www.americanwellnessnetwork.com - Eliminate Coronary Heart Disease

Home

Health Conditions

Heart Disease

Eliminate Coronary Heart Disease

beyond bypass: Eliminating Coronary Heart Disease
by Parris M. Kidd, Ph.D.

As the national health care bill gets above $1 trillion a year (one thousand billion, or $1,000,000,000,000), our people continue to be plagued by painful and debilitating chronic diseases. Of all these, coronary heart disease (CHD) may be the most devastating, not just to the hundreds of thousands of people who are afflicted but to the nation’s collective wallet. CHD develops as the arteries that supply the heart become blocked, with resultant starvation of the heart muscle. CHD continues to be the number one cause of premature death: each year it kills more men than die from prostate cancer and more women than die from breast cancer. CHD bleeds away hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs. So what is being done about it?

The treatment most widely in use for CHD is coronary artery bypass grafting, often simply called bypass. This is a sophisticated, complicated operative procedure in which arteries are taken from elsewhere in the body, then grafted into the heart in place of the blocked coronary arteries.

Recently I evaluated the professional literature on bypass and was struck by how overrated bypass is, both in its safety and its effectiveness. Bypass can be lifesaving for a small portion of heart patients, but the procedure poses a real risk of death and has a high rate of major complications. Bypass is at best an expensive “band-aid” for CHD, since it does not treat the atherosclerosis process that causes CHD. After the operation the underlying atherosclerotic progression resumes.

Bypass has been available since the late sixties and is widely regarded as THE lifesaving heart treatment. In some social circles the scar over the breastbone is a mark of passage, and men ask each other, “When did you have yours? Did you have a triple or a quadruple? You mean you actually had all five vessels done? Wow! How much did it cost?”

Bypass is marketed to the health care consumer as a safe, reliable, sophisticated medical procedure that saves the patient from dying and buys valuable years of healthy living. Yet bypass is none of these things. The scandalous truth is, bypass continues to be in wide use mainly as a vehicle for financial exploitation of the public.

Bypass surgery has many limitations, few of which are revealed to the patient who is considering having the operation done. First, many of the patients recommended to have bypass are not adequately assessed to justify this dangerous surgery. Typically the patient is told something like, “you’ve got 75 percent blockage of three of your coronaries, so you’d better have a bypass or you may not be around much longer.” This recommendation is usually based on catheterization and dye imaging of the coronary arteries, but the patient doesn’t know that this technique is unable to generate such precise information on the nature and extent of the blockage. Really, the interpreting physician is making an educated guess; studies indicate even the most experienced cath readers are not consistent with their estimates. This is important because some vessels that look pretty blocked can still allow lots of blood to get through. If the pumping action of the heart muscle is not impaired, the patient may not be ill enough to justify the risk of a bypass operation.

Another downside of bypass is that the operation is very challenging to the patient. It is far from simple and poses real risk: patients die on the operating table (or soon after the operation) at a rate of up to five percent, and even in the best hospitals major complications reach 10 percent and more. Neurologic complications such as coma, loss of memory and personality, and seizures occur all too often following bypass. And sadly, few patients are made to understand in advance that the benefits of bypass are usually short-lived. Many patients, if not all, experience re-blockage within one to five years. But since the medical literature is so clear on all this, why does bypass continue to be the number one treatment for CHD?

The answer to this provocative question is simple: Bypass is a phenomenal moneymaker for hospitals and practitioners. Bypass has become an institutionalized medical dogma because of the hypocrisy of high-tech medicine allows bypass to make a lot of money for a few well-positioned parties. Falsely represented to frightened and naive patients as their only real option for cheating death, bypass is the quintessential example of a medical procedure done more for the profit it can yield than for the benefits it actually affords the patient. Just as the widespread stress, lousy lifestyle, workplace oppression and chemical pollution of our society creates epidemic heart disease, so does institutional profit motive and personal greed perpetuate a treatment that gives a false illusion of security and does not slow the disease process.

Bypass does make a lot of money for hospitals. But not every shiny surgical operating unit can do bypass. Consistent success at bypass surgery requires first-rate facilities, staffed by skilled professionals with verrry steady hands. The equipment—even the very best of it—is never totally reliable. The statistics of success from bypass differ dramatically between the average regional facility that does a small number of bypass operations, to those relative few specialized institutions that do thousands of operations each year. Nonetheless, some mediocre institutions having trouble to make ends meet, set up as bypass factories and kill or maim innocents to feed their bottom line.

CORONARY HEART DISEASE BLEEDS AWAY HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN HEALTH CARE COSTS. SO WHAT IS BEING DONE ABOUT IT?
From the perspective of most mainstream heart specialists, bypass is not to be challenged because it has taken on the stature of medical dogma. Bypass is so much a part of the medical pantheon, so accepted by the gods of health care, that any physician who takes a skeptical look at this medical habit is liable to bring down on himself the wrath of his colleagues. With bypass as king, the thinking cardiologist or intern must go along to get along. What’s more, bypass makes money for powerful guys on the wards. Doctors joke that a bypass surgeon can buy a new car every day—that’s the level of his daily earnings!

Some bypass patients may be at fault for allowing themselves to be conned into bypass. The patient who feels there is no choice but to subject himself (or herself) to bypass is often the kind of personality who has been in denial of a poor life style, of a need to reduce stress, of the possibilities for improved health from exercise and taking dietary supplements. These patients often are not plugged in to conduits for information about the limitations of bypass and alternatives to it. Bypass can only be a wake-up call to the patient with heart disease and for the uninformed or passive patient, the call can come too late.

Sometimes the bypass patient continues to pay a horrendous price in suffering, long after the operation is complete. Studies show that most patients who undergo bypass surgery DO NOT clean up their act after they get out of the hospital. Yet unless he (or she) makes a commitment to a major life realignment, he almost certainly will die or be forced to have another bypass surgery within five years of the first. Women tend to get a worse deal from bypass: as a rule they are not referred to bypass as early during the disease progression as men are, with the result that women’s post-operative complications and mortality are higher than for men.

But isn’t bypass the best kind of medical care for people with fat-clogged coronary arteries, and doesn’t it save their lives when nothing else can? Remarkably, the answer to both these questions is NO, NOT ALWAYS. For as much money as bypass costs ($28,000—$37,000), going through the operation gives the patient no guarantee of a lasting improvement in quality of life. Choices other than bypass do exist for the patient with atherosclerotic CHD, depending on the degree of severity of his condition.

Coronary heart disease usually takes decades to develop, and it progresses through degrees of severity. The person with clinical symptoms of CHD can have severity ranging from mild blockage of one or two of the coronary arteries, with or without anginal pain, all the way to severe blockage of most of the five major coronaries. As the coronaries progressively become more and more blocked, less and less oxygen and nutrients get to the heart muscle. Zones of the heart lose their capacity to contract, become sick, and die. Sometimes the zones of dead or dying heart muscle fibers extend across the electrical conducting pathways of the heart and cause life-threatening arrhythmias. As more and more of the heart muscle mass loses function, the organ loses pumping capacity. At this point, unless something is done to rebuild the heart’s pump function, the patient is in severe danger of sudden death.

After being professionally assessed and found to be free of arrhythmias or other risk factors for sudden death, a patient whose heart muscle is still only mildly affected by coronary blockage does have a range of available options. Among these are life style modification, nutritional cholesterol management, rational dietary supplementation, exercise, all sorts of other positive steps. When implemented with discipline and under professional guidance, such an integrated heart health program can reverse atherosclerosis, as proven for example by Dr. Dean Ornish’s work. But for patients with more advanced CHD, options are more limited.

The patient with marked blockage of more than one coronary artery, and/or with angina, can implement a personalized program as rapidly as possible, and this is likely to improve the symptoms over the long term. In the short-term, nutritional and/or pharmaceutical treatment may lessen the pain of angina and bypass is rarely necessary to achieve this goal. Angioplasty can be used to “Roto-Root” smaller vessel blockages, but like bypass, this procedure is involved and expensive and does have major risk. But this patient must do something to re-establish good coronary circulation before the heart muscle deteriorates further.

If the heart muscle is allowed to deteriorate to the point where the heart's pumping capacity is being destroyed, the scene is set for major problems to develop. Once the left ventricle’s pumping capacity falls below about 35-40 percent of normal, and/or when most of the coronaries have become badly blocked (particularly the large left anterior descending artery), the patient is likely to be told he has little choice but to submit to bypass. Such patients with advanced CAD are likely to benefit from bypass, if they survive the operation. Respiratory, neurologic, or other major quality of life problems can become an unpleasant feature of life after bypass. The individual with any sense will start to do something about his progressing heart condition before things become this bad.

One thing the symptomatic CHD patient can do to help revitalize his heart is EDTA chelation therapy (chelation for short). Though still viewed as “alternative” by the medical establishment, chelation has substantially improved heart function and quality of life in tens of thousands of patients, and has no substantial risk of death or complications. Chelation does not involve surgery or catheterization with little wires; the chelation protocol involves walk-in visits for intravenous drips of the nontoxic substance EDTA (ethylene diamine tetra-acetic acid) with magnesium, for two to three hours once or twice per week. Experienced chelation physicians advise that a course of at least 20 treatments is likely to be necessary before benefits become noticeable.

Symptoms of coronary artery disease, angina, peripheral arterial diseases and diabetes all have been reported to benefit from chelation. In sharp contrast to bypass and angioplasty, chelation has truly curative and rejuvenative action on the heart and general circulation. The chelation protocol also is designed to include dietary supplementation with nutrients aimed at benefiting the circulation. Most chelation physicians strongly encourage their patients to develop an integrated personal health program. What’s more, chelation is relatively inexpensive: 20 treatments at about $100 per treatment would cost $2,000, as compared with bypass or angioplasty which costs 10-15 times this amount.

As natural accompaniments to chelation therapy, vitamins, antioxidants, minerals and herbal preparations all contribute to healing the damaged coronary blood vessels and rebuilding ravaged heart muscle. Vitamin C helps the blood vessel walls rebuild their connective tissue linings. The B vitamins help the heart energize more efficiently. Vitamin E helps control prostaglandins, which might otherwise initiate inflammation or angina. The energy nutrient and antioxidant known as CoQ (Coenzyme Q10, ubiquinone) helps damaged heart muscle regain its contractile action. Magnesium helps the heart stay in rhythm. The larger coronary vessels often have their inner lining surfaces torn and damaged from the atherosclerosis process; onto these areas platelets from the blood can attach and form clots. Bioflavonoids and other antioxidants (especially vitamin E) help stabilize the circulating platelets against forming dangerous clots on the inner surfaces of damaged coronary vessels.

One particularly well-studied category of heart-friendly nutrients is the longer-chain omega-3 fatty acids, EPA and DHA. Found mostly in cold-water fish, these are proven to support the healthy circulation and lower the risk of heart attack following bypass. They provide much needed nutritional support for the damaged arteries to rebuild healthy linings and simultaneously help lower the “stickiness” of the circulating platelets. With the help of fish oil supplementation, preferably with the above-mentioned nutrients added in, the bypass recipient has a good chance to slow or reverse atherosclerosis and avoid a need for further bypass.

The virtues of exercise, dietary modification, meditation, stress reduction, peer group support, and spiritual development for managing heart disease are well documented. The informed individual can put everything together within the scope of his or her own value system, to develop an integrative, personalized heart health program. If you, the reader, know someone who has had a bypass operation or is about to have one, please share these thoughts with them:

Bypass is neither a cure for self-neglect nor a substitute for a healthy way of living. Illusions persist that the bypass operation gives the patient a “new life.” Yet even the most conservative among the experts agree that “secondary prevention” of risk factors for coronary heart disease will have the most influence on the long-term benefits from the surgery.
A positive outlook tends to improve bypass outcome. Those who go into the bypass operation anxious and depressed are likely to have psychological maladjustment after the surgery. Optimism, a sense of being in control and adequate social support all tend to improve outcome after bypass.
Bypass is not the only choice for the person with symptomatic heart disease. The heart muscle with its pumping function benefits from EDTA chelation therapy, preferably as part of an integrated personal health program.¹
Coronary heart disease is a product of modern industrialized society. When viewed from a holistic perspective, CHD is a product of our modern, industrialized, competitive way of life. The only viable long-term solution to CHD (and other chronic disease, as well) is to eliminate the chemical and emotional stressors, the exploitative work conditions and the racist-Darwinian “survival of the fittest” attitudes, which altogether create and perpetuate heart disease in our modern society.

¹For a referral to a MD physician who does chelation in your area, telephone the American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM) at 714-583-7666, or write to them at P.O. Box 3427, Laguna Hills, CA 92654.

< Prev		Next >

[ Back ]

Main Menu