Story at a Glance:

•Elevated blood pressure is the most common chronic disease, and as the decades go by more and more people are declared hypertensive.

•Remarkably, at least 25% of all hypertension diagnoses are due to inaccurate measurements, and there is still no known reason for why over 90% of people are hypertensive.

•Aggressively treating everyone’s blood pressure is justified under the belief it prevents cardiovascular disease. However, in most cases it has never been proven to reduce heart disease—rather it only leads to a small reduction in strokes (hence why these medications were rebranded to treat “cardiovascular disease”).

•Many of the misunderstandings with heart disease arise from the fact that impaired circulation or damage to the blood vessels will cause blood pressure to go up and their correlation being misinterpreted to instead believe high blood pressure causes cardiovascular disease.

•In this article, we will discuss the actual causes of high blood pressure, the dangers of commonly used blood pressure medications, the safest pharmaceutical and natural ways to reduce blood pressure directly, and our preferred methods for treating the underlying causes of high blood pressure.

Ever since I first encountered the medical field, something struck me as off about their relentless focus on blood pressure. Before long, I began to notice that the blood pressures the same acquaintances (e.g., relatives or friends) shared with me varied immensely. As I was pondering this, a long-time Eastern spiritual teacher shared with me their belief that the West’s relentless focus on blood pressure was due to it being much easier to measure than blood perfusion (healthy blood flow).

Then, as I became more acquainted with the medical field, I began to notice a consistent pattern—whenever a drug existed that could treat a number or statistic, as the years went by, the acceptable number kept on being narrowed, making more and more people eligible to take the drugs that treated the number.

For example, as I discussed recently, once the statins drugs entered the market (which unlike their predecessors, could effectively lower cholesterol), the acceptable blood cholesterol levels kept on being lowered, and before long almost everyone was told they would die from a heart attack unless they started a statin—despite statins have an almost non-existing mortality benefit (e.g., taking them for 5 years at best makes you live 3-4 days longer) and causing (often severe) side effects for roughly 20% of users. Broadly recommending these drugs hence appears unconscionable, but as I showed in that article, these unjustifiable guidelines were a product of clever pharmaceutical marketing and targeted bribery of public officials.

In this article, I will attempt to show how something similar happened in the field of blood pressure. As this is an immensely controversial position to take (e.g., measuring and documenting blood pressure is one of the most routine procedures during a medical visit), I’ve done my best to clearly present the evidence for this perspective so you can make your own determination.