Not a doctor, but a medical assistant- “My blood pressure isn’t normally that high!”
My patient is panicking after seeing the numbers and swears up and down that the high BP is wildly abnormal and incredibly worrying. I don’t see any filled BP med prescriptions on their chart. I run the machine again, I get a manual BP, I get the nurse involved, we start checking in-depth for symptoms of a hypertensive crisis, we involve the doctor in case the patient needs to be admitted, and fifteen minutes later the patient comes out with “Well, I guess I haven’t taken my blood pressure medication at all in the past week. Could that be affecting it?”.
They were under the impression that being prescribed the medication would immediately change their blood pressure, even before they actually started taking the medication.
I’ve started asking about meds right away to head off the panicking when the BP comes back high, as it almost always does in our clinic.
My patient is panicking after seeing the numbers and swears up and down that the high BP is wildly abnormal and incredibly worrying. I don’t see any filled BP med prescriptions on their chart. I run the machine again, I get a manual BP, I get the nurse involved, we start checking in-depth for symptoms of a hypertensive crisis, we involve the doctor in case the patient needs to be admitted, and fifteen minutes later the patient comes out with “Well, I guess I haven’t taken my blood pressure medication at all in the past week. Could that be affecting it?”.
They were under the impression that being prescribed the medication would immediately change their blood pressure, even before they actually started taking the medication.
I’ve started asking about meds right away to head off the panicking when the BP comes back high, as it almost always does in our clinic.
