DrKrupka.com

I want to take a minute and talk to you about checking your blood pressure. I had this discussion yesterday and it was suggested to me to do a video on it, and I think that's probably a good idea. I'll briefly go over mechanically how to check your blood pressure, but the bigger point of this video is to talk about how much data to collect to get an understanding of what's going on. So I'll get to that in just a second. As far as mechanically how to do it, I mean we all have the experience of going into our doctor's office or dentist or whoever, and you get your blood pressure checked and maybe it's good, maybe it's not, but it's a single reading and a single reading is never, well, I shouldn't say never. A single reading is generally not considered to be enough to make clinical decisions like should we put someone on medication or not.

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Now, there are readings that are so out of the normal range that you have to take action, right? But when you're talkin...

I have a list of things that I wish most of my patients had at home, and I would imagine most doctors feel the same way. So I'm going to share that list with you and see if there are gaps in this or someplace where you could kind of fill in and make sure that you have a full compliment of these things at home. Now, this is more about assessment or diagnostics. This is not for treatment. That's a different discussion. But if you were to call me after hours or on the weekend and say, Hey, I've got this situation, I'm not sure what to do, being able to get some information from these few things would likely help me make a decision. So let's run through the list real quick. This is not in any particular order. The first three or four of these could probably all arguably be in the most important spot, but the first thing I put on the list was a blood pressure cuff.

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Being able to know if you're dealing with either a high blood pressure or low blood pressure sit...