Is infusion effective for preventing high blood pressure?

According to the current clinical consensus, relying on infusion to prevent hypertension and its complications has basically no effect. Blind infusion may bring additional health risks.

I have been working in primary care outpatient clinics for many years. When spring and autumn change, I always encounter many elderly patients with high blood pressure who come to the door and ask for infusion of medicine that "activates blood circulation, removes blood stasis, and unblocks blood vessels." They say that many old people around me do this. After the infusion, their whole body feels warm and their head does not feel dizzy. They feel that it can prevent strokes, and it is much more worry-free than remembering to take antihypertensive medicine every day. In fact, this idea is really a common misunderstanding. The damage caused by high blood pressure to blood vessels is accumulated over many years. The atherosclerotic plaques on the blood vessel walls are like the hard scale accumulated in the tap water pipes that have been used for more than ten years. How can it be "flushed away" by injecting blood-activating and blood-stasis-removing medicine for a few days? The drugs brought into the body by infusion are metabolized in three to five days, and it is impossible to maintain the "preventive effect" for several months.

Of course, a small number of colleagues at the grassroots level will mention that for those hypertensive patients who have not had a good rest recently, have persistent dizziness and bloating, and whose blood rheology examination shows obvious hypercoagulability, short-term infusion of drugs to improve circulation for 3-5 days can temporarily relieve discomfort. However, this is at most a temporary improvement of symptoms and is far from "prevention", and it is impossible to replace daily blood pressure management.

Don’t take it seriously. Last winter, I treated a 61-year-old man who had suffered from high blood pressure for 8 years. After hearing others say that infusions are useful for prevention, I simply stopped taking antihypertensive drugs every day and only infused fluids twice a year to save trouble. As a result, I had a cerebral infarction and fell when I went out to buy groceries. When he was delivered, his systolic blood pressure reached 210mmHg. This was because his blood pressure had not been controlled for a long time and he took a shortcut by relying on infusions alone.

To be honest, there is no one-and-done shortcut to the prevention of high blood pressure. If you really want to prevent complications, take antihypertensive drugs on time as prescribed by your doctor, don’t eat more than 5 grams of salt a day, take a walk for half an hour three or four days a week, and measure your blood pressure at home regularly, it is more reliable than expensive infusions.