Dr. Iona Heath, a retired general practitioner and member of the UK’s Royal College of General Practitioners, writes in JAMA Internal Medicine‘s “Less Is More” column about “Waste and Harm in the Treatment of Mild Hypertension.” (subscription required for access to full text)
This is a topic that receives very little attention.
After all, who can argue with attempts for early intervention against “the silent killer”? Well, evidence is not a bad argument, writes Heath, a leading voice against disease-mongering.
Excerpts:
This is worth noting: I could not find one mainstream news organization that reported on Heath’s article. Why not? Too contrarian? It’s just mild hypertension?
We have news organizations that publish stories about journal articles on case series of 1 to 4 patients and make sweeping proclamations based on these. Then why not this?
ADDENDUM ON MAY 30:
On a Forbes blog, Dr. Peter Lipson challenges Heath’s stance, concluding: “One Cochrane report combining four studies is not about to change the way most of us practice medicine. Given the disease burden caused by high blood pressure, none of us should rush to raise our treatment thresholds. While Dr. Heath raises some interesting points, her call for significantly raising the treatment threshold (to 160/100) should be discarded until stronger evidence supports her ideas.”
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