Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Home blood pressure testing ?

A few years back I bought a little electrotonic gizmo monitor my BP. Worked fine until recently so I'm here to ask you rummies what has been a good fit for your needs if you don't mind please.

Thanks friends !

IME you pays your money and takes your chances. Walmart has quite an array of them. Supposedly, the manual ones are more accurate. The docs claim you should bring yours in and see how close it reads to theirs. IME, no two read the same and getting two readings from the same one that are anywhere near each other, can be a chore.

I have & use a Paramed.....$25-30 from you know who

Just checked it in fact

120/80

We went through three of the best available from Rite-aide. We did not like the results we were seeing, so we took each of them into the Dr's office and compared with a nurse with a stethoscope. The 1'st was 20 points high. The second was 12 points high. The third sample was 25 points high.

Rite-aide was good about giving our money back each time.

No recommendation for a good one. Just avoid the Rite-aide brand.

I've spent the last 20 years working transportation.

Almost every broker I know has one, most senior transportation people I know have one - all in our desks somewhere.

I have one from Life Source that the doc gave me. Works fine.

UA-851THW I do not use the wireless part of it. Just there on the screen.

Here

That Rite Aid monitor must be made by blood pressure med companies.

Mine is an Omron 3 Series. No complaints, and it seems to be accurate, compared to getting a nurse's reading at the Dr's office. Got it at Wallie's for about $50, as I recall. The ones with an arm band are MUCH more accurate than the wrist kind. LINK

What the hell is this about? Are you an air traffic controller?

nope

Just (for me) - over the road truck and trailer. It's an industry where much goes wrong that people never see.

Long hours, poor diet, lots of stress.

+1 for OMRON with the arm cuff. Mine has been accurate for 7 years.

About BP in a doctor's office, not 1 in 10 of the staff who take BPs does it correctly. Plus, if you see the doc infrequently all he has is a snapshot, when an average would give a better picture, due to the inherent variability of BP. I'm not trained in medicine but I do understand data analysis. The info doctors work from is scary, as is their cavalier attitude toward much of it.

By coincidence, I have an appointment with my retinal specialist today. Awhile ago one of his "techs" said, "Oh, I see your A1C is 8.6". Now I'm borderline diabetic, under good control, and my A1C has never been anywhere near 8.6, hovers around 6.0. Moreover, they are not connected to a data source that would show such a record, would only know what I told them. Then, they routinely ask me "what was your blood glucose this morning?" Damned if I know, I don't have a sticker routine. For some reason they treat me as a full blown diabetic. Like I said, scary.

I was told several for several years I was borderline diabetic. In my early 40’s and bullet proof. Didn’t concern me.
After my first heart attack brought on by diabetes, I started paying attention.
Being borderline is like being a little pregnant. Hasbeen

That's the truth. Of course blood glucose is a continuum, probably a normal curve, but they treat it as if it were binary, like your pregnancy example. The diagnostic threshold is just something agreed upon by the profession. My doctor kept saying looking at my labs "You're not diabetic." Then one time he casually said "You're diabetic". My A1C had crossed the threshold, something like 6.6. Although I take ultimate responsibility for my health, I wish the doctor had been a bit more assertive early on. I could have used a wakeup call. With exercise and diet over about six months, I dropped all my lab numbers and have stayed in the prediabetic range for 10 years, with just a low dose of Metformin. I consider myself lucky.

Paul

I have the same one for 6 years. My wife is a nurse, so she checked the accuracy over time, and it was always spot on.
It will give errors if the batteries are shot.

I agree with others that this is a good answer. It is the one I recommend to patients. As suggested, take it to your next doctor's appt to verify it against the readings they get. This one seems like a great value.

Yep, Omron 3 Series

I use an OMRON brand tester. It has been reliable for some years now. Being accurate is not as important as being consistent. The daily peaks and valleys are not as important as a sudden large variation from your norm. Don't forget to buy and use a good pulse oximeter as well.

I bought a Beurer, one of the brands recommended by my doctor, which works fine.

In general have always had "normal" blood pressure of around 120/80, but in the past year or so it started spiking a little occasionally. Started taking my BP at home and traced it to me getting a little sloppy with salt and potassium in my diet. It has been back to the normal level consistently for a while now--which is good to know, especially as we get older.

Many patients assume that everything is calibrated to the nth degree and up to date in clinics and hospitals.
There's variations in people and instruments.
The BP meds are often dispensed without consideration to this fact.

This.