
The way to make all exercises go well over the longterm in mid and late life is to do plenty of stretching beforehand and to jog or bike a bit for starters to get the word out to ones heart that we’re doing this again now. Likewise, to jog off in place a couple hundred steps the adrenaline and lactic acid buildup between the hard bits really helps, too, and takes the heart-rate down gradually and hence less poisonously.
My exercise tends to be somewhat less strenuous – digging the garden, walking or cycling. All good for the cardiovascular system, though.
“Getting” the regular exercise habit is not for the easygoing and good natutred. It helps no end to be venomous and spiteful. It also helps to be afflicted with the so-called “problem” of being an obsessive and at least somewhat driven (“compulsive,” ie) type — that helps especially when it’s a case of keeping track of the number of reps, what am I doing today? and so on.
This whole “OCD” thing naturally is a form of special pleading by The Psychologists, themselves not an orderly group. It is a low manifestation of the democratic spirit, at the common denominator. In fact were it not for us “compulsives” things would be whole lot worse than they are now. Not to say rather more dirty.
The real jacks of the human pack, and the cause of much of the disease and runaway checkbook overdrafts, of course are the ITBTs and UTBIAHs, the Inability To Be Tidys and the Unable To Be In A Houses. The psychologists who mainly depend on state subsidies of course are in no hurry to find a “cure,” and in any case having lots of folks on file is good for business. These professionalists dream, like crows of dead animals by the road verge, of the day when DNA testing will enable them with state connivance to sign up everyone from kindergarten. So much for regular exercise, a pleasant home with some nice cats lounging in the Sun…and psychology.
The choice is yours.
Here’s the American version:
“I’m not saying that us OCDs are the Sufis or anything, but we practically are.”
http://bodwyn.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/spring-on-the-farm-in-old-squawbunion-county-thursday-21-may-2009/
51 eh? Are you still biking around?
I am indeed. My father is still riding at 76, so there’s no reason for me to give up just yet.