Individualization of Antihypertensive Treatment

Pickering (1978) has suggested that some physicians treat their patients as individuals, while others treat the labels which they have fixed to their patients. The latter approach is peculiarly inappropriate for patients who have been labelled hypertensive. All present definitions of idiopathic hypertension are based upon arbitrary deviations from supposedly normal ranges of a single, highly variable haemodynamic parameter which is the outcome of an intricate interplay of a host of cardiovascular functions. This type of definition may have been inevitable in view of the ease with which arterial pressure can be estimated, but as a description of disease and guide to therapy it leaves much to be desired.