You must get treatment for hypertension and atherosclerosis. How to improve your health? 17

You must get treatment for hypertension and atherosclerosis. How to improve your health? 17

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The third question I think that's asked to me, especially by my hypertensive patients, reflects the fact that hypertension and also incipient atherosclerosis. These are asymptomatic conditions. Dr. David Ellison, MD.: And so, it's unlike a patient with heart failure who comes in and they can't breathe, they will ask you to do anything, doctor, to try and make me feel better. The hypertension patients say, I feel better, right? I feel fine, right? Now, why do you want me to take these drugs? And I don't want to take so many drugs. And I think drugs are bad for you. And I read this and that, I Google it and it says all these drugs are bad for you. So there, I spend a lot of time really saying that the drugs are your friend. We're not saying any drugs are your friend. We're saying we have drugs that are time-tested, that have been used in millions of patients, that don't cost very much and have very low incidence of side effects. But we also know that the only way that these drugs are going to be useful to you and prolong your life is if you take them on a regular basis and don't be afraid of them. And that said, if you do have a side effect, report it to me. Because we started out talking about the classes of antihypertensive drugs we have three, four or five different types of antihypertensive drugs. And if one class is bothersome to a person, we can almost always switch to another. The example would be ACE inhibitors. ACE inhibitors are fantastic drugs, but they do cause cough in a substantial minority, a substantial percentage of patients and that cough can be very troubling. They can occasionally cause angioedema as well. That can be very troubling and potentially life-threatening. But with those effects we can try an Angiotensin Receptor Blocker, which is very unlikely to cause a side effect like that. So, I think the question that is often asked is, Doc, why do I need to take so many drugs? Can I reduce the number of drugs? And there my answer is, we really know from studying hundreds of 1000s of patients, or hundreds of 1000s of people, that if you take the drugs, your likelihood of having a stroke, or myocardial infarction, is dramatically reduced. And often talking about stroke as a risk is very compelling for patients, because people sometimes don't worry as much about dropping dead as they worry about getting incapacitated. And having a stroke, where you lose important function is just something we all worry about. And this is a situation where antihypertensive drugs very clearly, at essentially any age, are very effective at reducing the likelihood of a stroke.