By: Mirela Draganescu, MD
There are many health problems that could affect a person. What comes natural, though, is that a person will pay attention first and foremost to a health condition that causes pain.
Hence, many of the patients I see in my office come in with complaints related to pain, whether back pain, sprains, headache and so on.
On the other hand, hypertension, or high blood pressure, many times, gives no symptoms at all. This makes it more dangerous. We are a pain-wired society — if it does not hurt, it must not be important.
Hypertension, untreated or insufficiently treated, will lead to dilated heart with heart failure, kidney failure, heart attack and stroke and short-term memory loss — and that’s only a few of its consequences.
Given the current economic struggles that many of my patients and others throughout the community are facing, some people choose to take their blood pressure medicine every other day, or take them only “when they get a headache,” which to them signifies that their pressure is uncontrolled.
More often than not, we see patients come to the office without any headache but with uncontrolled blood pressure. Even worse, after a routine blood work check it’s revealed in many of these cases that there is present the beginning of kidney failure.
In reality, there is no reason to skip on the medicines. Many pharmacies offer huge discounts on a variety of generic high blood pressure medications.
This includes ShopRite with its 340B Drug Discount program-(20-50 percent savings) to which all of our patients at CompleteCare have access.
In addition, we have been supporting the applications of many of our uninsured patients to obtain free medications, directly from the manufacturer.
Take action now, in order to preserve your heart, kidneys and your indispensable memory. See your doctor and make sure your blood pressure is well controlled.
CompleteCare Health Network is accredited by the Joint Commission and is a Federally Qualified Health Center which provides primary medical, dental and behavioral health services to nearly 50,000 mostly health uninsured persons annually in Cumberland, Gloucester and Cape May counties.
Now operating 18 community and school-based health centers, CompleteCare is dedicated to serving the community with accessible, affordable, culturally competent, high-quality health services. For more information, visit www.completecarenj.org or call 856-451-4700 to make an appointment.
-Dr. Mirela Draganescu is a board certified doctor and geriatrics specialist who has practiced at CompleteCare Adult & Specialty Medical Professionals in Vineland since 2006. She finished her internal medicine residency in 2003 in Philadelphia and completed a geriatrics fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.
She continued to train at Penn as a clinician-educator fellow, fine tuning her teaching skills. Her philosophy of practicing culturally competent care in an efficient and compassionate way made her very popular from the beginning.
“Dr. D,” as her patients call her, is fluent in several languages, among which are Spanish, French and Romanian.