Tag: high blood pressure

High blood pressure: your doctor’s ignorance the real disease?

By Marika Sboros

Can you turn something into a disease just by giving it a fancy Latin title? Scottish GP Dr Malcolm Kendrick says you can.

High blood pressure is just one example. Most medical doctors don’t know what causes high blood pressure in their patients, says Kendrick. At medical school, they learned that in most cases – around 90% – they’ll never know the cause, he says.

That percentage is probably higher, says Kendrick. But whatever the number, he says it’s rare to find a clear, specific cause. Here’s the real problem of the medical profession’s ignorance about causes of high blood pressure, as he sees it: Most doctors are not very good at admitting when they haven’t a clue about something. And haven’t ever been.



By Marika Sboros

Dr James DiNicolantonio, a US cardiovascular research scientist, is up next in Foodmed.net’s Vital Signs Q&A series of personality profiles. He shows why the US legal profession’s loss has been the health profession’s gain.

DiNicolantonio once wanted to be a lawyer but his parents steered him into the family tradition of pharmacy.

He is also a doctor of pharmacy at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, an associate editor of British Medical Journal’s (BMJ) Open Heart and a mythbuster of note.

He is perhaps best known these days as author of The Salt Fix. It’s a seminal book that dashes to death the low-salt myth. In it, he provides fascinating new understanding of salt’s essential role in our health and what happens when we aren’t getting enough salt. And why that has far-reaching, even heart-stopping, implications.