Therapy for heart disease goes far beyond bypass surgery and stents. I hope that your doctor will be open to the virtues of a less invasive but highly effective procedure called EECP.
Enhanced External Counter Pulsation( EECP). If you have diagnosed heart problems and a positive stress test, EECP is used to create collateral blood vessels supplying the heart muscle. Sometimes called a " natural bypass," EECP uses blood pressure cuffs applied to the patient ' s legs, which are repeatedly inflated and deflated, to force blood up from the legs to the heart. It has been government tested and funded, is currently being administered at four hundred sites in the United States and is reimbursed by health insurers. I strongly recommend it for our heart patients, so much so that the cardiology unit at The Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine provides about one hundred EECP treatments weekly. ==================================================================
The Lessons of History
Why did heart disease become a major problem when it did, and why is it so much more common in certain countries? Those questions have significant nutritional implications. Forty years ago, Ancel Keys, PhD, a prominent American nutritionist, argued that heart disease was common in countries that had high-fat diets. He drew a graph of seven nations to show that more fat meant more heart attacks. This was an influential finding until a few years ago when George V. Mann, of Vanderbilt University, discovered that Keys had carefully selected those nations to make his case but suppressed the data in his preliminary report that showed exercise had a far more significant correlation with coronary heart disease risk than did any other factor.
A famous British nutritionist of the same period, Dr. John Yudkin, took a different view. He thought heart disease correlated with sugar consumption. It ' s difficult to isolate information on food habits in different nations. Nearly all developed nations have high fat consumption and high sugar consumption. And nearly all underdeveloped nations have neither. Heart disease is high in the developed nations, but why?
One explanation proposed by T L. Cleave, MD, in his book Saccharine Disease: The Master Disease of Our Time, argues that increases in the incidence of coronary artery disease could be traced to increases in refined carbohydrate intake 26 He noted that diabetes, hypertension, ulcers, colitis and heart disease, to name a few, were all virtually nonexistent in primitive cultures until refined carbohydrates were introduced. He proposed his " Rule of Twenty Years;' noting that it took that long after the introduction of refined carbohydrates before diabetes and heart disease began to appear.
Cleave ' s hypothesis does give one explanation of what brought about the heart disease epidemic in the industrialized world. Let ' s look at a couple of atypical western countries. In Iceland, heart disease( and diabetes) was almost unheard of until the 1930s, although the Icelanders ate a diet tremendously high in fat. In the early 1920s, however, refined carbohydrates and sugar arrived in the Icelandic diet, and true to Cleave ' s Rule of Twenty Years, the degenerative diseases arrived on schedule. Likewise, in the former Yugoslavia and in Poland, the development of high heart disease rates in the mid-twentieth century occurred in decades when the sugar rate was quadrupling and the animal fat intake was falling.
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