Category: Health Tips

The Great Blood Pressure Scam, the Dangers of Blood Pressure Medications, and the Forgotten Research That Shows How to Restore Circulatory Health

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”). Instead, we keep on putting more Americans on these medications (with the most recent 2025 update making 26.8 million low-risk Americans potential candidates for blood pressure medications).

•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.

•A vast body forgotten Russian research corroborated what a few Western pioneers discovered by directly measured what happens to blood pressure when you change the thickness of the blood itself, and found the circulatory impairment comes first, that lowering blood pressure does nothing to correct it, and that several widely used blood pressure medications make it worse.

•In this article, I 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 spiritual teacher shared with me their belief that the 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.

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-forgotten-causes-of-high-blood?r=yh8aw

Click to view the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX49xXYKm7I

2 cups chick peas
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/3 cup honey or maple syrup
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of salt
1/2 cup chocolate chips

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. Combine the chickpeas, nut butter, maple syrup/honey, vanilla, baking powder, and salt in a bowl or tall container. Blend with an immersion blender (or use a food processor) until completely smooth, scraping down the sides as needed.
3. Fold in the chocolate chips with a spatula.
4. Scoop tablespoon-sized portions onto the sheet and gently flatten them (they barely spread).
5. Bake 12–15 minutes until the edges look lightly golden and the tops are set. They firm up more as they cool—leave them on the pan for 5–10 minutes before moving.

Tips

– Natural (no-stir) nut butters work best.
– Pat the chickpeas very dry so the dough isn’t overly wet.
– Optional: add 2–3 Tbsp oat flour or coconut flour if the mixture seems too soft.
– Store in an airtight container in the fridge; they keep several days and freeze well.

Peanut Butter Alternatives (use the same amount, 1:1)

– Almond butter — Mild, creamy, and the most seamless swap.
– Cashew butter — Even milder and extra creamy.
– Sunflower seed butter (e.g., SunButter) — Best nut-free option; slightly earthier.
– Tahini — Milder savory-nutty note; you may want a touch more sweetener to balance it.

Chickpeas contribute roughly 14 g protein and 12 g fiber per cooked cup, which supports the satiety and gut-health claims, though the nut/seed butter and chocolate chips still add calories and fat. Enjoy as an occasional treat.

Nature continues to put drugs to shame, yet why has no one heard of this research?

In Part 1, honey beat a steroid fourteen-fold for chronic cough, turmeric stopped prediabetes in 100% of trial participants, and saffron ran even with Prozac. The response told us something: people are hungry for the studies nobody puts in a press release.

So for Part 2, we went back into the archive — 455,000 studies, hand-mapped since 2008 — and pulled ten more. This time we went after the drugs people take every day: the antibiotic for recurrent UTIs, the beta-blocker for blood pressure, the Alzheimer’s blockbuster, the stimulant given to millions of children, the benzodiazepine for sleep, and the antidepressants tens of millions of people take every morning.

Same rules as Part 1. Every study is a human trial. Every one is indexed in our database. Every one links to the long-form article or abstract so you can check the work yourself.

And the same caveat: this is research information, not medical advice. Some of these trials are large and well designed — the St. John’s wort meta-analysis covers 27 trials and 3,808 patients; the mindfulness trial ran in The Lancet. Others are smaller or single studies. I’ve given you the design and the numbers for each so you can weigh them. Never stop a prescribed medication without your practitioner.

Finish reading: https://open.substack.com/pub/sayerji/p/they-compared-the-spice-to-the-drug-5ba

How the companies that pay for the trials end up writing the rules your doctor must follow, from the Xigris scandal to ivermectin, and why getting caught never stops them.

https://open.substack.com/pub/pierrekory/p/medical-guidelines-are-not-guardrails

From a friend on Facebook:
Birth control is one of the most common gateway drugs into psychiatry for young women.

I see the pattern over and over. She starts the pill or an IUD. Months later she’s anxious, irritable or depressed. Nobody connects the dots, so she gets a diagnosis and a psych med while the hormones keep destabilizing her mood.

A Danish study followed over 1 million women. Every hormonal method raised the risk of ending up on an antidepressant, and for teens on the hormonal IUD that