Hypertension diets, high blood pressure, low in salt, high in potassium.

I disagree.There are people who have kept their levels of potasium up and not needed supplements. My Dr. says my potasium levels are fine because I eat a lot of potassium foods throughout the day. Diuretics dump potasium, but if they thought diet didn't help, then why even suggest oranges and bananas? The problem is they tell people to eat a banana or an orange at breakfast like that will be the answer, yet most people here are diabetic and it messes with their sugar. Also the diruetics mess with potasuim levels throughout the day, not just in the morning, right after taking the diuretic. Two diets, DASH and PAMM, both by Doctors and the first one by researchers says that potasium levels can be maintained if you keep 2xs the amount of potassium in your diet to salt. After I spoke to my hypertension Dr. about the DASH diet, he was impressed that I knew about it, and was using it so well to keep my potassium levels up. NO Thanks to him, he never spoke of it. My regular Doctor thought it was great that the urologist has spoken to me about it, but he didn't. I spoke to the Dr. My regular Dr. believes in diet, but my urologist doesn't. My regular Dr. is slim and on a diet and my age. My urologist is obese and our age and didn't say a thing about diet for over a year, I researched and approached it. Now, my friend comes to me and says that her Dr. told her to do a hypertension diet and I asked her what one and she didn't know. So I printed out the DASH one and loaned her my PAMM book because these idiots up here tell you to go do something and don't tell you how. My brother was diagnosed with diabetes and told, "Don't eat sugar, loose weight." Good-bye. Like my parents were told they had hypertension, "Don't eat salt, have a banana or orange with breakfast, come back in a month for blood tests." That's the information we get up here. You have this, go do that, take a pill, come back in a month, we'll do tests and give you more pills. They used to give you a diabetic diet or send you to a nutritionist, but now they don't. My brother is in his 40s and on soooo many pills it is unbelievable. My Dad, they gave blood pressure pills to, then diabetic insulin ones and every month, they upped both because both were high. Then they said they could do nothing for him because he was on the strongest of both and they couldn't regulate them. So my Mom looked them up in a PDR and found out that the side-effect of the blood pressure meds was higher sugar and the side effect of the diabetic meds was higher blood pressure. So they changed his meds, but put the new meds on a high level that my Dad didn't need (should have been the level before the meds made him spiral upward) and they almost killed him. If a person has kidney damage, I agree with you. But if they have hypertension just because they're fat or don't have proper diet and exercise, that's different. One of my brothers dieted and exercised for a while and didn't need the pills, any of them. Follow what guideline my Dr. gave me? He only said don't add salt to food or buy food with salt added. No guidelines about how much salt/sodium or how much potassium that is naturally in food that I need. You have most of our Drs. confused with ones that give a dang or know something or even care. They have 100 patients in a day for 3 Drs., you're in and out like they're building a car (assembly line patients). Unless you know what questions to ask and hurry up and ask them, you get nothing. My brother was in shock and denial when they said high blood pressure and diabetes. So they just told him to read labels, keep the salt and sugar down. There are no labels on sausage for how much salt and sugar and he eats that all the time. Does that sound like he got good medical advice? Then his girlfriend asked about going to see a dietician, "Your insurance won't pay for that."

It ranges between the rich and the poor. In the USA, we've heard horror stories of how bad it is in Canada, mostly perpetuated by insurance companies that want us to not have a national healthcare system. Things were different, but the companies are now under orders to cut costs. There is a lot of unnecessary medical stuff going on here. In short, it's a mess.

Sorry, I did not realize that medical care was that bad in the US. Here if you need a consult with a dietician or specialist for a medical reason then medicare pays for it and that would include hypertension from being too big around the middle. The only reason medicare would not pay for a dietician is if you just wanted to lose weight and had no medical reason to make it a serious concern. Good doctors here consider teaching a part of their job and you get even more teaching from the nurses and doctors at the free clinics they hold at the hospital for certain conditions. I'm not saying we don't have bad doctors, we do, but if you don't get the teaching you need from your doctor he refers you to a clinic and most time you get both. Hypertension is taken serious in Canada because it can lead to more serious problems when left unproperly treated and they always investigate what the underlaying cause is as there is always one. What I don't understand is that if medical care is so bad in the US why is there such a fight down there against the type of medicare that is available here in Canada? There are some things here not covered, such as prescriptions, but overall most is covered through our system, even hospital stays. We do not have a perfect system, I don't think there is such a thing, but we do have a good one.

My weight has pushed it up. I have tried to loose weight. Not working. I have recently found out that many in my family have thyroid problems. That usually equals weight gain and high blood pressure both. But with $80 co-pay, I don't have enought $ to go get tested.