Why are physicians so ignorant about blood pressure?

While concurring with your views, sadly I'm unable to approve of the disparaging terms in which you've expressed them, and the generalizations you make.

Not all doctors and scientists working in that field agree with the views like those above, and others parroted on sites like Answers, and many (like me) are fully aware of the silliness of the "hypertension" concept and are working to bring some light into the discussion, by pointing up many of the more fanciful, and obviously nonsensical assertions and assumptions. (Such as, for example, the quaint idea that is even physically possible, significantly to raise the ambient pressure of the volume of blood in a distant secondary artery, by injecting about 70 mils. of ventricular blood at "systolic" pressure into the root of the aorta, where the greater body of arterial blood volume is at 'diastolic" pressure. A quite scientifically impossible feat !)

What you say is quite right, and the only evidence is that high BP readings are associated with higher cardiac 'incidents', and that certain medications tending to lower BP readings sometimes appear to improve outcomes, but only marginally. I think that's a fair summary both of what you're saying and the sate of the art? The point you have haven't made is the harm done to individuals by artificial lowering of both heart rates and BP readings inappropriately.

Personally, -and I'm nearing the end of my life now so won't be playing much of a further part, - I think the only way forward is to put aside just for a while the corset (strait-jacket?) of so-called "Evidence-based-Medicine" approach, and reliance solely on "peer-reviewed" publications. In my own discipline, for instance, we aren't allowed the luxury of simple 'evidence', but must stick to fact. Evidence comes cheaply in science, fact somewhat more hard to come by.

How many "peers" did Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton have, and what peers can review direct challenges to tenaciously-defended orthodoxy? What of Phlogiston? and that bedrock of early 20th Century science, "the Aether" through which we all knew light travelled?

And if Einstein had deferred to his "peers" we'd know nothing about Relativity, even now. After all, look at the "evidence" -never mind the facts.

Then cross-disciplinary boundary discussion could take place freely using fact (-as opposed to evidence-based) data to be disseminated, and paradoxes, inconsistencies, and new light to be brought to bear on the subject.

I think it is fair to say (without generalizing!) that the medical profession has reached a point where it has tended to treat non-medics a tad patronizingly, in the fashion of "There, there,! Don't you worry your pretty little heads about it! Trust us, We're doctors".

Has the time not come when Quantum Physicists, Research Chemists, Nobel Laureate Mathematicians, an the like can be trusted as grown-ups, -despite not having been trained by Sir Lancelot Spratt?

Far be it from me to treat the subject lightly, but isn't this about the Bleeding-Time it was ?

But I do agree with you that it is remarkable, (-odd in fact), that many doctors in my experience, sincere, clever, and dedicated, while acknowledging the flaws in what they were taught, and procedures they see being absurd, persist in following without question practices they know to be little more than witchcraft or "white magic"......

sorry, but it does benefit one's health even if just to stop headaches and ringing in the ear, elevated bp has also been shown to cause strokes by putting too much pressure on fragile blood vessels in the brain.

I'm not going to repeat what your physician did. Here is proof since you seem so hard headed.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/high-blood-pressu...

That should break it down for you simply and how it can damage your body.

"There is no data that high blood pressure is a problem or that lowering it helps anyone" -- Why are you so ignorant, period?

Maybe because they have experience and see the changes it makes in their patients......