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Some of the major causes of a discrepancy between the conventional clinical measurement of blood pressure and the true blood pressure are listed in Table 2. The measurement of blood pressure typically involves an interaction between the patient and the physician (or whoever is taking the reading), and factors related to both may lead to a tendency to either overestimate or underestimate the true blood pressure or to act as a source of bi-directional error. As shown in Table 2, there may be activities that precede or accompany the measurement that make it unrepresentative of the patient’s “true” pressure. These include exercise and smoking before the measurement as well as talking during it.