My View Of Hypertension.
NATIONAL JOURNAL OF HOMOEOPATHY 1996 Jan / Feb Vol V No 1.
Manu Kothari.
Hypertension is the anecdotal elephant, surveyed and reported upon by the six blind men of Indostan. It is a high pressure illusion that has managed to keep to keep the researchers, clinicians, hospitals, patients, gadget manufacturers and patients happily occupied over this unhappy fact of human physiology. Allopaths, naturopaths, whichever paths, have scratched their heads and pulled their hair trying to fathom the mundane matter called the definition of hypertension. It is an edifice whose keystone has always been missing.
Hypertension, hyperpiesia, high blood pressure, essential hypertension the silent killer, the disease of modern civilization are the epithets used to describe but a feature, life would be impossible.
And while considering blood pressure as a biological entity, there also steps in Normal Distribution. And that means "nothing like a normal pressure at individual level, but a full range from the lowest to the highest, both being integral to the herd, natural tot he herd, and no error of Nature." N wonder,. Sir George Pickering became hoarse crying all his life, that there aint anything like a definite border between normal and high pressure, Each clinician has his own fancy and his own concept of what is normal and what is not.
The most abnormal aspect of modern medicine, is that it has no idea, much less a definition, of what is normal. The so-called normal pressure of 120/80 is a myth, an illusion, a fraud, a lie forged by totaling a 1000 systolic diastolic pressures, and then dividing the total by 1000 to give you the ideal. magical, misleading and hopelessly unattainable figure of 120/80. Never in the history of medicine has so much of malignant mythology made by any observation save the mysterious 120/80.
The late Rustom Jal Vakil, pioneer cardiologist, and Lasker award winner generalized from a lifetimes experience, that the ECG machine had done more harm to mankind than the atom bomb. You could extend this to two very ordinary bedside gadgets-thermometer, and the sphygmomanometer simply called the blood pressure instrument. The thermometer made an enemy out of any rise of body temperature, however physiological and howsoever beneficial to the bearer. Antipyretics and antibiotics stepped in to abort all dialogues between the human body and the microbes, spawning in return mankind immunologically immature. ill,-formed and crippled/ AIDS is an upshot not of HIV obtained or through innocent love-making but a gift of antibiotism.
The world is as yet to have the ideal hi-fi blood-pressure instrument; yet to settle down on the infallible method: yet to decide where should the Korotkoff sounds begin and where they should end. The gadgetry ranges from the aneroid to the electric, each replete with sources of error. Having willy-milly declared that high blood pressure mostly, is essential, medical kind has endeavored to identify the enemy that unfortunately isnt there. Some venerated medical journals-BMJ, Lancet for example-had to wax eloquent over WHITE COAT HYPERTENSION-the high pressure IATROGENY whereby the very art of measuring a persons pressure converts her or him into a patient by pushing the pressure up. The commonest cause of essential hypertension, then, is the doctor. Stewart and others found out that in, more than 60 percent of patients with "high blood pressure", the symptoms made their appearance after they were told that they are hypertensives. Rightly, a check-up clinic should be defined as, a place wherein a person walks in and wherefrom a patient totters out.
Having enemized BP, what next? Link it to ills of the heart, the brain,the kidneys and the blood vessels-without of course reliable proof or data for anyone! Not knowing how exactly the body computer controls blood pressure every second so thoughtfully and dynamically, modern medicine has chosen to control some facet of the physiology, with inevitable train of side-effects ranging from increased mortality to humiliating impotence. In a celebrated multi-blind trial on antihypertensives in UK, 90 percent of the physicians declared that their patients were doing well, 80 percent of the relations of the patients felt they were worse off than before.
Honestly stated, modern medicine has drawn a glorious blank in the field of the etiology and the Rx of hypertension much like in the fields of cancer, heart attack, diabetes, arthritis and so on. Non-allopathic disciplines (medicina alternative!) including Homoeopathy are fully justified in pitching in to claim, "we are better than you are".
No until medicine accepts the essentiality, nay, inevitability, nay, indispensability of low. average, "normal", and high HP, both physicians and patients will continue to battle a foe that is nothing but a figment of their imagination. So much of needless diagnosing , doctorising, debating, researching.
Like in all discipline of medicine, doctors have the cardinal role of easing whatever whenever wherever the disease is. Hence even in low high BP, there is enough scope for words of assurance and pills of palliation to put to ease the diseased. Whensoever a human body decides to exhibit " malignant" hypertension, palliation assures supreme importance. The Golden Lettered Triumphs of modern medicine are in the field of causal or secondary hypertension. The removal of any adrenal tumour, or the dilatation of the stentic renal adrenal tumour, or the dilatation of the stentic renal artery or the removal of a compromised kidney can restore BP to levels that produce "ease". Vis-a-vis hypertension all pathies have a role of play that, alas, is highly limited.
A persons BP at a given moment is a spectrum of "the then" functional adaptation of the body that cannot be caged into a definition much less a static figure like 120/80. If BP readings are distributed over a range in a herd, the same in a way holds true for an individual in whom the readings differ from hour to hour, minute to minute and mood to mood. Let BP be- high, medium, or low.
