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Adults in the prime of life are three times more likely to end up hospitalized or dead from accidental falls if they take two or more drugs to lower blood pressure or cholesterol. Researchers investigated potential causes of serious falls in adults aged 25-59, with the finding that taking one or more prescription drugs is a significant risk factor in serious injuries from falling.

The research was undertaken at New Zealand’s University of Auckland by Dr. Bridget Kool and colleagues, and was published in the journal Injury Prevention under the title, “Association between prescription medications and falls at home among young and middle-aged adults“. The study looked at 344 working-aged people who had been hospitalized for serious injuries from falls at home. One of them had died. They were compared with 362 age-matched people in the general population.

They found that, in general, pharmaceutical drug combinations result in 2½ times more serious injuries from falls than taking one or no drugs. This connection was found to hold true even when confounding factors such as hazardous drinking, illicit drug use, or amount of sleep were factored in. The worst combination was drugs taken for high blood pressure or high cholesterol.

Just One More Reason to Avoid These Drugs

People considering taking these drugs now have an additional adverse effect to factor into the equation. Blood pressure drugs come in several varieties, including beta blockers, alpha blockers, angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers, calcium channel blockers, diuretics, and vasodilators. Adverse effects include:

• Hypokalemia (low serum potassium, potential life-threatening)
• Anorexia
• Dizziness/vertigo
• Fatigue
• Nausea
• Back pain
• Chest pain
• Edema
• Headache
• Congestive heart failure
• Atrioventricular blockage
• Photosensitivity, including severe keratosis and excess pigmentation

And that’s just with taking a single drug. But these are often prescribed in combination, especially with statins to lower cholesterol. The adverse effects of this class include:

• Rhabdomyolysis (muscle wasting)
• Myopathy
• Jaundice
• Depression
• Sleep disorders
• Memory loss
• Dizziness
• Arthralgia
• Flu-like illness

Try to imagine what taking these drugs in combination can do—and then add triple the risk of ending up in the hospital or dead from an accidental fall.

High Blood Pressure and High Cholesterol Are Not Diseases

Even more important, though, is that high blood pressure and high cholesterol are not diseases! They’re markers for heart disease, but it has never been shown in studies worth taking seriously that lowering either blood pressure or cholesterol with pharmaceutical drugs prevents heart disease.  You can find discussions of this issue with regard to cholesterol in New Drug Increases HDL, Decreases LDL, But What About Heart Disease? and Major JAMA Study Shows Statins Do Not Prevent Heart Disease.

In the effort to market more and more drugs, Big Pharma has invented more and more fake diseases, including high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Now, we have evidence to show that this aggressive drugging of people is even resulting in more accidents. But then, what does Big Medicine care? That’s just more money in their pockets for treatment—including, of course, yet more drugs to prescribe for the injuries.