DOT Physical - VERY FRIENDLY Doc - Atlanta Area

Salt and caffeine won’t be an underlying cause of hypertension. Those can spike blood pressure temporarily, so yeah don’t eat a huge salty meal and drink a bunch of coffee before you go in there. Sugar and being pre-diabetic can definitely be an underlying cause of it though.

Try to pick a day where you got a good night sleep and feel mellow and in the groove. it will raise your anxiety and stress level if you’re not well rested and that won’t be good for your BP readings. Puts the body in a fight or flight response.

if you get okay readings at home or by yourself sitting at the tester machine at CVS pharmacy or wherever, I wouldn’t worry about too much. Readings in a clinic won’t be your best ever even if you don’t get white coat fever.

 

The meds might actually be the key there more than anything. What that probably means to them is that there is a documented issue with your blood pressure that warranted a doctor’s prescription for meds, which means you’re going to get grilled extra hard about it vs somebody showing elevated BP levels but not on any controlling meds for it. In other words, you kind of get caught up in the medical industrial complex or “the system” and now they’ve got it in for you. Sort of like a black guy that gets sent to jail once for some minor BS and gets caught up in the criminal justice system.

 

BP meds do not lower BP that quickly. It is not take a pill and see the effect, it is take the pills over a period of time and see the effect.
It is not 3 or 4 hours, it is 1 to 2 weeks.

 

See if you can get it up over 200 so they’ll put you out of service and it’s back to flipping burgers or greeting the happy Walmart holiday shoppers

 

Here’s another inexpensive trick/hack I’ve heard about for general male cardiovascular health (maybe not BP specifically): go to the blood bank and let them do an “oil change” on you every few months. Somehow this has been known to have positive health effects when your body had to make new blood to top off the dipstick. Reproductive age females already have this advantage during their monthly cycle but men don’t have any natural mechanism for it.