Blood Pressured to Death (Part 1 of 3)

How to destroy your kidneys in 5 easy steps!

The Blood Pressure Lie

I first became interested in blood pressure, not because of a number, but because of what happened to people after the number was treated. Years ago, I heard a story from a “colleague” who had spent most of her working life in the medical field doing home visits, hospice work, and long-term patient care. This is the kind of medicine that doesn’t fit neatly into spreadsheets or guidelines. She used a manual blood pressure cuff, took her time, and did something that, according to modern medicine, should not have worked.

When patients measured blood pressures considered “dangerously high,” she told them their pressure was fine. She explained the reading calmly and did not frame it as dangerous. If the cuff read something like 170/96, she would smile and say, “Your blood pressure is actually very good, about 128 over 65.” She didn’t lecture them. She didn’t warn them about strokes or heart attacks. She simply removed the anxiety and the obsessive medical meaning that had been attached to the number.

Most patients reacted with shock. “What? No! It’s never been that low. High blood pressure runs in my family.”

This is where things get interesting. Over the next few visits, something strange began to happen. The patient’s’ actual blood pressure readings began to fall. Then they stayed lower, often right around what she had told them they were. In many cases, the numbers were normalized enough that medications were reduced or stopped altogether.

This should not be possible if high blood pressure is primarily a mechanical failure from faulty genetics that requires chemical correction.

And yet it happened, repeatedly, with almost every patient, with only a few exceptions, usually people who had been taking blood pressure medications for more than five years.

That story stayed with me because it mirrored what I had already been seeing for decades. Not dramatic collapses or sudden catastrophes, but slow, quiet harm. Patients are placed on blood pressure medications for years, sometimes decades, often for numbers that fluctuate depending on where, when, and how they were measured. Over time, many of those patients developed kidney disease. Some progressed to renal failure. Dialysis entered the picture. Dying with kidney failure is not dramatic. It is prolonged, exhausting, and quietly devastating. And I think you all know who that “colleague’ is. Evidenced based reality is the only true measure.

The Pattern Impossible to Ignore.

Treat the number long enough, and the organs that depend on finely regulated blood flow begin to fail. The cruel irony is that the very medications meant to “protect” often accelerate the decline, especially when blood pressure is lowered without regard for context, physiology, or actual perfusion.

What made this even harder to reconcile was how easily blood pressure could change without drugs at all. A calmer environment. A slower pace. Six deep breaths. Hydration. Weight loss. Removing alcohol or excess caffeine. Simply not being frightened by a cuff tightening around the arm. Or waiting with the cuff on the arm for 20 minutes. Something most practitioners don’t have time for.

If the medical system were genuinely interested in understanding health, it would begin by asking what is in a person’s kitchen cabinets, how much alcohol or caffeine they consume, how they sleep, how much they weigh, and what stresses accompany the act of measurement itself. Instead, the indoctrinated, often overweight physician reaches for a prescription pad and mumbles something about losing weight, switching from vodka to red wine, and limiting caffeine to one or two cups a day.

What if blood pressure has been misunderstood not because clinicians are careless, but because the underlying model guiding its interpretation is wrong? What if the obsession with numbers has obscured the conditions under which blood actually nourishes tissue? And what if, in trying to control a proxy, we have ignored the system it was meant to represent?

My opening story should not work. But it does. And that alone suggests that something fundamental about blood pressure warrants re-examination.

Blood Pressure as a Disease

Blood pressure did not enter medicine as a disease, but simply as an observation.

In the early 1700s, physicians were not hunting for “hypertension.” They were still arguing about whether blood even circulated in a closed loop. When pressure was first measured, it was done invasively, crudely, and almost always in animals. Glass tubes were inserted directly into arteries and watched as blood rose and fell.

These early experiments were dramatic, but their purpose was narrow. They were asking only one question: Does blood move with force? Only if you acted on the movement with a kink, like a hose flowing, will the pressure be released if you step on it or kink it somewhere. That was it.

No one walked away thinking pressure itself was pathological. No one proposed a correction. No one assigned moral meaning to a number. That would be insane. Like blaming the water spigot for the kink in the hose and thinking the pressure rising from the kink was the problem, instead of just removing the kink.

For more than a century, blood pressure appeared in medical writing only alongside obvious disease. Advanced kidney failure. Dropsy. Severe heart enlargement. Late-stage illness. Pressure was never discussed in isolation. It showed up as an observable, measurable part of collapse, not as an early warning system demanding intervention.

By the early 1800s, a consistent pattern became impossible to ignore. People with damaged kidneys often have enlarged hearts and elevated arterial pressure. The sequence was clear and uncontested. Kidneys failed first, pressure rose second.

This was not mysterious. Kidneys were already understood to be filters. Filtration requires force. When filtration becomes difficult, whether from damage, inflammation, dehydration, or fluid imbalance, the body increases pressure to keep waste moving out. Elevated blood pressure was correctly interpreted as simple compensation. I will repeat this over and over so we all understand there is not grey area here, this isn’t rocket science after all—I am not sending penis shaped hunks of junk to the Bermuda Triangle.

No one argued the heart had suddenly “gone bad.” The heart was responding to downstream resistance. The pressure rise was functional, not defective. Just like the hose example. The pressure is what happens after the root cause, like stepping on a hose.

This understanding was so basic that it barely needed explanation. Lowering pressure without improving kidney function would further reduce filtration. That was dangerous, not therapeutic. Obviously. Early physicians correctly worried far more about pressure being too low than too high, especially in older or chronically ill patients.

As the nineteenth century progressed, something new emerged. Doctors began measuring pressure in people who were not yet visibly sick. Some had higher readings before obvious kidney failure appeared. This raised curiosity, not panic.

Higher pressure was treated as information.
A clue.
A sign of strain or a kink somewhere in the system.

It was Never a Diagnosis

There were still no drugs, no numerical cutoffs, no treatment mandates. Blood pressure was interpreted alongside digestion, hydration, stress, emotional state, elimination, and overall constitution.

In fact, many physicians believed higher pressure could be protective, especially with aging. As vessels stiffened over time, increased pressure was thought to help maintain circulation to vital organs. Lowering it indiscriminately was considered reckless.

Then came the real turning point, and it had nothing to do with new biological insight. Blood pressure was easy to measure. Or what they called blood pressure.

A number could now be produced quickly, repeatedly, and on almost anyone, sick or well. For the first time, pressure could be abstracted from context and recorded as a standalone value.

This changed behavior.

Once a number exists, it can be compared and manipulated for profit. Then, once it can be tracked, it invites the interpreter to assign meaning.
Once it can be altered, it invites intervention. And the for-profit medical machine marches on. Meaning began attaching to the measurement itself rather than to the circumstances that produced it.

The label came first. Concern followed. Treatment came later. Early chemical attempts to alter blood pressure in the mid-twentieth century were crude and often dangerous. They proved only one thing: the number could be manipulated.

They did not prove that manipulating it improved health, and still haven’t yet here we are.

By the time more refined drugs appeared after World War II, the conceptual groundwork was already laid. Blood pressure had been reframed as something that should be lower. Elevated readings stopped being treated primarily as signals and started being treated as problems in their own right.

The Key Point…

Blood pressure did not become a disease because new discoveries disproved earlier understanding. The kidneys did not stop needing pressure. Compensation did not suddenly become a failure. What changed was that pressure became actionable and therefore profitable. That is the industry’s wet dream. Find a chemical that manipulates and changes a lab value, a pressure, etc.

Once medicine found chemicals that could reliably change the number, attention shifted away from asking why pressure was elevated and toward how aggressively it should be lowered. Or more to the point, how many more drugs they could sell to the public?

The effect became the target. The cause faded into the background. It was now simply a numbers game.

That is the foundation on which modern blood pressure medicine rests.

What Blood Pressure Actually Is

Before going any further, blood pressure has to be stripped of the mythology that has grown around it.

Blood pressure is not a substance.
It is not a disease.
It is not something stored in the body.

Blood pressure is simply a measurement of force.

More specifically, it reflects the force required to move blood through blood vessels under resistance at a given moment. That resistance is not fixed. It changes constantly.

Blood pressure is not measured in a relaxed, neutral state. No true baseline is being captured. What is measured is force under interference, at two moments in a moving system.

The two numbers come from listening, not seeing.

A cuff is tightened around the arm until blood flow is temporarily restricted. As the pressure is slowly released, blood is forced through a partially collapsed vessel. What we hear are vibrations and turbulence created by that forced passage.

The top number, the systolic pressure, marks the point at which blood first forces its way through under compression and becomes audible. Essentially, how strong the force can act, or how much the spigot is open.

The bottom number, the diastolic pressure, marks the point at which that turbulence disappears. Or how weak the pressure can go. They way we determine this? We simply stop hearing sound.

The idea that the lower number represents a “resting” state is misleading. Blood is still moving. Vessels are still constricted to some degree. Pressure is still being maintained to keep flow going through organs that require constant filtration, especially the kidneys.

Both numbers capture how much force the entire system is exerting to maintain flow against resistance which changes from minute to minute.

Blood pressure, then, is not a measure of calm or equilibrium. It is a snapshot of how hard the system is working in that moment to keep blood moving where it needs to go under the conditions present at that time.

This is why blood pressure cannot be separated from context.

Isn’t it strange that we squeeze an artery shut, wait for blood to force its way through, listen to vibrations created by that interference, and then write down two numbers as if they reveal something permanent about a person?

We are not measuring a steady state.
We are listening to the turbulence created by disruption and calling it into form, like an ancient spellcaster. Now we have the belief in the disease. What they are always after. Because without your consent, none of their fear-mongering would be effective. You must accept their numbers as true.

The body is moving, adapting, and responding. We freeze one noisy moment in time and treat it like a verdict.

Using blood pressure to explain disease is like squeezing a garden hose and measuring how hard the water pushes back. You are not measuring the soil, the sprinkler, or what the water is meant to nourish. You are measuring resistance in the hose at that moment. The tighter the hose, the higher the pressure reading.

That does not tell you why the hose is tight. It does not tell you whether the pressure is helpful or harmful downstream. It tells you only that resistance exists.

Blood pressure works the same way. It reflects how much force is being used to overcome resistance, not whether that force is appropriate, protective, or destructive in the larger system.

Blood vessels are not rigid pipes. They are living tissue. They constrict and relax in response to signals from the nervous system, blood condition, hydration status, temperature, posture, digestion, emotional state, and stress.

When vessels constrict, pressure rises.
When they relax, pressure falls.

Lowering the number without understanding why the system raised it is like loosening the hose without checking whether water is still reaching what needs watering.

Blood pressure simply reflects conditions, never identifiers.

And once that is understood, the next question becomes unavoidable: How did a constantly changing, situational signal come to be treated as a fixed diagnosis?

Hearing the Breath?

When blood pressure is measured, we are not observing a still system.

We are listening to a body that is breathing.

Blood pressure is measured in a chest that rises and falls, a diaphragm that moves, lungs that fill and empty, and pressures inside the body that shift with every breath. The cardiovascular system does not operate independently of this cycle.

Anyone who has watched an arterial line waveform knows this. Pressure rises and falls in rhythm with respiration. Inhalation alters venous return. Exhalation alters resistance. These changes are constant.

Breathing patterns vary. Sometimes the breath is shallow. Sometimes forceful. Sometimes held without awareness. Sometimes rapid and anxious. Sometimes slow and expansive. Blood pressure shifts accordingly.

When we place a cuff on an arm and listen for sounds, we are not isolating the heart or the vessels. We are inserting ourselves into a moving organism and then treating the result as if it were static.

What we call “high blood pressure” may often be the audible imprint of how a person is breathing in that moment.

Forceful inhalation changes internal pressures and alters blood return to the heart. Tense or prolonged exhalation increases downstream resistance. Breath-holding, which anxious patients frequently do during measurement, amplifies both effects. Vessels tighten. Turbulence increases. The number rises.

None of this is routinely accounted for.

We tell patients to sit still, but we do not guide breathing. We rarely observe whether they are breathing freely or holding their breath. Yet the measurement cannot be separated from respiration.

In everyday life, this is obvious. We feel pressure rise when we brace, strain, or hold our breath. We feel it fall when we exhale or relax.

If blood pressure changes with breathing, and breathing changes with fear, posture, and anticipation, then a single reading cannot represent a fixed internal state.

It represents a snapshot, just a moving moment in time.

How Can Breathing and Reassurance Change the Number?

One of the most inconvenient facts about blood pressure is how quickly it can change.Slow, deep breathing often lowers blood pressure within minutes and continues to do so. That alone tells you the number is responsive, not static.

This does not require a mysterious explanation. Slow breathing shifts the nervous system away from threat signaling. Sympathetic tone eases. Vascular resistance drops. Pressure follows. The same mechanism explains why reassurance works. If the cuff, the setting, and the expectation of danger trigger a stress response, then reassurance removes the stimulus that was inflating the measurement.

When a person is told calmly that their pressure is fine, the system often downshifts. Breathing becomes easier. Muscular tension decreases. Vessels relax. The number falls. This does not prove that blood pressure never rises pathologically. It demonstrates something simpler. The measurement has from the meaning attached to it.

Repeated monitoring can reinforce the opposite effect. Anticipation raises pressure. The reading confirms fear. Fear raises pressure again. The loop sustains itself.

Underlying all of this is a continuous coordination system.

Breathing alters internal pressures and autonomic tone quickly.
Autonomic tone alters vascular resistance quickly.
The kidneys adjust volume and baseline pressure over longer time scales. The cuff reading reflects the system’s combined output at that moment. Once that is understood, it becomes difficult to argue that a single, context-loaded measurement represents a fixed disease.

It looks much more like a signal from a system adapting to immediate conditions.

And that raises the next question: if blood pressure responds this readily to breath, reassurance, and context, why did medicine ever decide to treat it as a diagnosis rather than a message?

The Full Bladder Problem

There is another completely ordinary variable that reliably raises blood pressure, and almost no one bothers to control for it.

A full bladder.

Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in real clinical practice has seen this. Measure someone’s blood pressure when they clearly need to urinate, and the number is higher. Have them empty their bladder, wait a few minutes, and measure again. The pressure significantly drops.

This is neither subtle nor rare, and it is not pathology.

A full bladder activates the sympathetic nervous system. It creates internal pressure, discomfort, and a low-grade stress signal. The body responds exactly as it should. Vessels tighten. Pressure rises. This is the same threat-and-demand signaling seen with pain, breath-holding, anxiety, or physical strain.

In plain terms, the body is saying, “Something needs attention.”

We rush them into a chair, tighten a cuff, and capture a number under artificial pressure, because that is where the revenue lies.

Then we write it down as if it represents anything more than a snapshot of the wave in the ocean.

If a full bladder can raise blood pressure measurably within minutes, then what exactly are we claiming to diagnose when we treat that number as a fixed trait?

This matters because it exposes the problem again, from another angle.

Blood pressure responds rapidly to correctable, everyday conditions. Bladder fullness, like breathing, posture, hydration, pain, and fear, changes pressure quickly. Imagine what will happen if we treat that blood pressure with drugs—what happens when the pressure drops?

Where This Gets Uncomfortable

If blood pressure can be pushed up by breath-holding, fear, posture, reassurance, or something as undignified as a full bladder, then the real question is not:

“How do we lower the number?”

The real question is far more uncomfortable.

Why did lowering the number become the goal at all?

That didn’t happen by accident. And it didn’t happen because the physiology suddenly changed.

In the next article, we’ll trace how a situational, adaptive signal quietly lost its context and hardened into a diagnosis. How a measurement meant to describe conditions became a label meant to define people. And how, once chemicals existed that could reliably move that label, the story rearranged itself around the intervention.

We’ll also look at figures like Thomas Cowan and Andrew Kaufman, not as saviors or villains, but as symptoms. When people sense something is wrong with the blood pressure narrative, they often swing from institutional certainty straight into absolutism. Different costumes. Same mistake.

Drugs were never the answer, because blood pressure was never the cause or the disease.

And yet drugs became the centerpiece anyway. Not because they restored understanding, but because they offered control over a number that had already been mistaken for truth.

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Disclaimer

The views expressed in this article are the author’s opinions, based on historical sources, public records, and secondary reporting. Where possible I cite or reference archival material and peer-reviewed work; any statements of historical fact are drawn from those public sources. This piece is intended for informational and opinion purposes only and is not offered as a statement of proven legal wrongdoing by any named company or individual.

If you believe this article contains a factual error, or if you represent an entity mentioned and would like to provide source documents or request a correction, please contact the author at robin@purifywithin.com. Corrections will be made promptly where warranted.

Readers should not construe this article as legal or medical advice. For legal guidance about defamation risk, publishing rights, or corrections, consult a qualified attorney. For medical questions about Suramin or any other treatment, consult a licensed healthcare professional.

References

Autonomic nervous system and situational BP changes

• Mancia, G., & Grassi, G. (2014). The autonomic nervous system and hypertension. Circulation Research, 114(11), 1804–1814.
https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.114.302524

• Goldstein, D. S. (2010). Adrenal responses to stress. Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology, 30(8), 1433–1440.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10571-010-9606-9

Measurement context and variability (non–white coat framing)

• O’Brien, E., et al. (2003). Blood pressure measurement: What is the ideal method? Journal of Hypertension, 21(5), 821–848.
https://doi.org/10.1097/00004872-200305000-00002

• Stergiou, G. S., et al. (2018). A universal standard for the validation of blood pressure measuring devices. Hypertension, 71(3), 368–374.
https://doi.org/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.117.10237

Kidney–pressure relationship (historical + physiologic)

• Guyton, A. C. (1991). Blood pressure control—Special role of the kidneys and body fluids. Science, 252(5014), 1813–1816.
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.2063193

• Hall, J. E., et al. (2012). Renal function and blood pressure regulation. American Journal of Physiology – Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, 302(3), R343–R354.
https://doi.org/10.1152/ajpregu.00014.2011

Breathing, respiration, and rapid BP changes

• Bernardi, L., et al. (2001). Slow breathing reduces chemoreflex response to hypoxia and hypercapnia and increases baroreflex sensitivity. Journal of Hypertension, 19(12), 2221–2229.
https://doi.org/10.1097/00004872-200112000-00016

• Joseph, C. N., et al. (2005). Slow breathing improves arterial baroreflex sensitivity and decreases blood pressure in essential hypertension. Hypertension, 46(4), 714–718.
https://doi.org/10.1161/01.HYP.0000179581.76301.64

• Parati, G., et al. (2002). Respiratory influences on blood pressure variability and baroreflex sensitivity. Hypertension, 40(6), 715–721.
https://doi.org/10.1161/01.HYP.0000038471.06144.31