High Blood Pressure vs. Hypertension
A lot of times people use high blood pressure and hypertension to mean the same thing. But they’re actually not.
Your blood pressure isn’t the same all day. It goes up a little when you’re talking or need to use the bathroom. But then it comes back down.
Hypertension is when your blood pressure is high most of the time. If it’s 130/80 or higher even when you’re relaxed, then it’ll be higher the rest of the day. When blood pressure stays high, it’s bad for your blood vessels and body.
One reading is like a photograph of a park. It tells you what’s happening at that moment. You have to take photos for multiple days to learn how busy it gets. To figure out what it’s like at the calmest times of the day, you’d take photos in the morning and evening. You’d get a much different picture if you took your photos in the middle of the day.
Blood pressure works the same way. You need multiple readings to see the pattern. And you want to take them when it’s the lowest, usually in the morning and evening. Then you take the average of your readings. If you don’t remember how to do that, we built a calculator you can use.
If the average of your top number is 130 or higher or your bottom number is 80 or higher, then you might have hypertension. But don’t worry. You have a lot of options for taking care of your blood pressure, from medicine to lifestyle changes.
Welcome Kristal to Our Board!
We're excited to welcome Kristal Vardaman to our Board of Directors!
Kristal has over 20 years of experience in healthcare policy and program evaluation. She's focused her career on improving how healthcare systems serve people, especially those dealing with complex care. She has deep expertise in Medicare, Medicaid, and services for older adults and people with disabilities.
Kristal is interested in advancing clear, trustworthy health information and strengthening the connection between how policy is designed and the everyday realities of people seeking care.
Featured Volunteer: Raul Garcia Jr
If you've noticed some of our great Instagram posts, Raul's the one to thank. He's turning information on our website into engaging and memorable posts. He's also helped us improve our social media team system.
Raul recently graduated from the University of Michigan-Dearborn with a degree in marketing. He volunteers with HealthEd, because he believes everyone should have access to clear, easy-to-understand health information.
What We're Working On
Improving Our Blood Pressure Medication Pages
We’re revamping our blood pressure medication guides based on your feedback. Right now we have medication types, but we don’t help people figure out what type of medicine they’re on. We’re working on a way to search by your specific medication.
People also told us they wanted more information on side effects and more medications covered. We’re adding both. Thank you for helping us improve!
Adding Definitions to Our Search Bar
A volunteer software engineer is helping us add definitions to our search page. This way you can get reliable meanings to confusing acronyms and medical words like “benign” and “SOB.” Spoiler alert: your doctor isn’t calling you names. SOB means shortness of breath.
Building the STI Hub
We’re still chipping away at our new resources on sexually transmitted infections. Our physician reviewers are hard at work. We may have some new authors joining our writing team too!
"I Can Go to the Doctor" Illustrations
Rosie finished sketches for the first five pages that are bringing the book to life. We can’t wait to share them with you!
Website Improvements
We’re still working on making pages easier to navigate and use. We also welcomed a new volunteer who will be checking our user experience and how accessible our website is.
How to Support Our Work
Donate – Your donation helps us illustrate our children’s books, create sexual health resources, and keep our website free of ads.
Every donation, whether $10 or $100, helps us reach more people.
Donate now → https://donorbox.org/healthed
Volunteer – We’re a small team and we grow through people who want to help. Right now we’re looking for help with social media, fundraising, and evaluating how well our resources work for the people who use them. If any of that sounds like you, or if you have other skills to offer, we’d love to hear from you.
Email info@HealthEd4Everyone.org to get involved.
Help Us Improve – Have an idea for how we can make our resources better? A topic we should cover? Something on our website that’s hard to find or confusing? We want to hear it.
Email info@HealthEd4Everyone.org or suggest a topic if you want to send one in anonymously.
Spread the Word – Know someone who might benefit from easy-to-understand health information? Forward this newsletter or share HealthEd4Everyone.org
