The Black Liszt

How to Cure AMD Macular Degeneration

AMD is the leading cause of visual impairment in the US. It hits many people as they age and causes vision to worsen to the point of blindness.

First the bad news: all I have is some evidence and common-sense logic that there MAY be a cure. Now the good news: there is a never-refuted major study that shows that people who take pills to reduce their blood pressure get AMD at more than twice the rate of those who don't, and there is anecdotal evidence (needs more study to confirm) that stopping taking the pills causes the AMD to reverse (not stop or slow down -- reverse) its progression. Do you think that's worth digging into? And at least letting everyone who takes BP medications that there is a good chance that at least 10% of them will needlessly go blind with AMD?

Blood Pressure Pills

All the medical authorities are united in the importance of fighting the “silent killer” of blood pressure that’s too high, i.e., hypertension. I’ve described in detail that what doctors call ‘essential hypertension” is NOT a disease.

Pills to lower blood pressure are the mostly widely prescribed pills in the US, with over 100 million people supposedly cursed by the “disease” of hypertension.

I started taking them eight years ago as a small part of my fight against a cancer that I had.  Last year I started experiencing symptoms that could have been evidence for heart problems. I had extensive testing and did research on my own. My heart was good but I discovered that my symptoms were side effects of BP pills, widely reported by people but ignored by doctors. I stopped taking the pills and my symptoms faded away to nothing. I tell the story here.

Blood Pressure Pills and AMD

Then I wondered if the pills could possibly have something to do with my AMD that was first diagnosed about three years ago. I studied hard and came up with nothing. Big authorities said that having "uncontrolled" hypertension could cause it along with "bad" diet. In a story I tell here, I discovered here’s a never-refuted medical study published by the American Academy of Ophthalmology and sponsored by the National Eye Institute (part of NIH) showing that taking those pills greatly increases the risk of going blind.

The study remains on-line but is shockingly difficult to find. I found only one eye doctor group that mentions it. You would kinda think that they would recommend getting off of BP pills, don't you think?

Blood Pressure Pills and AMD

I had detailed pictures of my macula clearly showing the drusen that are the things in the eye that hurt vision in AMD. I just went to the same doctor, who took another set of careful pictures so we could compare them to the ones from a year ago, while I was still taking BP meds. I stopped taking the pills a bit more than six months ago.

Below are pictures my doctor took of a section of the left eye. (You may have to click the picture to see it all, particularly the wavey drusen on the right.) The top picture is from a year ago and the bottom a couple days ago. The drusen are the wavey parts of the two white curves on the right.

As she said, the central drusen got larger but the ones in the periphery diminished significantly.

Generally speaking, drusen either stay the same size or they grow. Mostly grow. That's why AMD is progressive and no one has found a way to make it stop or slow down, much less reverse course. Here's an example of drusen shrinking. Why?

If you smoke, your chances of getting lung cancer are high. If you stop smoking, the chance of getting cancer goes down. If you're an alcoholic, your chances of terrible liver damage go up the longer you drink. If you stop drinking, your liver usually stops getting worse and often gets better. Is it reasonable to think that if taking BP pills doubles your chances of getting AMD as demonstrated by the Beaver Dam study, that stopping taking the pills would result in good things happening with AMD? We need a study to prove it, but it's a reasonable assumption. It's particularly reasonable given the proven fact that taking BP pills more than doubles the chance of getting AMD as you age.

Conclusion

I thought blood pressure pills were benign, something you probably had to take when you got older to lengthen your stay on earth. It's what the whole medical establishment and nearly every doctor says. What's a visit to the doctor without taking your BP?

They're wrong. The evidence that they're wrong is available, but they're no more willing to change than they were in the cases of antiseptic surgery or blood-letting.

That the horrible side-effects of BP pills are universally denied by doctors and bad enough. But making you blind? If there were any conscience in the medical establishment, they would defy the pharma companies and immediately create studies to validate this. Serious mining of the RWE in centralized medical charts that should show the relevant data points would be a good start.

 

Blood Pressure Pills can make you Blind

As a direct result of ridiculous, anti-scientific standards, pills to lower blood pressure are the mostly widely prescribed pills in the US, with over 100 million people supposedly cursed by the “disease” of hypertension. Did you know that there’s a never-refuted medical study published by the American Academy of Ophthalmology and sponsored by the National Eye Institute (part of NIH) showing that taking those pills greatly increases the risk of going blind? I didn’t think so.

AMD: Age-related Macular Degeneration

More than 11 million people in the US have this disease. It mostly affects people 60 and older. The most common variety of it – dry AMD – is progressive and has no cure. Eventually it leads to complete loss of vision. Here is the NEI description of the disease, its causes, prevention and non-cures. You will notice that there is NO mention of blood pressure medication.

I have described the largely suppressed side effects of blood pressure medication, and my path to freedom, with the result that I'm not taking the pills and I'm healthier. Two years ago I was diagnosed with early stage AMD. After resolving the issue with harmful blood pressure pills, I decided to see if the pills also impacted AMD. While it wasn't too hard to find out about the side effects of blood pressure medications, including the ones related to heart health I experienced, I hadn't seen anything about vision in general, much less AMD. I decided to look harder.

I mostly found things like this from the Cedars-Sinai website:

In other words, they don't really know. And they clearly state that "uncontrolled high blood pressure" -- in other words, failure to take blood pressure medicine when you "should" -- is a cause.

OK, let's go to the professionals. the American Academy of Ophthalmology. What do they say about blood pressure drugs and AMD?

This blows me away. The very first risk factor they list is the garbage about saturated fat. Totally wrong. This is the cornerstone of the explosion of obesity that harms so many and has nothing to do with AMD. I'm suspicious. Scanning down the list, I see one of the causes they list is "have hypertension (high blood pressure)." Not "treating" it or "taking blood pressure medications," but simply "have" it. In the linked article about high blood pressure, they simply declare that it can lead to big trouble, and "can cause permanent vision loss." OMG! I'd better start taking pills to get my blood pressure under control!

I guess it's clear. Whatever the cause of my AMD, it can't be the blood pressure pills I took for eight years.

The Beaver Dam Eye Study

Stubborn guy that I am, I kept looking. I found a little eye group in the DC area that promotes its services. I found them because my search engine surfaced two closely related blog entries on the site, one of them titled "The Link between Blood Pressure Drugs and AMD," a close match to my search string. Score! The second sentence of the post is: "If you take medication to lower your blood pressure, it’s important to know that you could be increasing your risk of developing AMD, or age-related macular degeneration." The bold was in the original!

Both blog posts give a reference to the 2014 study and extract some details, all of which I have verified. Here is the attention-grabbing sentence from the blog post: "For residents who were not taking blood pressure drugs, only 8.2 percent of them developed early AMD. For residents who took medication for high blood pressure, nearly 20 percent of them developed AMD."

The chances of getting AMD were more than doubled by taking the drugs.

Here are the highlights of the study.

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In short, thousands of people in a Wisconsin town were followed over 20 years, tracking their use of blood pressure medication and the incidence of AMD. Here is the conclusion at the top of the paper:

Conclusions: Use of vasodilators is associated with a 72% increase in the hazard of incidence of early AMD, and use of oral b-blockers is associated with a 71% increase in the hazard of incident exudative AMD. If these findings are replicated, it may have implications for care of older adults because vasodilators and oral b-blockers are drugs that are used commonly by older persons. Ophthalmology 2014;121:1604-1611 ª 2014 by the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

Whatever the chances of you getting leads-to-blindness AMD are, you increase them by about three quarters by taking widely-prescribed blood pressure pills. Still think lowering your blood pressure is worth it, particularly considering the proven facts I describe here?

So where are the headlines? Where are the cautions about the vision-killing side effects of blood pressure drugs? Where are the follow-up studies? Where are they on the websites of major public and private healthcare organizations? Nowhere, that's where they are. Nowhere!!

It's clear that this isn't just ignorance. It's suppression. Just above I showed how there's no hint of a problem with blood pressure pills on the official AAO website. When I did a full search on Google for "AMD blood pressure," instead it showed me results for "And blood pressure." I corrected it and mostly found propaganda, but did find a reference to the Beaver Dam study. When I used my favorite non-Google search engine, which I like because they don't have thousands of engineers hard at work adding bias to the results, the very first result was a direct link into ... the AAO website! ... to a news item about the Beaver Dam study! The Expert-fueled AAO organization put a brief post on their site about the study, but failed to mention it anywhere else! Not only that, when you use their embedded (Google) search facility on the site, their own post fails to appear in the results!

Why do you suppose that is? Pharma money? What about the ethics of the healing profession, not to mention their self-respect? Given the near-total suppression of the information, I suppose simple ignorance could explain the actions of most providers, along with "standards of care" that demand regular taking of blood pressure and prescribing medications according to standards. Which are wrong, not to mention destructive.

I paid to get a copy of the full study. It had important information not included in the brief summaries. Look at this extract from Table 4 near the end of the paper:

The first line is the one often quoted. Let me show the math. Of the 2714 people in the study, 295 of them (more than 10%) got AMD because they were taking the BP pills.

I took two pills for eight years. One was Amlodipine, a calcium channel blocker, which in the study nearly doubled the chance of getting AMD. I also took Losartan, an ARB, which had zero percent AMD -- not because it was innocent, but because as shown in an earlier table, almost none of the participants took it. It could be awful, but the study was too small to know.

An earlier table also showed the incredible extent of BP medication use. About a third of the participants in the youngest age group (under 64 years) took medications, while over two thirds of those over 85 were taking them. Most of whom shouldn't have been taking them at all! I  wonder, just wonder, if this could have something to do with the increasing incidence of AMD with age -- you think that's a possibility that should be studied?

Conclusion

I used to think that the pharma and the industrial food industries make mistakes, like any industry, and you have to take the good with the bad. There is certainly some good. But the more I learn, the more I discover the all-too-widespread shameless self-dealing of the industries, strongly supported by government agencies and professional authorities. They force through regulation putting misinformation on our food and our diets in hospitals, and are making billions of dollars selling pills that are standard procedure for preventative care that, instead of keeping us healthy, actively make us sick -- even to the point of making us blind -- along with numerous other problems I have briefly touched on in prior posts.