June 17, 2026
How to detect high blood pressure early
High blood pressure often develops silently—but its impact can be life-changing. In this episode, co-hosts Carmenn Miles and Dr. Rajay Seudath sit down with Dr. Benjamin Stevens to discuss the importance of screening for hypertension. Dr. Stevens shares why early detection is critical, how routine screenings can prevent serious complications, and what patients and caregivers should know to take control of their health. Whether you’re managing your own blood pressure or supporting someone who is, this conversation offers practical insights and expert guidance you won’t want to miss.
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Show transcript
Podcast transcript
INTRO
Welcome to Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. Over the next half hour, Docs in a Pod will educate you about the health and wellness of adults everywhere. Co-host Dr. Rajay Seudath and Carmenn Miles will share information to improve your health and well-being. And now here are Carmenn Miles and Dr. Rajay Seudath.
CARMENN MILES
Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today on the award winning Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. I'm Carmenn Miles and I'm excited to jump into another great conversation centered around health and wellness topics that really matter, especially for our seniors. If you're listening in for the first time, you can find this podcast on any podcast listening platform. We're also available on the radio in several Texas markets, and each week we share practical health information that hopefully helps all of us live healthier, happier lives. So, we're thrilled that you're tuning in. We have a great topic for discussion, but before we go there, I want to introduce our co-host, a proud Tampa native, Dr. Rajay Seudath is board certified in family medicine and the lead physician at the University location for Optum. He brings great passion for primary care. He's a wealth of knowledge. He keeps health issues simple and easy to understand and that is precisely why we love having you here on the show. Dr. Seudath, how are you today?
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Doing good. Happy to be back.
CARMENN MILES
We're happy to have you back. Before we get started, we need to welcome our esteemed guest for today. Dr. Benjamin Stevens is a board certified family medicine physician. He earned his Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree from the Oklahoma State University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and completed his family medicine residency at Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. Dr. Stevens attended medical school on an Army scholarship and served approximately eight years on active duty, including several years overseas in Germany. He concluded his military service in 2005 as a major. Since leaving active duty Dr. Stevens has pursued his passion for travel, logging over half a million miles and visiting approximately 33 countries. He currently practices family medicine at WellMed in New Braunfels, just outside of San Antonio, Texas. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Stevens. I got to ask, if you could practice medicine in any other country, where would that be and why?
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
That's a leading question. The honest answer is I probably wouldn't, because the more you see of the world, sometimes the more you appreciate home and what you know. That said, if I was forced to choose, I would probably actually choose Dubai for no other reason than it probably is one of the, more, how shall we say, sanguine places on the face of the earth where you can live a really calm, high scale of life with very little to worry about. ItÕs probably the safest place in the world I've ever been. It's about the only place in the world where you can be told to leave your Hermes purse and walk half a block and take a picture with the sure and certain knowledge that it will be there when you get back. That's my wife's experience.
CARMENN MILES
I remember the days. I miss the days where we could go outside of the house and play and leave the door unlocked and nobody had a care in the world. New Braunfels is a pretty pleasant place to live. ItÕs a pretty quiet, peaceful, city just outside of San Antonio, Texas. We have a great topic on deck today. The importance of screening for hypertension, better known to most as high blood pressure. Dr. Stevens, we have a lot to cover in a short period of time on this topic today. So, we'll jump right in. Let's start with just explaining to our listeners what is hypertension?
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
Well, hypertension is high blood pressure. ThatÕs a whole series of circumstances that can conspire to raise your blood pressure on average, up above a point at which it starts to place too much workload on the heart and too much strain on the kidney. Of course, anytime you have a closed pressure system, the higher the pressure, the greater the chance of some sort of what amounts to a plumbing accident, which is basically what a heart attack or stroke amount to. It's called a silent killer for a reason, and probably goes unrecognized more often than it should, and it probably contributes more to not just the risk of things like heart attack and stroke that we think of, but heart failure and kidney failure and blindness, for that matter. So, it's one of the things that probably doesn't get the attention it necessarily deserves.
CARMENN MILES
You said the silent killer. Tell us a little bit about that. A lot of times when we have high blood pressure, it's not detectable, right? And the effects of high blood pressure can affect us over time, am I correct?
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
Exactly. I mean, a lot of things in medicine will creep in insidiously over time. Again, I can't count the number of times I've seen a new patient who thinks they're healthy. We get some baseline labs that they haven't had in years or an EKG chest x ray and find all kinds of things we weren't expecting. But chief among them is people's blood pressure because it can creep in ever so slowly and insidiously over the course of a lifetime. Many people feel just fine, but they don't realize that there's this again, silent killer that's doing damage to their body every hour of every day. It's one of the things that, again, once is identified, probably one of these single most important things that you can do for your health is to do what you can to manage it, both in terms of lifestyle modifications, weight loss, watching your sodium intake. But also utilizing medications when appropriate.
CARMENN MILES
Got it. Let's take a moment to welcome those who may have just joined us. You're listening to the award winning Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. Our podcasts are available wherever you listen to your podcasts. We're also available on the radio in several Texas markets. I'm Carmenn Miles alongside our co-host today, Dr. Rajay Seudath, and we are chatting with Dr. Stevens out of New Braunfels, Texas about the importance of screening for hypertension. Dr. Stevens, I understand that nearly half of all adults in the U.S., and even more astounding 1.4 billion globally, suffer from high blood pressure, with fewer than 1 in 5 adults who properly have it under control. The numbers are really astounding. I have to ask, is hypertension a genetic issue?
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
It can be a significant contributor. I guess in my case, I always joke with my patients how for the longest time I was rather prideful. I was the guy in the family who made it through high school and college and medical school and well into the Army. I never had to wear glasses. Everybody in my family usually starting in elementary school, high school had to wear glasses. Not me. In fact, I even passed the army flight physical back in the day with flying colors, no problems. Then, lo and behold, the first time I had to re-up my up slipped, so to speak, for my flight status, I failed. Just plain slide out failed. So, sometimes these things are not there and are no problem, and then suddenly they rear their heads. In the case of vision, sometimes it's rather easy to sort out. But again, hypertension is notorious because of very oftentimes it's kind of like that fog of the pan of water, you can gradually turn up the heat, and the fog will not budge because it feels fine. It just creeps in that slowly. Hypertension can be like that over a lifetime, but again, over the course of months and years, it can take a terrible toll. So, I'm not surprised to hear those numbers and I'm not surprised to hear that only about 1 in 5 people who suffer from the condition have it adequately managed.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Yep. One of thing I wanted to add, and you hit the nail on the head, Dr. Stevens, it's that idea of the frog in the pan. So often my patients say, doc, I know my body and I feel fine. I know when there's a problem. And it's true. You want to trust your patients, and when they have an issue, you definitely want to listen to them. But our bodies are so good at compensating small changes over a long period of time. Your body can compensate for that, and you can learn to live with this high blood pressure. But that doesn't mean it's not causing you damage. Oftentimes we'll get a patient who may be transferred from a different practice or from a different state, and they'll say, oh, but, doc, it's always high. It's always in the 150s. It's always in the 160s. It's always been like that. Just because it's always been like that doesn't mean it's healthy, right?
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
Absolutely.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Those numbers are there for a reason and the fact that you can't feel that difference is we're trying to stop the problem before it becomes a major problem. In family medicine, primary care, an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of response, so I think that's one of the founding, guiding principles of seeing your primary care doctor when it comes to hypertension, especially.
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
It can also be a question of context. I tell all my older patients that we have no right to forget. It wasn't so very long ago, turn of the last century, that statistically, there's some things that skew the statistic, but statistically, the average life expectancy for men in this country was only 47. You get a retirement age of 65 from 1937 when they first fully implemented Social Security, because if you lived to be 65, in aggregate, you only lived another 18 months. So, I tell folks that in a sense, it's kind of uncharted territory. Things like hypertension, if they were recognized at all werenÕt properly managed, and our bodies collectively paid the price for it. Now that we know better when we recognize these things, we can intervene early and we can not only extend your life but also add quite a lot of quality to it. Because the bad things that come with hypertension, heart attack and stroke, at the risk of sounding rude, very often times you're not lucky enough to die from it. You just have to live with the terrible ramifications of these things, and your quality of life suffers as a consequence. Other things even more insidious are heart failure and kidney failure. Very often times these things could have been prevented or significantly forestalled if people had only recognized what was causing it, inadequately managed it years and decades beforehand, and given themselves years and decades of quality of life that they miss out on.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Absolutely.
CARMENN MILES
I know high blood pressure is a leading risk factor, as you mentioned, and cardiovascular disease and heart failure and stroke and heart attack and I get what you're saying. Yes, even if you survive it, you're left with the consequences of these different diseases. I'm curious about cognitive decline and dementia. Can you speak to that? Does it affect our dementia or cognitive decline in any kind of way?
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
I hesitate to use the word Ònormal aging,Ó but to that end, we know that there is a certain degree of cognitive decline that comes with aging. The problem with dementia is that in so many cases, when we make the diagnosis and when we assign a cause like Alzheimer's or Lewy body dementia, many times it's the best guess. I tell folks, we'd have to biopsy the brain to really know for sure. Regardless, we do know that senile or vascular dementia probably constitutes much of it. I think the leading cause of hospice admission in this country is just senile degeneration of the brain, and a lot of that stems from just poor plumbing, which is to say, if over the course of many years, we've just kind of learned to accept that when you see to the brain of somebody over the age of 65 or 70, the radiologist is going to make mention of just atrophy of white matter. While some of that may come with aging regardless, we do know that hypertension plays role.
CARMENN MILES
Thank you. We need to take just a quick break, but please stay with us as we continue this great discussion on the importance of screening for hypertension. You're listening to Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. WeÕll be right back.
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CARMENN MILES
We're back on Docs in a Pod. IÕm your host, Carmenn Miles, with co-host Dr. Rajay Seudath of Tampa, Florida and our guest today, Dr. Benjamin Stevens from New Braunfels, Texas. Just before the break, we were talking about the health risk associated with hypertension. Dr. Stevens, tell us why it's so important to be screened for high blood pressure. You've said a lot of that already, but when should we start being screened and how often?
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
Not to oversimplify, but basically every patient, every time. Which is to say, if you're seeing a healthcare provider, very often times it may be a dentist, physical therapist, certainly a physician provider. Usually, part of the initial workup before you even see the provider is to check your vital signs. They are going to check your height, weight, and they're going to check your blood pressure and pulse, amongst other things, namely because sometimes that's the only time with ever gets checked. In fact, until fairly recently myself, we didn't routinely check these things. You'll check it somewhat. You'll check your temperature at home if you're not feeling well. IÕm amazed at how many people have little pulse oximeter. They'll check their oxygen saturation. They have an Apple Watch that will check their pulse, but nobody really checks their blood pressure nearly as often as they probably should. You may be here because you think you have a cold or a sinus infection. You may be here because you're following up on everything from your blood sugars to your cholesterol, but blood pressure again, chief among them. I tell folks every day we can quibble around the edges about what you want to do in terms of your cholesterol readings. Sometimes we let people's thyroid read a little more out of whack, too, and one of the ways feel we should, because we just don't want to pick that fight. But it's worth picking a fight over the blood pressure. I mean, as much as you have to do something in this world at least within medical circles, you just about how to do something about that. That's the only thing I think I'm generally more insistent about is people who need to be on insulin. Maybe I will stratify that ahead of it, but just about nothing more.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Oh, yeah. Sometimes talking with patients and trying to get them to understand the reasoning behind why the blood pressure is so important. Sometimes I often will say, light at the end of the tunnel, heart attacks and strokes. We want to get this number under control, because when it's above 140 on that top number and above 90 on the bottom number, it puts you one step closer to a heart attack or stroke. Sometimes, putting that that consequence in the front allows people to understand that a little bit better. Most people have a family member who's had a heart attack or a family member who's had a stroke. So, they have seen what someone has had to go through when they're recovering from something like that, and oftentimes you have to tie those two together because so often it's, I feel fine. That's the idea. Well, you wear your seatbelt, right? I mean, in this generation there are very few young people who don't wear their seatbelts. It's been so ingrained into us to wear your seatbelt that in the 1950s, 1960s, it was optional. In fact, my dad, growing up in the 80s, it was, well, you don't have to wear your seatbelt if you're in the back seat. That's gone away. Everybody pretty much wears their seatbelt. So, we have to get it to the point where everybody is invested in this blood pressure issue as well, where it's second nature for, oh my God, it's you're over 140. We got to go do something about that.
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
Absolutely. I date myself here, but I can remember back in the 1970s being tutored around Stillwater, Oklahoma, in the back of a pickup truck. They would call Child Protective Services now. Or wearing a helmet. When I was riding my bicycle back in the 80s, the idea that was for nerds.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Yeah. People don't know how to ride a bike.
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
But now, people would look at the parents and wonder what kind of job they think they're doing. You're right, though. I tell folks, I looked at this thing once and it was actually ranking the top 10 causes of death today versus 100 years ago. There are some strange things on there like diarrheal illnesses. I've been doing 30 years. I don't think I've ever seen anybody die of a diarrheal illness. But the top three, you had heart attack, stroke and cancer. That's still there. I tell folks, at the risk of sounding morose, when you die, when I die, when most of us die, it'll be something about your plumbing that gets you. So, it would be the height of foolishness not to pay very close attention to the pressure you're subjecting that plumbing to because at the end of the day, in large part, that's what will get you.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Yeah. Blood pressure, it really affects your entire body. I try to relay that to patients. If you think about where your blood vessels are, they are all over your body. Your entire body. It's not just your brain. It's not just your heart. It's your eyes, your neck, your muscles, your bowels, your sexual organs. Sometimes that's the one I use for gentlemen. I say, if we don't get this under control, you are a young man in your 40s, when you are a young man in your 50s or 60s, if you want to maintain whatever function you may have for sexual gratification, now is the time to make sure that we're keeping that under control. Because that oxidative stress on those arteries, hardening of your arteries. That's what happens when you have plaque from cholesterol and high blood pressures. Your blood vessels are supposed to be nice and stretchy and elastic. but what happens when you have high blood pressure and cholesterol, they become hardened. So that affects the amount of blood pressure control and blood flow. So, if we're talking about getting erections and being able to have intimacy, get that blood pressure under control.
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
Absolutely. Most people, if they were driving along the oil pressure, the light came on in their car blinking red, they might ignore it for a little bit, but it wouldn't be too long before they get that checked out because they know good and well if they don't, they're looking at the most a very expensive repair, if not the need for a new car. In this case, sometimes nohing in the world is going to get you the repair you think you could get, and you don't get to get a new car. So, when that red light goes off, you better pay attention.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
It's so true because I have patients who boast about, yeah, I get my oil changed more frequently than I check my blood pressure. So, we're trying to get that switched.
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
Absolutely. It's a mindset, but again, it wasn't that long ago that nobody really cared. Diabetes was just this thing about your sugar, and anytime somebody had to be started on insulin, that usually meant they'd be dead in the year. Whereas now some people know more about GLP-1Õs than half the doctors I know and can cite chapter and verse about proper diabetic management and blood sugar goals. Nobody does it. When it came out, you had to explain painfully what an A1C was. Now people see that on TV all the time and they don't have diabetes. They know they should take a pill for A1C, but they still don't know very much about, if anything, with their blood pressure should be.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
That builds upon this idea of people are getting motivated. They are participating in their health. I think sometimes we just have to try and feed that hunger, feed that need. Oftentimes, they're coming to me from Dr. Google, and they'll be a family. Oh, I keep telling him not to do that. Oftentimes I'll tell them, bring your questions to me. If that is going to spark your interest in your health, go on Google. Now, don't listen to the guy that tells you to drink seawater if you have liver failure, because that's not good. You can get information. You can bring information and we can talk about it. You may be giving me information I don't know, but the idea is to drive that conversation to keep you health conscious and improve your health. I always caution about starting a new medicine or starting a new therapy that you hear from somebody else that's not really a qualified medical professional. That's always a little bit scary. You should have a healthy, American distrust of people who don't put their money where their mouth is. It's strange how American skepticism used to be such a defining factor. Put your money where your mouth is. Show me the show me the money. Show me the results. Prove it to me. Over the years, that's kind of gone to. well, it's on the internet. It's true.
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
I remember when advertising cigarettes and liquor on television was de rigueur, but that's been banned. But pharmaceutical advertising has come along right about the time I started medical school. People sometimes get skeptical because they think we just have something to sell.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Yes.
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
You just want to put me on more drugs. Sometimes that's the mindset, but it's far from the truth. At the end of the day, I'm kind of lazy. I'm really trying to save myself work, so I want to make sure that we're doing the things we need to do up front to make sure that here again, five, 10 years plus down the line, we don't have a train wreck on our hands. So, that's sometimes a good motivator, too.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Absolutely. I think patients need to know blood pressures are important. They affect the entirety of your body. Your brain, your heart, everything. So, that would be my thing is talk to your health care provider, whoever they are and make sure your blood pressure is controlled.
DR. BENJAMIN STEVENS
Absolutely.
CARMENN MILES
Great discussion, gentlemen. Believe it or not, we are just about out of time. It's time for us to wrap up. Listeners, just remember, hypertension is it's extremely common and does not discriminate. It's typically not detectable, right? When it is detected, late and serious damage occurs. High blood pressure can lead to life threatening conditions. Screening is really the only way to detect it and most importantly, early detection saves lives. Don't be a stranger. Subscribe to this podcast so you're never missing out on an episode. If today's show helped you, sharing is caring. Tell your friends and family where to find us on any podcast platform, and you can also catch us on the radio in several Texas markets. Thank you for listening. Thank you gentlemen. Until next time, everybody stay well.
OUTRO
Executive producer for Docs in a Pod is Dan Calderon. The producer is Cherese Pendleton. Thank you for listening to Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. Be sure and listen next week to Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed.
DISCLAIMER
This transcript is generated using a podcast editing tool; there may be small differences between this transcript and the recorded audio content.
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