Article: Everything you know about stress and high blood pressure is wrong

Sly Saint

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Your hectic job, difficult marriage, rebellious children and dwindling bank account? They're probably not raising your blood pressure in a medically meaningful way, according to the latest research.

The big picture: Rather than everyday stressors, the real culprits are genetics and poor habits that are often linked to stress, like overeating, smoking and hitting the bottle.

  • Commonly prescribed regimens — such as stress reduction, biofeedback and relaxation techniques — aren't effective in lowering blood pressure in ways that confer health benefits.
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Samuel Mann, a hypertension specialist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.
  • It's a "medical myth" that chronic stress causes hypertension — job stress in particular, says Mann, who reviewed dozens of studies on the topic and found no meaningful correlation.
  • "Yes, stress and emotional distress can transiently increase anyone’s blood pressure," Mann writes in a new book, "Hidden Within Us: A Radical New Understanding of the Mind-Body Connection."
  • "However, decades of mind-body research have failed to confirm that they cause sustained hypertension or that stress reduction and relaxation techniques can lead to sustained blood pressure lowering."
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but

New theory: While everyday stress doesn't cause chronic hypertension, repressed emotions — from childhood upheavals and other traumas — sometimes can, Mann writes in his new book.
  • "I'm introducing the concept of repressed emotions and their effects on our health, a concept that doesn't yet exist in medicine," he tells Axios.
  • His conclusions come from decades of interviews with patients who have hard-to-explain hypertension, who described severe traumas in their lives (from losing a child to surviving the Holocaust) yet remained upbeat.
  • Repressed emotions, whether or not we're aware of them, can cause hypertension, migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome and other conditions, Mann contends.
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https://www.axios.com/2022/12/14/hypertension-stress-high-blood-pressure-mind-body-wellness-pandemic
 
So repressed emotions can raise blood pressure and not repressing one's emotions is assumed to cause hysteria and anxiety.

Is there any normal function of the human brain and any normal emotion that people can display without being blamed for something that the medical profession doesn't want to deal with?
 
Wow that took a quick downturn. What does it say about medicine that they can go from one myth to another and never see the problem with the underlying thought process of thinking that wild speculation like this is simply not a valid way of understanding things? Also the disconnection from reality? That's just absurd:
New theory: While everyday stress doesn't cause chronic hypertension, repressed emotions — from childhood upheavals and other traumas — sometimes can, Mann writes in his new book.
  • "I'm introducing the concept of repressed emotions and their effects on our health, a concept that doesn't yet exist in medicine," he tells Axios.
  • His conclusions come from decades of interviews with patients who have hard-to-explain hypertension, who described severe traumas in their lives (from losing a child to surviving the Holocaust) yet remained upbeat.
  • Repressed emotions, whether or not we're aware of them, can cause hypertension, migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome and other conditions, Mann contends.
Click to expand...
There is a scene in the TV show House of cards (spoilers alert), where after having acceded to the presidency and months of "will he run again will he not?", there is a scene where the main character pretends to have a genuine epiphany, the face of surprise, and exclaims "I know! I will run for president" as a solution to the current problem, as if this hadn't been his entire goal all along. Like this dude genuinely pretends Freud's worst ideas are new? WTactualH?

This is as genuine as this, it has the exact same level of sincerity. Is that dude seriously pretending this very old idea that is extremely popular in medicine is new? Hard to say. It's too absurd to suspend disbelief and take it as anything but bullshitting. Then again, given the last few years, it's entirely possible that he actually believes it, even if he knows it's wrong. We've seen this everywhere, the ability to hold mutually exclusive ideas at the same time is not a problem in psychosomatic ideology, it's pretty much a requirement.

Obviously the issue with "stress" is that it's a substitute for exertion and that the bodies cannot overstretch this indefinitely. That's why every small bit of relaxation and enjoyment feels like it's less stressful, that's because it is, by the definition of being about relaxing, the opposite of exerting.

Once again, the notion of the brain being powerful is only ever mentioned in the context of creating illness. Nothing else. Never anything but that. The worst power anyone could have ever thought of. It's even worse than turning things to gold going wrong, as far as powers go.
 
  • "I'm introducing the concept of repressed emotions and their effects on our health, a concept that doesn't yet exist in medicine," he tells Axios.
    Click to expand...
    eh? lol wheres he been all this time? Does he really think he's introducing something new? :rofl:
@rvalle its just as you say.

yeesh HOC was a grim, disturbing show.
 
BrightCandle said:
They almost returned to the actual evidence before speculating even more, not about life stress, nope its all about your repressed emotions about the life trauma you never had.
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Watch for the follow-up article detailing how trauma from our past lives affects our biology today: harmonic echos interlinked through a multiverse of alternate, past and future selves, via quantum entanglement.
 
Sean said:
Well that went from promising to nonsense real quick.

We have come full circle back to Freud. It is like the previous century of medical science simply never happened.
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With stuff like that and the frequency of MDs who post stuff saying that almost all diseases could be avoided if people weren't stupid and ate well and exercised, I despair for what is even thought at medical school and where things are even going next, whether it's even possible to fix the current system. It's like the indoctrination in medicine ends up with a singular perspective, it stifles what makes human intelligence work.

It seems to have reached the limits of what an education focused exclusively on biology can do when they don't have the first clues to work on the biology. There is no plan B, everything non-biology in medicine is basically terrible or weird, and I'm not even including the BPS model yet, which is just failure by design. But it's researched and delivered strictly by people whose training is basically 95-99% biology.

It's really all up to other fields of science and technology. Fortunately that progress is inevitable, but this is the slowest possible pace of progress and barely anyone seems to notice. Instead most MDs seem to conclude that medical science must be mostly complete and the future is biopsychosocial. The contrast with technology fields, how quickly progress occurs and the sheer appetite for it, is simply absurd. It's like stepping out of science and into spirituality and ritual beliefs, too conservative, too hung up on myths and narratives.
 
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