Hypertension
High Blood Pressure can be quite worrying for some people, and difficult to get you interested in for others.
Generally speaking, short term high blood pressure measures are not concerning unless they come with: Chest Pain cardiac in nature, loss of consciousness, severe headache, neurological changes like weak arms/legs/face or speech changes. As such, getting an ER physician interested is very unlikely without those accompanying symptoms.
Over the long term, however, your family physician will be quite interested at getting it under control if it is consistently elevated. We do this to protect the small blood vessels in your body: in the brain, kidneys, eyes, and heart over time.
Steps on your blood pressure journey
We first need to affirm that your blood pressure is consistently above target on multiple occasions and not just when you're feeling stressed or nervous.
Our two methods that are considered gold standard are:
1) Ambulatory 24 hour monitoring
With this we send a request to groups who have this available, you wear it for a 24 hour period, return it and they send us a report of your blood pressure throughout both the day and night
2) Self Home Monitoring
You either purchase an approved cuff or we have one at the clinic for my patients to borrow as well. You take a measure at two scheduled times every day for 7 days using the methods in the handout linked above. "how to take your blood pressure at home" and bring in your recorded values for review.