Page 52 - Summer 2017 Journal

The fact that diabetes and smoking are risk factors for heart attacks makes no sense from the perspective of the plaque-major artery theory, but it makes perfect sense from the standpoint of the small blood vessels.
coronary angiogram. They find a vessel that is 97 percent blocked that requires an emergency stent or bypass “or he is going to die.” People come to me with stories like that all the time. (Note that F. Mason Sones, who invented the technique of doing coronary angiography, has said on record that this is not a good way to assess who is at risk for heart attacks or heart disease.)
Let’s dissect this scenario a little bit. First of all, when a cardiologist shows a patient a diagram of the heart, it shows the four major coronary arteries going to the heart. All cardi- ologists show patients the same diagram of the heart with these four blood vessels. They show the stenosis and say, “It’s 97 percent blocked, you’re only getting 3 percent squeezing through the bottleneck.” They just told this person who’s sitting there looking totally fine that he’s got 3 percent blood flow to one of the major parts of his heart. Think about that. How is he even sit- ting there? If that’s the only way he gets blood to his heart, how did the patient walk up the hill, albeit with some difficulty? Moreover, the cardiologist says that if another 2 percent gets blocked (so that he is down to 1 percent blood flow), he’s a goner. Is there any meaningful dif- ference between 3 percent and 1 percent? How do you explain the fact that this guy is even alive? When you put all those pieces together, you start thinking that there is something about the conventional explanation that does not make any sense.
NATURE IS SMART
If the conventional explanation does not
make sense, what is the answer to the riddle? When you go to the heartattacknew.com web- site, you will see a picture of a normal heart with the blood vessels. What that picture shows is not just the four major blood vessels but a whole fine cascading network of smaller blood vessels, which are called the collateral circulation. The collateral circulation is in place soon after birth because nature is not so stupid as to put all of her eggs in just three or four baskets. The cascading network is interconnected such that if one part does not work, then another part will. Interest- ingly, if you take a rabbit and suddenly ligate its coronary artery, it will have a heart attack,
but if you do it more slowly over three to four days, the rabbit will build up enough collateral circulation to not have a heart attack. The body is prepared for contingencies.
Paying attention to the collateral circulation is important because of an interesting anomaly in the theory that plaque causes angina and heart attacks. That anomaly is that some of the risk factors for heart attacks, such as diabetes and smoking, concern the small blood vessels, not the large blood vessels. People with diabetes end up with amputated feet not because they have trouble with their femoral artery but because the small blood vessels in their body are inflamed and stop functioning properly. The same thing goes for smoking. Nicotine is a direct poison of the small blood vessels, which is why you see smokers with broken blood vessels all over their face. The fact that diabetes and smoking are risk factors for heart attacks makes no sense from the perspective of the plaque-major artery theory, but it makes perfect sense from the standpoint of the small blood vessels.
It's foolish to base a therapy on a theory that does not fit the facts (although insisting on unsubstantiated theories seems to be a national pastime). With regard to heart attacks, there are numerous facts that we have to explain. Why are the brain and heart the only organs to have “attacks?” Why do beta blockers decrease the incidence of heart attacks, when they have no relation to plaque formation and in fact raise your cholesterol and increase your tendency to get diabetes? Why does nitroglycerine help people who are having a heart attack or chest pain? Why do statin drugs give people brain- fog, and why does chronic ingestion of statin drugs cause people to lose on average 3 to 5 percent of their IQ? We have to account for all of these effects.
PARASYMPATHETIC NERVOUS SYSTEM There is a connection here with stress and the adrenal glands. Adrenaline is the main stress hormone. Having been an ER doctor, I know that if you inject adrenaline into the tissue, it constricts the small blood vessels, which is convenient if you are trying to sew up a wound, because it doesn’t bleed and has no effect on large blood vessels. There is no theory that
52
Wise Traditions
SUMMER 2017