How high is blood pressure when Doctors decide to medicate? ...

How high is blood pressure when Doctors decide to medicate? Is there mildly high blood pressure that doctors will just recommend life style changes?

The question is, "Why is your blood pressure high?"

Often high blood pressure comes as a result of problems that stem from lifestyle and are rarely a direct result of lifestyle. For example, poor diet may cause high cholesterol levels which are furring up your arteries, which pushes up your BP. Eating a healthier diet isn't going to do a lot to remove the furring up of your arteries, but it will help stop more cholesterol and calcium deposits. Which will help prevent BP from continuing to rise. Stress is one of the few lifestyle things that can directly drive up your BP, but it's also one of the few things that's hardest to deal with. The stressors are just too invasive and diverse to make quick impact. By all means a course in stress reduction is good for anyone. It may mean a change in job even.

Many doctors will begin to medicate when your BP is sustained at over 140/80. The typical path is to ask you to get your BP checked say 2 or 3 times a day, 7 days a week, for example, in the morning, mid-day and evening. If it remains consistently high they will often prescribe medications. If it isn't consistently high, then they may investigate lifestyle, but the thing is that medication may be the easiest way to get it under control while you sort out your lifestyle.

The impact of constant high blood pressure is immense, leading to clots and strokes and aneurysms, and causes a thickening of the heart muscle which causes it to become less and less efficient and results in congestive heart failure and premature death. Not good.

There are several classes of meds used for blood pressure control and those chosen will depend on what the doctor believes will be the most effective. Some have very little impact on your day to day activity level. Some will have a more profound impact (such as beta blockers which also slow the heart rate), resulting in more tiredness.

If the doctor feels it's necessary to prescribe meds, don't treat it as something to be afraid of ... treat it as something good ... he's going to make sure you stay alive a lot longer! There's nothing more frightening than lying on a hospital operating table being told you're going to die. It's the most loneliness you'll ever feel in your life. If some pills can prevent that, go for it!