Page 51 - Summer 2017 Journal

anybody with a spleen attack. (A spleen rupture from a gunshot is not a spleen attack.) The ques- tion then becomes, if plaque is forming in all the arteries, why doesn’t the spleen (or another organ) have attacks, too? There is no anatomic or physiological difference between the splenic and coronary arteries.
CAUSE OR CONSEQUENCE?
Most cardiologists did not believe in the
coronary artery theory in the forties and fif- ties, when heart disease first began making its appearance in this country in a significant way. But sixty years later, they all do. A lot of stud- ies in the earlier medical literature were from autopsies of people who died of heart attacks. A website called heartattacknew.com shares an amazing study by an Italian pathologist named Baroldi who spent forty years doing pathological examinations on people with heart disease.4 He found that many people who had been identified as having a non-cardiac disease like asthma had a more than 90 percent blocked artery in one of the major coronary arteries, yet none of them had any signs of heart disease. Thirty-nine per- cent of people who had been identified by their doctor as being completely normal also had a greater than 90 percent blockage in one of their major coronary arteries. Baroldi found that there was no relationship whatsoever between the size of a heart attack and the severity of the blockage.
Another study in 1986 looked at people with a documented myocardial infarction who had died within twenty-four hours of their heart attack. About 19 percent had a blockage in the coronary artery leading to that part of their heart—but most of the people (81 percent) who died of a heart attack did not have a blockage in the coronary artery leading to the part of the heart that had the heart attack.
Most people who have a heart attack actu- ally live for a week, a month or longer. As far as I can tell from the medical literature, the percentage of people who have a blocked artery leading to the relevant part of the heart varies from a low of about 20 percent if they die right away to about 78 percent if they die some time later. This raises two questions. First, even if it’s as high as 78 percent, what happened to the other 22 percent who do not have a blocked artery
SUMMER 2017
but had a heart attack anyway? If you go see a cardiologist and you have clear coronary arter- ies, the cardiologist will say, “You’re fine, you don’t need therapy,” but we know that at least 22 percent of the people who die of a heart attack do not actually have a blockage in that part of the heart. Second, these studies indicate that the longer you live after a heart attack, the greater the percentage of blockages you’re going to get, which raises the question of whether the block- age is a consequence of the heart attack and not the cause. If blockages are the consequence of a heart attack, that’s a whole different story.
Some years ago, I gave a talk at a holistic heart symposium. The head of cardiology at a large hospital spoke just before me. Speaking for a holistically inclined audience, he knew that he needed to talk about something other than bypasses and stents, so he talked about a study he had been involved in in rural Alabama in the early 1960s. They took poor black men who showed up at the hospital with chest pain and did an angiogram, which involves squirting dye into the coronary arteries and watching to see whether there are blockages. The investigators identified men with severe stenosis (meaning greater than 95 percent blockage) in just one coronary artery and then sent the men home. They wrote a note in the chart predicting that if Joe so-and-so came back some day with a heart attack, it would obviously be in the part of the heart supplied by the blocked artery.
Over the next ten years, some of the men came back with heart attacks and some did not. When they ran the ten-year data, fewer than 10 percent had suffered a heart attack in the area of previously identified blockage. This is a re- ally important finding, because nearly all of the coronary bypasses, angioplasties and stents done in this country today are for people who have stable blockages of over 90 percent. What this and many other studies show is that you are extremely unlikely to have a heart attack because of that blockage.
Consider this scenario. A seventy-five-year old person has noticed in the last three months that he has more shortness of breath or is more tired walking up the hill. He’s got a little ten- sion in his chest, so things aren’t right. He goes to a cardiologist for evaluation where they do a
Most of the people (81 percent) who died of a heart attack did not have a blockage in the coronary artery leading to the part
of the heart that had the heart attack.
Wise Traditions
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