Today as it has been for many years now, taking the blood pressure is one of the easiest, fastest and least harmful procedures in clinical medicine. And in most hospitals, this can be done completely free of charge or for paltry money. But still the number of people who only go to the hospital when they are sick and never for a routine blood pressure check is saddening. Spending three, five, ten years and even more without going to the hospital because they are ‘‘never sick’’ or when they get sick, they see no need to go and consult in a hospital as medications bought from a nearby pharmacy very often make them feel better. As a result, they spend more and more years (often more than ten years) without ever knowing the stand of their blood pressure, this is enough time for an insidiously rising blood pressure to reach to critical levels for those who eventually become hypertensive.
The frightful part is that most of them, when asked why they are not going to the hospital for a routine blood pressure check, what follows is the very famous answers ‘‘I don’t have hypertension’’, ‘‘I cannot be hypertensive’’, ‘‘I’m feeling very fine, why should I do that’’, ‘‘I am very active’’, ‘‘I am not overweight’’, ‘‘How can you ask that to a young person like me’’. It is obvious they would have thought twice before giving such answers if only they knew how silent a rise in blood pressure is or how silent hypertension can be at the beginning; if only they knew that screening for hypertension starts at 18 years of age for everyone, regardless of their ethnicity, health, their activeness, their weight and whether they are hypertensive or not.
Hypertension is a preventable disease; hypertension is easy to prevent, you just need to think of preventing it and following it through. And the first step in doing this is to make routine blood pressure checks a routine. The good news is that you will not have to go to the hospital every day, every week or even every month for that. It’s either once every year or once every two years depending of your blood pressure.
Routine blood pressure checks is certainly the first and most important step in preventing hypertension. Because no one who has the records of his/her blood pressure showing a progressive increase of the values with the years, will keep living the same way for this blood pressure to continue increasing until becoming high. This makes the implementation of a healthy lifestyle way much easier and minimises the chances of getting surprised by hypertension, as it is the case for most hypertensive patients out there, who got to know their blood pressure value only when it was high already and too late to do anything to prevent hypertension.
The hospital is not only that place you go to when sick and seeking treatment, it is also a place you go to prevent sickness even if feeling fine, hypertension being an example. Develop a new habit from today to make routine blood pressure checks a routine. You can start now by writing down or setting in your phone a reminder for the day you will go to the hospital to take your blood pressure.
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