Originally published at: Super easy blood pressure monitor | Boing Boing
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Arm cuffs are much more accurate than wrist cuffs, fwiw. It’s always a good idea to check the ratings.
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Does it micro dose me with thc?
Not asking for a friend…
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Agreed. Had a wrist cuff but the readings seemed too variable. Use an arm cuff now. Never did bother to calibrate/compare one against the other, and I suspect the wrist cuff has disappeared now, so too late.
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I also found wrist pressure monitors to be totally unreliable.
I had a couple, for both the values could range +/-30 mmHg in samples taken seconds apart, totally pointless (I ascribed that to having quite thin wrists).
The arm band one I have now (bog standard not-the-bottom-of-the-barrel from Amazon) gives more stable readings: I checked it with a real mercury column one I also have, and it’s usually within +/-5 mmHg.
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Do I need a blood pressure monitor?
I use the Garmin armband and I quite like getting some numerical input to tell how things are going, hence I am not opposed to the idea. Just wondering what the blood pressure monitor would add to the mix
A relative of mine really prefers the wrist cuff blood pressure monitors. Unfortunately, when they took them to their doctor’s office to compare with the manual arm cuff readings, two different automatic wrist cuff models failed to match well enough to have any positive value. An inaccurate blood pressure device may be worse than not having one at all.
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Most of the people who regularly use them are doing it because they get a high measurement at their doctor’s office. A significant percentage of people are blessed with situationally responsive high blood pressure, aka white coat syndrome. Since I get “inflated” values at the doctor’s office (where they rarely follow the correct procedure), I regularly make my own measurements at home. This also helps avoid being placed on medication with strong side effects to correct a problem that rarely occurs.
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Mine is always high when visiting the doctor’s office. It’s a traffic nightmare to get there and it shows.
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My GP calls that the Weißkittelfaktor and takes it into account.
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That’s me once I got into my late forties. Now I ask that they take my blood pressure at the end of the appt and it works. I was reliably in the healthy range up until that point.
I figured this out when I had to change to Kaiser and I was so irritated by their system, parking, check in process, and their scripted responses to my concerns. I had to ask them to recheck my BP at the end of the appt. They were like, how odd is that?
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The last section made me chuckle (weird, I know…)
As others have mentioned, white coat hypertension is a thing which affects some, including me. So I have an arm cuff monitor at home. Last March, I’d been getting unexpected breathlessness when walking up hill, which over a few weeks started to get annoying (I initially put it down to being a bit out of shape). Then I had a few days of it getting worse, followed by a really bad nights sleep - waking every hour, really restless.
Got up and thought, on a hunch, let’s check my pressure (hadn’t done it for a few years)… couldn’t get a reading, just a big ‘E’ error on screen. Hmmm. Got an Uber to my local A&E dept, and the look on the face of the triage guy when he had to use the ‘big’ meter to get my pressure was priceless - the reading? 235 over 160.
Had a heartrate of 130bpm flat, even though I was chilling out on a bed in resus. Cue a week in hospital, bottom line - no specific cause, just age related ‘essential hypertension’ - oh, and enlarged heart/heart failure as well oh joy. Little or no symptoms, and had probably been developing for some years. Nice cocktail of drugs each day has calmed everything down nicely.
Early 50s. Check your pressure folks! No opinion on the wrist cuff, but I’ve not been impressed with fitness ‘watch’ heart rate measurements so…
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