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Comment by dgacmu | Hacker News Reader

It's frustrating. I usually bike to the doctor's office, and every time I warn them that they're going to get a systolic 10 higher than if they'll wait until the end of the appointment. They don't wait. The tech-taken entry gets put in the EMR. The doctor takes my BP again at the end, says "oh, great" and that reading gets ignored. :p

As a sibling comment noted, I ended up deciding to just watch my BP at home every now and then. It turns out it's fine and it reduced my metaphorical blood pressure to monitor it myself.

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However, as discovered during a family heart crisis, medical professionals will routinely ignore any kind of heart rate or blood pressure readings that you take at home. In my experience, it's not until they see the same measurement during the ($$$) ambulance ride that they take it seriously.

It really really depends on the office and their practices. I visited (and later brought my mom) to a cardiologist who is a terrible doctor, but his office does instruct you to log your blood pressure and then they review the logs. So at least they do that right.

What they do wrong: Queuing up 10 patients at a time, seeing like 60 a day, and then jumping from room to room like a kid with a bad case of ADHD. Dude told the assistant to give my mom 1 bp medicine, rushed out to another patient, and then rushed back 2 minutes later "no, give her this one instead!"

I can't trust that LOL. Our primary doctor got mad at me for taking my mom there and called the cardiologist a "f-ing a-hole" because he had a bad experience with his aunt going there LOL.

Honestly I ... I won't be going back, but I don't hate the dude. He's generally spot-on, even if he's rushed and his medicine advice is sketchy.

My primary care recommended taking my BP at home periodically and even wanted to calibrate my home system against the office system. I do tend to test higher in the doctor's office but I still periodically take it at home.

The good doctor offices do recommend all that. :)

To be fair, I'm guessing a lot of people really suck at it lol.

I found that taking it at home helped a lot with white coat syndrome, I was more relaxed and more able to tell when I'd settled. I also just set a timer when walking and told the nurse "no not yet" when they tried to take my BP. They listened except the one nurse who insisted I was wrong and that I was 5'11" not 6'2" which was entered in by the urgent care the day before because people get shorter as they get older. You know, a day later, at 40, after being 6'2" since I was 18. no possible way she could be wrong, everyone else was. Also tried to mark me as an active smoker because I'd been in a resturant with smoking before, in the 90s and she had magically never been around smoke in her 50 years. The doctor corrected the smoker note but the height hung around in some SOT field even though the next 15 height measurements were 6'2" until I had an extra 10 minutes with a PA who went over all my records with me and corrected things.

I had trouble with 2 of the BPs drugs, one gave me head spins in the afternoon seated in my car sometimes, another gave me the dry cough (could feel a prickle in my thorat). My bp is actually high esp when I've had caffiene (what coder doesnt), move around, etc, but it's usually low pre-hyper tension. I also had it taken about 300 times in the last 6 months getting certified as an EMT. There's a LOT of variation in how the tools take the BP and just how close you're listening. I compared a manual cuff with one of the fancy automated ones and it's not that hard to hear your dystolic down 10 below what the automated reads. Same with systolic, you can hear it higher if you really listen before it starts sounding like a watch with another 10 spread, and you leave that cuff at 200 for 10 seconds and everyone's going to read higher and tense up more. I can feel my blood pressure surge any time an automated machine decides "nope I need to go higher on systolic" and it squeezes and I know I'm going to read high and have yet another conversation with the nurse and doctor. Just take it to 200 and come down stupid machine.

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