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发帖数: 416 | 1 An Open Letter to Dr. John Warner, President of the American Heart
Association, on surviving a heart attack
By Dr. Davis | November 14, 2017
http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/2017/11/open-letter-dr-john-warner-president-american-heart-association/
An Open Letter to Dr. John Warner, President of the American Heart
Association, on surviving a heart attack
By Dr. Davis | November 14, 2017
Headlines today announce that the new President of the American Heart
Association (AHA), cardiologist Dr. John Warner, has suffered a heart attack
, aborted by an emergency stent placement. Typical of the ridiculous
attitudes that prevail at the industry-friendly AHA, they Tweeted:
“Sending all our love and support to @American_Heart president Dr. Warner
as he recovers from a mild heart attack. Heart disease can strike anyone, at
any time. That’s why we keep fighting.”
If you ignore the nonsense that AHA policy dictates, you can absolutely gain
control over cardiovascular risk. But you will NOT find the answers in any
AHA policy. I learned these lessons practicing as an interventional
cardiologist, then abandoning this ridiculous way of managing coronary
disease to devote my efforts to early detection and prevention.
So I thought I would articulate some of these thoughts in an open letter to
Dr. Warner as he recovers from his procedure.
Dr. Warner–
Imagine you read these headlines:
“Campaign in Afghanistan a success: 10,000 Americans dead.”
You would be confused, perhaps outraged. How can the death of American
soldiers be regarded as success when it is clearly an outright failure?
Well, for the same reasons, why do our colleagues, hospital executives, and
people in Big Pharma and the medical device industry make claims such as “
We’ve had a banner year, our most successful year ever: 800 coronary
bypasses and 18,000 heart catheterizations performed.” These are not
measures of success; they are measures of failure–failure to identify the
people at risk, failure to correct the factors that lead to heart attack,
angina, and atherosclerotic coronary disease, failures that you have now
survived.
There are a number of reasons why someone like you—deeply-entrenched in the
conventional world of heart disease management and what passes for
prevention—highlights the miserable failure that the modern coronary care
paradigm represents:
1) We are trapped by the outdated but profitable Lipid Hypothesis–We’ve
been misled and stalled on this absurd and outdated notion that “
cholesterol”—meant to represent nothing more than a crude and indirect
marker for atherogenic lipoproteins, even back in the 1950s when Drs.
Friedewald and Fredericksen at the NIH recognized that quantifying the true
etiology of coronary atherosclerosis, bloodborne lipoproteins, caused
atherosclerotic plaque accumulation. Cholesterol was meant to be nothing
more than a crude marker for such lipoproteins but IS NOT A DISEASE IN
ITSELF. But Big Pharma entered the picture, muddying the water and
persuading our colleagues that cholesterol was a causative factor and
deserves “treatment.” Hundreds of billions of dollars later and many
coronary events that were NOT prevented by the absurd notion of statin
cholesterol treatment later, we still have plenty of coronary events that
pay Big Pharma, cardiologists, hospitals, and the medical device industry
quite richly.
2) We know from abundant data that small oxidation- and glycation-prone LDL
particles are highly atherogenic (atherosclerotic plaque-causing), as they
endure for 5-7 days in the bloodstream, compared to 24 hours for large LDL
particles provoked by fat consumption; are adherent to the
glycosaminoglycans of the arterial intima; are potent triggers of the
inflammation cascade, e.g., intimal matrix metalloproteinase; and are
triggered to abundant degrees in some genotypes upon consumption of the
amylopectin A of grains—yes, the food that the American Heart Association
advises to fill the diet with—and sugars.
3) I have advocated CT heart scans to generate a coronary calcium score for
over 20 years, the only means we have to measure, then track, progression or
regression of coronary plaque burden. And your coronary calcium score is
wonderfully manipulable and reversible—I’ve done it countless times and
published the data. People who stop progression of their coronary calcium
score (compared to the 25% per year progression typical of people taking
statin drugs) or reduce their score have virtually no cardiovascular events
–NO EVENTS.
4) As with all complex conditions such as dementia and cancer, coronary
disease is multifactorial. Thinking that a statin drug (+ aspirin and a beta
blocker) are sufficient to prevent coronary events is absurd and overly-
simplistic, like thinking that taking Aricept for dementia will stop the
disease—of course, it does no such thing. Our colleagues say that many of
the causes cannot be treated because the drugs do not yet exist—that is
indeed true: There are no drugs to “treat” many of the contributors to
coronary atherogenesis. But there are many non-drug strategies to identify,
then correct, such causes: Removal of all dietary factors that provoke
formation of small LDL particles, insulin resistance, and glycation;
restoration of vitamin D to a 25-hydroxy vitamin D level of 60-70 ng/ml that
exerts anti-inflammatory effects such as reduction of abnormal activation
of matrix metalloproteinase; a dose of omega-3 fatty acids sufficient to
generate an RBC omega-3 index of 10% or greater associated with dramatic
reduction in cardiovascular events, reduction in small LDL, and subdued
postprandial atherogenic lipoprotein patterns; restoration of ideal thyroid
status, given the extravagant increase in risk with TSH values even in the
high “normal” range; cultivation of healthy bowel flora to correct the
common dysbiosis caused by sugar consumption, chlorinated water, antibiotic
exposure, pesticide/herbicide exposure, and common drugs such as H2-blockers
and PPIs for acid reflux. Problem: While effective, these strategies are
not dispensed by Big Pharma, require no involvement of the medical device
industry, don’t even require a doctor in most instances. Thus, there are no
sexy sales reps advocating for them, no all-expense-paid trips to Orlando,
no direct-to-consumer ads on TV, and few doctors who even want to bother
with the effort.
I am hoping that, now that this disease has touched you personally, your
eyes will be opened to the corrupt and absurd policies of conventional
coronary care and the American Heart Association. Your life, after all, may
be at stake in coming years. Contrary to the self-serving Tweet from AHA
staff to you, heart attack risk is 1) quantifiable, 2) trackable, 3)
stoppable and reversible. Look at what happened to political commentator,
Tim Russert, a few years ago: a coronary calcium score of 550 that his
doctor dismissed as nonsense, treating his cholesterol with a statin and
hypertension with various agents, along with aspirin, advising a low-fat
diet and exercise. Five years later, Mr. Russert died suddenly on the set of
his Meet the Press TV show. If we calculate his heart scan score at the
time of death, it was 1880, a score that is associated with 15-20% per year
death or heart attack: Mr. Russert’s heart attack and death was clearly
written on the wall 5 years earlier, but an ignorant colleague failed to see
it. Mr. Russert should be alive today, healthy, not having submitted to any
coronary procedure. You, likewise, should be healthy with no stents and
virtually no risk. But that is not what the conventional world of heart
disease provides because it makes no money for healthcare insiders.
About Dr. Davis
Cardiologist Dr. William Davis is a New York
Times #1 Best Selling author and the Medical Director of the Wheat Belly
Lifestyle Institute and the Cureality.com program.
Nothing here should be construed as medical advice, but only topics for
further discussion with your doctor. I practice cardiology in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. |
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