I have an intense phobia of dentists; if I were wearing a constant monitor, I bet you could tell when I was at the dentist just by watching the blood pressure and heart rate spikes. (You'd have to find some way of differentiating them from me being in a car accident, or being attacked by a werewolf.)

If you've got one of these machines at home it seems you really want to run it a couple of times. Often I find the first reading I get is quite alarming but then if I sit for a bit longer and run it another 1-2 times I get a very normal reading.

Taking a BP in person during a medical consultation, while stressed out because I know I have a very limited amount of time to do a verbal data dump of a large amount of information in a good way never fails to give me extreme values.

It also never helps to explain that this has happened many times before and that I have a reasonably high quality BP measurement device at home (most recently the exact same Braun model) that gives me decent measurements when I'm at rest/relaxed. They just look at me like I'm an idiot. How could a civilian conceivably perform such a complex measurement?

Then I get the predictably insanely high measurement and they look satisfied. Gotcha!

Please bring on the AI doctors.

White coast hypertension isn't just about a clinical setting, it's more generally about the worry about the results of having your BP measured. [EDIT] OK, well maybe there's another type of hypertension which is related to anxiety about a high result regardless of the measurement setting.

I have to take daily BP measurements during titration for ADHD medication. (Using an _A&D UA-611 Plus_ machine at home.)

I can put the cuff on my arm and sit at my desk for 20 minutes to be nicely rested and calm, and then take 5 different measurements with a few minutes between each one. They'll vary quite wildly (anything from, say, 115/75 to 135/90) despite not moving between measurements or having any reason to be more or less agitated. I generally just ignore the low/high outliers and average the others. There's no pattern either, sometimes the outliers are first, sometimes last.

Also it's not just the monitor I have at home, the same is true of a probably more trustworthy machine in a clinical setting. I mentioned this to my doctor when I last visited and we saw the same thing with multiple measurements using a more sophisticated machine at the clinic.

Yep. My heart-rate is normally pretty low (45bpm or so, 55 if I'm walking around), and my BP is on the high end of normal, but white-coat syndrome reliably brings it up to a fluttery 110bpm and 155/125 pressure. I was just in a wreck last week, so I got to see the before-and-after measurements from a few medical providers, and it's shocking how the act of talking to a new person in an unfamiliar environment spikes my BP even when I "know" that it's fine, and also how quickly it falls back down to normal.

I got it when an eye clinic wanted to do my blood pressure (which is kind of weird in itself), which they did shortly after the glaucoma test which never works for me because I have an overdeveloped blink reflex and it turned up high.

It really amazes me how people whose job it is to take blood pressure don’t recognize the stress situations that people are in might result in abnormal readings.

That's very cool. I wonder if sniffing the Bluetooth connection directly might be easier than reading the PDF (although not because it's easy).

At least you have more than 24 hours to find out!

you missed a closing parenthesis

> Testing blood pressure after a shot seems weird.

I was at the Dr last week and my first BP reading was 154/95, a second reading a few minutes later was 141/89. The doctor asked for one more reading before I left.

The medical assistant gave me my vaccines and then took my BP, 130/81 right after a Hep B and COVID vaccine. I told the tech that needles didn’t bother me at all, she believed me after she saw my blood pressure :)

If you think that's bad, just think about what's in those finger-holes in bowling balls, between rounds of beer, bowling, and greasy bar food :)

I had my blood pressure tested several times over the course of the month and each time it was high, weirdly high, like 160/100. If I drove in, weirdly high. If I cycled in, weirdly high. If I got another reading after sitting quietly in the waiting room reading my book for half an hour, weirdly high.

They wanted me to start on all sorts of medications immediately.

The second-last time, they got a reading of 220/130, and were going to get an ambulance to take me into hospital immediately.

Er, hang on a minute, folks.

That's beyond "hypertension crisis" and well into "incompatible with life" levels. That's the kind of pressure I see in hydraulic servo feedback channels, not living things.

They grudgingly agreed that someone with high blood pressure probably ought not to be making as much sense as I was, although what would I know about it, they're the professionals, etc etc.

The next time I noticed the automatic blood pressure cuff had a fresh new calibration sticker on it.

130/90. Not bad, for a reading taken at the doctor's surgery.

I wonder how many people are on medication they just plain don't need because of a plainly faulty sphyg though?

I have a family member working in hospital setting. Electronics bairly survive a year from the amount of disinfectant they're exposed to. Everything is wiped so constantly that anything not made for the environment has its lettering stripped and rubber dissolved and cracked within short notice.

> btw you think they ever clean those devices?

Maybe? Do they clean the shelves? Arm-to-arm contact isn't exactly a big threat.

> you think healthy people go to pharmacies?

Yes. Of course. Those free blood pressure machines are generally found in drug stores that have a small pharmacy section. The vast majority of people there are there because they're shopping. There are probably more people who come in to buy mascara than people who come in because they're sick. If you're sick, someone else goes to the pharmacy for you.

yup, its a decent "Rubber duck" and an ok search engine.