Ehh. Your experience is similarly anecdotal. You ignore that there is a placebo effect, blood pressure is a surrogate marker for cardiac events, and drugs can have adverse effects.

It’s best to look at all cause mortality in your example. Many studies have looked at that endpoint if you are curious.

It’s “anecdotal” that I can measure with a machine that gives a number and that I track over a period time?

It’s not like I said “I feel better” when taking it. So my blood pressure just magically comes down after I’m taking it?

What did you think "anecdote" means? Why wouldn't your individual report of your meter measurements count? You haven't shown us the data, shown that you've controlled for confounding factors, or anything.

You posted an anecdote.

I mean it is technically anecdotal evidence; it is just a story about you and wasn’t collected in any systemic way, we have no way to abstract it.

But there’s also lots of clinically collected evidence behind blood pressure medicine, right? I don’t see why anyone would have reason to doubt you.

GP didn't say your blood pressure meds or pseudoephedrine don't work, they said "most drugs don't work." I would have preferred some specifics, but we didn't get them so you shouldn't argue as though they were given.

Do you think that 80% of prescribed drugs don’t work? Even 50%? I’m limiting it to prescribed drugs because those are the ones that a pharmacists would be most concerned about.

And a “pharmacist” isn’t exactly the best trained person when it comes to knowing how to do a drug research or to know its efficacy for patients compared to even a GP who is monitoring patients and keeping records of blood work and other stats

They didn’t say prescription drugs. OTC drugs are also drugs. (In fact, they’re the drugs the article is about!) And the majority of drugs are OTC drugs. I would fully believe that the majority of OTC drugs do basically nothing.

(Consider: how many problems are there with your body that you’re actually likely to be able to solve with a drug that can be taken safely and correctly at basically any dose, basically any schedule, quitting whenever you like, and without checking for cross-drug interactions? Because those are the requirements for a drug to be OTC. There exist far more OTC drugs than there should, given the number of OTC-able problems, is what I’m saying.)