History of Blood Pressure Medicine
Blood-pressure testing results were first published in 1733 by Rev. Stephen Hales, in England — building upon the pioneering work done about a century earlier by a fellow Briton, the physician William Harvey, in describing the human circulatory system. During the 1800s, Thomas Young, Richard Bright, and Frederick Akbar Mahomed advanced the medical understanding of high blood pressure, aka hypertension, as an ailment rather than a normal condition of human beings. The cuff-based method for measuring blood pressure was devised in 1896 by Scipione Riva-Rocci, and the modern approach of listening for blood-flow sounds using a stethoscope was first used in 1905 by Nikolai Korotkoff.
During roughly the first half of the 1900s, high blood pressure wasn’t considered a malignant condition requiring medical treatment until it had reached levels of 210/100 or even 210/110 — even though the only person ever elected to the United States Presidency four times, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had clearly died at age 63 from its bad consequences early during his fourth term. But then medical perceptions started to change, based on studies and actuarial results that found that higher blood pressures were more lethal the more that they increased and that Black folks were even more vulnerable to these lethal effects than were White folks. For a while, medical conventional wisdom held that 120/80 was the Ideal Blood Pressure that everyone should strive to have; but the most recent studies have now found that even lower blood-pressure levels are better for your health and for the length of your life.
Blood Pressure Measurement
Some review, at this point: Two numbers define your blood pressure, SSS/DDD: Your systolic blood pressure SSS is the blood pressure within your circulatory system at the instant that your heart’s ventricle (lower chamber) is exerting its maximum squeezing force during a heartbeat on the blood passing through it. Your diastolic blood pressure DDD is the blood pressure within your circulatory system when your heart is resting in-between heartbeat squeezes.
Your pulse rate is the number of these squeezes that your heart executes during every minute, usually between 60 and 100 for most people. The usual units of measurement for blood pressure are millimeters of Mercury, abbreviated mm/Hg, based on the first-developed pressure-measuring instruments or ‘manometers’ which used calibrated, often U-shaped, glass tubes filled with Mercury — a heavy metal, Number 80 in the Periodic Table of Elements, that is liquid at ordinary room temperatures. For comparison, sea level air pressure is usually about 760 mm/Hg. Nowadays, manometers are often purely mechanical, and are based on pressure-sensing devices; however, Mercury manometers are still widely used.
How a competent medical practitioner measures your blood pressure today:
- He or she puts an inflatable cuff of some type on your arm, that is connected to a manometer, and inflates it until there is no sound of blood flowing in your arm when this sound is listened for using a stethoscope with its bell pressed to the inside of your elbow.
- The cuff is then slowly deflated, and the practitioner listens for those Korotkoff sounds. When the first sound of flowing blood is heard, the instantaneous manometer reading is your systolic blood pressure.
- Deflation continues; and at the exact point in time when there is no longer any sound, the instantaneous manometer reading is your diastolic blood pressure.
- There are now microprocessor-controlled cuff-plus-manometer systems that don’t require another human being to be listening to the Korotkoff sounds of your blood flow; these are simple enough to use that you can measure your own blood pressure without help.
Since about the middle of the 1900s, the medical narrative has been one of steadily greater appreciation for the health benefits of lower blood pressure, and of frequent releases of new drugs by the pharmaceutical industry that are increasingly effective against too-high blood pressure and have fewer undesirable side effects. And now there’s also CLE Holistic Health Alistrol, a natural herbal supplement for helping you to manage your high blood pressure that’s a blend of four ancient herbal remedies, long used in traditional Indian Ayurvedic, Chinese, and Japanese medicine. Like other CLE products, Alistrol is produced from herbs raised organically and harvested carefully by CLE on its own farm plots and processed using its own proprietary methods, for excellent quality control and freedom from adulterants. It has no known interactions with prescription medicines, so you can keep on taking whatever your personal medicinal regime has previously been calling for you to take. CLE offers Alistrol in the form of accurately premeasured 500-milligram vegetarian capsules. So, if your blood pressure needs to be a bit lower, try Alistrol!