High Blood Pressure, Why is There So Much Medicine?

Why is there so much High Blood Pressure Medicine? The short answer to this one is that there are so many people and we are all different in our diagnosis and they way we react to the different types of treatment on offer. Everyone rightly so is scared of conditions like Heart Attacks and wants to ensure that they don't occur.

There have been tremendous improvements in the way Heart Disease, High Blood Pressure and other cardiovascular conditions are being treated nowadays and this is by and large down to the wide variety of medicines on offer.

We have long moved on from the "one size fits all" society and Doctors realise what works for one man might not work as well for the next man. The treatment for Heart Disease and High Blood Pressure has moved from being the "death sentence" it once was to taking on much more of a preventative approach to these conditions.

Though it may seem that there are a great many drugs in use to treat High Blood Pressure and Heart Disease, the actual fact is they all belong to a few main categories of drugs. The drugs within each category may appear to the initiated as similar but you can be assured that the minor variations are extremely important when it comes to treating different people.

One single Drug may have several different names, the first of which is its official name the generic name. After that we are into the realms of the free market economy with the same drug being marketed and sold under one or more brand names the proprietary name.

Every now and then you will get two drugs within the same delivery mechanism i.e. tablet and in this case there will be just one single name.

The drugs now in use are effective because they are so powerful and precise. You really do have to know what it is exactly that you are taking, why you are taking it, how to take it and what effects it will have on you.

The main categories of Drugs used to treat Heart Disease; High Blood Pressure etc are as follows:

ACE Inhibitors and Angiotensin II antagonists
Anti-Arrhythmic drugs
Anti coagulants
Aspirin (and other anti platelets drugs
Beta-Blockers
Calcium Channel Blockers (Calcium antagonists)
Cholesterol (lipid)-lowering drugs
Diuretics
Nitrates
Potassium channel activators
Thrombolytic drugs (Clot busters).

There are other minor drugs used in the general treatment of High Blood Pressure but the above selections are the main types of medicine in use today.