Is it from having large upper arms?

I cannot get a proper blood pressure reading from a lot of doctor's offices.

The last time I was in the cardiologist office and they had a machine that wouldn't stop applying pressure and I had to yell for them to stop. That machine never did work, even though the nurses tried 2 more times -- by that time I was so traumatized I told them to go get a large cuff and take it manually. And even then it took several times before anyone got a reading.

Two weeks before I was at a doctor's office and a manual reading was quick and easy. I have a wrist monitor that occasionally gets an error, but mostly works.

This has happened when I tried to donate blood but I was turned away because no one could read my blood pressure.

Someone said it could be dehydration, but I drink plenty of water.

I'm just wondering if this happens to anyone else, and if it's related to obesity.

PS: All my heart tests turned out normal -- I have no blockages or heart disease.

I can't imagine that they wouldn't have a cuff to fit you. Imagine a reasonably muscle-y guy would have the same issue. Sounds painful! I'd probably just rip off the velcro band and cuss out the nurse. :-)

Not quite the same problem as you but I find those electronic blood pressure monitors very unreliable. At a clinic I go to regularly the nurses always prefer to use the electronic device but afterwards I protest that the reading is wrong and insist that they measure again manually. Almost every time the manual reading is about 10 points lower, occassionally the same but it has never been higher.

Happened to me in the hospital. I made them take it manually because the electronic cuff would malfunction and keep tightening.

Kat, I found those electronic meters useless in many cases. When I was getting my BP done on a regular basis, they had a note in my file to use the large manual cuff. That always seemed to work, and in many cases, they are usually more accurately calibrated than the battery powered models.

My upper arm is 17" -- so it's large, but I'm sure there are plenty of people with large arms. The machine seemed to have a large enough cuff, but since it couldn't hear my BP, it just kept increasing the pressure. Don't you think there would be some kind of fail-safe to prevent it from squeezing someone's arm off? And when the nurses did try manually (two were working on me), but I'm not sure they really heard my BP either -- they tried several times. They kept asking me if I usually had high or low BP -- what's the difference? You can either hear it or you can't?

I'm just hoping it's not something wrong with me, although I just had a full cardiac workup, and I do have a "common" heart murmur, but no other abnormalities or blockages.

Any nurses out there unable to hear blood pressure know what's going on?

Sounds like they didn't know what they were doing, which is common when they don't take manual bp often - I never had a problem hearing the pulse when taking blood pressure, and yes the electronic machines are inaccurate.

I haven't worked in the clinical area for forever. My bets are that, because they're so used to the electronic BP cuff, they either never learned, or forgot, where to place the bell of the stethoscope to listen.

Lee, you know this: it gets LOUD in the area between the systolic and diastolic. Hard to miss, unless you have the bell an inch or two away from the artery.

OK, thank you guys -- I don't feel like such a freak now.

I think I'll just refuse the electronic machine and request a manual blood pressure reading -- that way they'll get some practice

Amazing that it was at the cardiologist office that this happened -- you'd think they'd want accurate measures there.

The machine is supposed to inflate until you get to about 180-200 somethings (don't know what it is measuring... PSI?). That cuts off the pulse so you can't hear it. Then you let out air slowly until you hear the pulse. That's the top number. You continue to let out air until you don't hear the pulse and that is the bottom number.

Millimeters of mercury is the base for the numbers. As in, what it being measured. OTOH, since it's pretty clear that the machine doesn't use mercury, who knows how it translates that from pressure on the cuff to mm of m?

Yeah really hard to miss: thud, thud, thud! then gets all muffled. They may be letting the air out of the cuff too fast, or placing the stethoscope in the wrong place...or both!

I always prefer to do BP manually -I have a manual set-up at home that I use on myself. When I insisted on doing manual BP's in the field, I was looked at by the younger nurses as a dinosaur and asked if I wanted leeches with that!

HEE. There is a whole branch of infectious medicine that DOES use leeches to debride wounds. The particular type of leech will only eat dead skin.

Kind of (OK, VERY) gross to think about, but it's supposedly painless, and lets wounds heal better.

Back to our regularly scheduled discussion of badly designed electronic BP cuffs.

I've heard of leech use - I wonder if they have and think to themselves 'maybe we know less than we think'.....I doubt it, wisdom is realising how little we really know about life the universe and everything

And my next question is how does mercury translate to how tight and puffy the cuff is? I tried to learn about this but I wasn't getting anywhere with Google! Then I realized I was wasting a lot of time...

I read about them using maggots to clean out wounds. Ew!