Blood Pressure, Big Pharma, and the Business of Redefining Health
My doctor told me my blood pressure was high, when I went for a routine visit. It was high because I had been in a life-or-death struggle on the telephone. I was trying to get a refund from one of those Internet entities that I believe are trained to try to drive one crazy. After a couple of hours on the phone with one of those, I was appolplectic! And my blood pressure showed it.
I have always had blood pressure on the low side. Even now, in my eighties, it is often around 120 over 70. I refused the prescription of blood pressure-lowering medicine. I promised to keep an eye on my BP. At once, I ordered a blood pressure measuring cuff to check daily on my own. I left the office with a new curiosity about numbers denoting health or disease. When I was younger, blood pressure was supposed to be 110 plus half your age. That would mean mine should be under 150. However, my doctor said “normal” was 120 over 70. So, being me, I began to do some research. I knew someone had lowered those numbers.
When Healthy People Become Patients
In 2017, something unusual happened in American medicine. A new disease wasn’t discovered. No breakthrough research revealed a hidden epidemic. Instead, a committee simply changed the numbers.
The definition of “high blood pressure” was lowered from 140/90 to 130/80. The American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology released new guidelines that quietly shifted the definition of high blood pressure. Overnight, 31 million Americans, most of them feeling perfectly healthy, were suddenly reclassified as “hypertensive.”
This wasn’t a matter of new symptoms appearing in society. Nothing changed in those people’s bodies. What changed was the line on the chart. And with that change, millions of people who had gone to bed healthy one night woke up as patients the next morning.
The consequences were enormous. For those affected, the reclassification meant anxiety, more frequent doctor visits, and in many cases, new prescriptions. Critics argue that this wasn’t just about science, it was about business.
Blood pressure medications are now a $36.7 billion industry. The American Heart Association, one of the most influential organizations in healthcare, received $30 million in funding from pharmaceutical companies the very year these new guidelines were announced. Of the 15 panel members who voted on the change, 6 had direct financial ties to drug manufacturers.
Was this decision really about protecting public health, or was it about expanding a market? When medical “truth” can be shifted by redefining numbers, how much of healthcare is science,and how much is business?
The truth is, lowering the blood pressure threshold didn’t discover a new disease. It created one. And when you can create a disease by moving the goalposts, healthcare begins to look less like healing and more like a business model.
And what happens to our trust in medicine when financial incentives are hidden behind claims of objectivity?
This isn’t the first time definitions have shifted. Over the past several decades, thresholds for cholesterol, diabetes, sepsis, metabolic syndrome, and osteoporosis have also been lowered. Each time this happened it swept millions more into the “at risk” or “diseased” categories. This does not count the overdiagnosing of patients due to constant routine screening for elevated PSA levels (for prostate cancer) or mammography, which has led to countless diagnoses of slow-growing tumors—tumors that would never cause symptoms or harm during a person’s lifetime.
The pattern is clear: by redefining what counts as illness, the healthcare industry doesn’t just respond to disease, it creates patients.
For decades, the threshold for “normal” cholesterol has been revised downward. When I was young it was 300 and even more. Then, sometime before the 1980s, a total cholesterol level under 240 mg/dL was considered acceptable. By the 1990s, guidelines lowered “normal” to 200 mg/dL or below. Anyone above that was labeled “at risk.” Overnight, tens of millions of people were told they had “high cholesterol.”
These shifts massively expanded the market for statin drugs. Statins were originally meant for people with very high cholesterol or prior heart disease. But once the thresholds dropped, Statins became the most prescribed drug in the world. Sales reached tens of billions by 2010. 8 out of 9 doctors on the cholesterol guideline panel in 2004 had financial ties to statin manufacturers.
So who gets to decide what “healthy” means? Is health an objective truth rooted in biology, or a moving target defined by committees influenced by money and politics?
What happened in 2017 was not just a medical adjustment. It was a reminder of how easily healthcare can be shaped by forces outside of patient well-being.
This isn’t healthcare.
It’s a business model.
Copyright©. 2025 Bonnie B. Matheson
Below is information from ChatGPT:
🟦 The Good Side of Cholesterol
Cholesterol is essential for life.
- Brain Power: About 25% of all cholesterol is in the brain—critical for memory, learning, and nerve function.
- Cell Strength: It stabilizes cell membranes across the body.
- Hormones & Vitamin D: It’s the raw material for estrogen, testosterone, cortisol, and even vitamin D.
- Digestion: Bile acids that break down fat are made from cholesterol.
Cholesterol isn’t an intruder—it’s a building block.
What changes is not cholesterol itself, but the definition of “healthy.”
🟥 The Good Side of Blood Pressure
Blood pressure is a sign of life.
- A Natural Rhythm: It rises during stress or exercise, falls at rest—this is normal.
- Adaptive by Design: Temporary increases help fuel muscles and sharpen focus.
- Not One Size Fits All: Healthy ranges vary by age, activity, and time of day.
Blood pressure only becomes dangerous when consistently high and paired with other risk factors.
The real issue isn’t pressure—it’s when definitions shift to make normal variation look like disease.
Here are links to information in this article:
- Framingham Heart Study (historical foundation of cholesterol research)
👉 https://www.framinghamheartstudy.org/- JAMA – Cholesterol Guidelines Controversy (2004)
- (Notes conflicts of interest in the cholesterol panel)
- 👉 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/199399
American Heart Association – 2017 Blood Pressure Guidelines
(Official announcement of the new hypertension cutoff)
👉 https://newsroom.heart.org/news/american-heart-association-joins-acc-to-release-new-blood-pressure-guidelines
News-Medical – Overdiagnosis and Why It’s Harmful
(Explains the problem of redefining health as disease)
👉 https://www.news-medical.net/health/What-is-Overdiagnosis-and-Why-is-it-Bad.aspx
PMC (NIH) – Metabolic Syndrome: A Historical Perspective
(Shows how creating new definitions generated millions of new “patients”)
👉 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9314822/
Wired – Disease-Mongering: How to Turn Healthy People into Patients
(Excellent readable piece on expanding disease categories)
👉 https://www.wired.com/2006/10/thin
2 thoughts on “Blood Pressure, Big Pharma, and the Business of Redefining Health”
The pharmaceutical companies did not fabricate my pancreatic cancer, Bonnie.
No, no one fabricated that cancer. I am so pleased that you are still around. Clearly, pancreatic cancer has not killed you. I wish you a long and happy life.
My article was not about pharma fabricating cancer. However, it was about fabricating “illness” like blood pressure or cholesterol as a business model. But since you asked;
What do you suppose would happen to the economy if someone were allowed to say they had found a way to cure cancer? Do you know what a huge industry cancer treatment has become? This is too long a discussion for this evening. But you are such a meticulous person, so excellent at discovering the details and clearly enumerating them. I wish you were on my side about this corruption.