Maybe 80-90% of people should take doctors at face value, but it is easy and only getting easier to at least access the knowledge to better advocate for your own healthcare (thanks to LLMs), with better outcomes. Of course, this requires doctors that respect your ability to provide useful inputs, which in your case did not happen.

My advice would be to "shop around" for doctors, establish a relationship where you demonstrate openness to what they say, try not to step on their toes unnecessarily, but also provide your own data and arguments. Some of the most "life-changing" interventions in terms of my own healthcare have been due to my own initiative and stubbornness, but I have doctors who humor me and respect my inputs. Credentials/vibes help here I think: in my case "the PhD student from the brand name school across the street who shows up with plots and regressions" is probably a soft signal that indicates that I mean business.

> In 2015, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26551272/ showed that medicating all of the way to normal works out better than medicating down to stage 1 hypertension

Thanks for posting this. While I would generally advise a healthy dose of skepticism for any individual study, this one was very large and seems to be both well designed and executed. While there was a (statistically) significant increase in side effects with more intensive treatments, only about 1% more patients had adverse effects versus the standard treatment group, which seems like a very reasonable risk given the improved outcomes.

I've been trying to get my blood pressure under control recently and was thinking getting down to 12x/8x was good enough, but this has me rethinking that.

You should have bought some illegal street diet and exercise or cholesterol meds or whatever.