The history of the world is the history of the word; the words we use define our core thoughts and beliefs. If the word heart evoked merely mechanistic images and biological functions, what kind of humans would we be? What kind of heart would we possess?

Call it:

Cardiovascular Care

or:

Caring for the Human Heart

...it is a subject very dear to my heart—Heart Disease is the number one killer in America. [Editor's note: this accepted fact, that heart disease is the number one killer in America today, ignores the research of Dr Carolyn Dean MD, ND, author of Death By Modern Medicine, who, after analyzing government databases and peer review journals, concluded: "I found that 784,000 people are dying annually, prematurely, due to modern medicine, intervention." She adds, that this too is a low estimate due to the medical monopoly under-reporting, or as the adage goes: A doctor buries his mistakes.]

According to figures from the World Health Organization (www.who.int) and the American Heart Association (www.americanheart.org):

• From 1973 to 1992 Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) saw a 45% increase from 364.3 to 530.33 per 100,000 population

• Nearly one million people now die yearly due to stroke and Congestive Heart Failure (CHF); more than two out of every five deaths.

• Every 34 seconds someone in the United States dies of CHD (1995).

• In 1994, one of every four people in the United States had some form of CHD.

• In 1994, one in two African Americans had some form of CHD.

• You now have a 50/50 chance of having CHD (2002).

• For every woman who dies of breast cancer, 11 women die from CHD.

• 45 percent of all heart attacks occur in individuals younger than 65, and 5 percent occur in people younger than 40.

Recently we have learned the following (Medline—online):

• More than 60% of heart disease deaths in 1999 were “sudden” and nearly half happened outside of a hospital.

• Caucasian women in Minnesota were least likely to die from heart disease (compared to Caucasian women from other states).

• African American women in Hawaii were least likely to die from heart disease (compared to African American women from other states).

Interesting statistics:

• Most heart attacks and strokes occur when most deaths occur, Monday morning before eight o’clock.

• Most occur in the month of January (shoveling snow—if you’re a Minnesotan—I would guess).

And finally, from Dr Garry Gordon, one of the four physicians who founded the American College for the Advancement of Medicine:

• Most heart attacks and strokes hit without warning. No previous symptoms. No atherosclerotic blockages. Normal cholesterol levels.

• Most heart attacks and strokes, an estimated 85%, are caused by infections in the blood in conjunction with a relatively new medical term, vulnerable plaque. This is according to a 40 year study summarized for the American Heart Association in a 1999 book entitled, Understanding Vulnerable Plaque written by Dr Valentine Fuster, past head of the AHA and currently the cardiology chairman at Mt Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

We will focus on vulnerable plaque right away in the section on caring for your blood.

After seven years of hearing theory after theory and examining study after study we discovered two very important things:

1. most of what we think we know about heart disease is utter poppycock;

2. the true healers in the world are those to whom the patient, not the patient’s dis-ease, is their focus; physicians who thoroughly diagnose and test, treat the patient, then retest.

To find the best treatments for cardiovascular conditions, we first found the physicians with the best outcomes. We learned about functional medicine; physicians who test thoroughly to discover which functions are askew. We learned about orthomolecular medicine: physicians who employ nutrition and supplements natural to the system to rebalance those dysfunctions to make them function properly.

The most successful physicians in cardiovascular care

• removed deficiencies with nutrition and supplementation as needed

• removed heavy metals

• encouraged physical activity and/or the internal arts (yoga, tai chi, qigong, meditation)

• encouraged love and spiritual practices

• treated the body/mind/spirit of their patients.

This (above) is the ultimate paradigm for healing and preventing cardiovascular disease. These physicians use pharmaceuticals when called for, but they know that, in most cases, pharmaceuticals are best used to bring a critical condition under control where natural remedies will then be more effective.

Like most diseases of the last half of the 20th century, heart disease can be described as a disease of the fork. Add smoking, breathing toxic air, drinking chlorinated water, and a lack of exercise, and you have your number one killer in America: a true “social” disease.

Healing disease is secondary to healing a person. True healers fill in where the patient’s lifestyle is lacking. These are the physicians and healers who have helped us to put together this work.

Let us look beyond medicine for a moment. What we have here is a simple problem of focus. Far too many physicians treat diseases when it is people who are sick. The heart and our circulatory system are not only a part the human body, but if you look at our language, our words, obviously the heart and circulatory system are also a part of our mind and spirit:

Heart-searching; faint-hearted; chicken-hearted; single-hearted; false-hearted; warm-hearted; warmth of heart; big-hearted; cold-hearted; heavy-hearted; large-hearted; lonely-hearts; half-hearted; kind-hearted; golden-hearted; hard-hearted; flint-hearted; stony-hearted; tender-hearted; soft-hearted; high-hearted; stout-hearted; brave-hearted; lion-hearted; heart-sick; heart and soul; bad-hearted; black-hearted; broken-hearted; heart breaker; sick at heart; heart of hearts; cockles of the heart; whole-hearted; steal one’s heart; free-hearted; set all hearts on fire; have a place in every heart; lift up your hearts; purple hearts; sweetheart; Queen of Hearts; two hearts that beat as one; be tender-hearted; have a soft heart; take it to heart; soften one’s heart; let one’s heart be touched; break one’s heart over; heart’s core; open-hearted; light-hearted; proud-hearted; take it to heart; fullness of heart; heart’s desire; someone after one’s own heart; pierced heart; heart-to-heart; in good heart; appeal from the heart; dear to the heart; a dear heart; win one’s heart; lost heart; didn’t have the heart; not having one’s heart in it.

It was difficult to start writing this book because I couldn’t find the heart to tell you that our science, our doctors, and our medicine are killing us, needlessly; and that most procedures don’t give you any more time than no procedure at all. Needless invasion of our bodies with knives, needles, radiation, and chemicals the human body was never designed for gives us no extra time. My heart goes out to all those who’ve suffered the abuse of our modern culture and the very paradigm that the heart is just the mechanical pump of our life flowing blood.

But perhaps I’m just a bleeding heart.

The heart is a magnificent organ. It can be healed by love, yoga, transcendental meditation, walking, horseback riding, a good massage, good food, clean pure water, a trip to your temple (where/whatever that may be), a prayer, and, did we mention love?

If we just remove a single cell from a heart muscle and supply it with a fresh flow of oxygenated blood, it will continue to beat and pulsate indefinitely.

Here is an interesting concept to mull over. Rudolf Steiner once wrote: “The heart is not a pump! I have often said this; it is rather an organ for sensing or registering the activity in the tissue fluid. The heart is moved by the circulation of the blood; it is not the pumping action of the heart that moves the blood. Just as the thermometer is nothing more than an instrument for registering the degree of heat or cold, so your heart is like an apparatus for registering what takes place in the circulation and what flows into this from the metabolic system. This is the golden rule we must heed if we wish to understand the human being. In the belief that the heart is a pump driving the blood through the blood vessels, we can see how modern natural science reverses the truth. Anyone believing in this superstition about the heart ought to be consistent and believe it is warmer in the room because the thermometer has risen.”

Writers like Robert Sardello feel the heart to be a sense organ; remembering the unity of the universe as it remembers the unity of itself in the body.

Were the heart and circulatory system simply a pump and conduit, then accurate measures of triglyceride levels, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, EKG findings, beats per minute, and a host of other conventional tests would produce an accurate indication of a person’s chance of a heart attack. However, Deepak Chopra points out that the most accurate indicator of a possible heart attack is how a person answers two simple questions:

1. Do you love your job?

2. Are you happy?

In the pages that follow we will point out the fabrications, inadequacies, and ridiculous notions of the current conventional treatment of heart disease. We will let you in on our discoveries: how to reach the path to wellness and how to avoid a problem altogether. We ask you at times to suspend your disbelief, at least until we’ve finished our explanations; and to take to heart the advice from those healers who have extensive experience healing problems of the heart.

Wellness is an ongoing process and learning is a large part of healing. Knowing more than your doctor costs less than an insurance policy and even pays off better. The time to begin is always now; the place to begin is inside your own heart. Fill it with love and you’ll outlive your physician.

Bless your heart.

Allow me to tell you how our research into heart disease began and you will see how we’ve arrived at the conclusions we lay before you here.

Heart disease, as we know it today, is less than a century old. When the electrocardiogram (EKG) arrived in the United States from Germany, most physicians had no use for it because heart disease was quite rare. Suddenly, 30 years later, every hospital had to have at least one EKG machine, and people were lined up for testing. Most experts seem to agree that heart disease began to take off in the late thirties, early forties. Type A personalities, the movers and shakers of the time, seemed to have had a high incidence of heart disease.

Then the Framingham Report came out in the fifties. Initial findings showed that consumption of cholesterol increased one’s chances of atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) by increasing cholesterol levels in the body. Cholesterol was suddenly deemed to be a bad thing, with Bad Cholesterol (LDL) being the worst of the bunch.

So the war on cholesterol began. Throw out your butter, margarine is here. Food industry monies built up educational charities promoting heart health, and the American Heart Association grew up and slapped its seal of approval on everything low in cholesterol, but high in partially hydrogenated oils.

When we planned our focus for this Third Edition, Dr Dean Ornish was the Heart Disease Guru in America. He was written up in Time and Newsweek, his books were quite popular, and he’d even put our presidents on heart healthy diets. So our research began by reading everything that Ornish had written.

His advice seemed sound. Exercise, modify your diet, and take time out for yourself and your Creator.

Then we began to butt heads as our research expanded outward. Dr Ornish told us to cut back on our eggs; to eat only the whites. We’d found research that showed that eggs from free-range chickens actually lowered cholesterol levels. To get to the root of the egg issue, we went back to the original research and discovered a slight problem. The eggs used were dehydrated. This was to lead us to a variety of conclusions about cholesterol and oxidized cholesterol that we’ll present later on.

The simple truth is cholesterol is not a bad thing. In the 1970’s the final version of the Framingham study reversed itself and concluded that when you eat foods high in cholesterol, your body creates less cholesterol; when you eat foods low in cholesterol, your body creates more, depending on the individual; depending on the individual’s needs:

In Framingham, the more saturated fats one ate the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person’s serum cholesterol…we found that people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, and ate the most calories weighed the least and were the most physically active. (Castelli, William, Archives of Internal Medicine, 1992 July; 152[7]:1371-1372)

Each individual has her/his own cholesterol level that is maintained by her/his own body. Cholesterol is not a bad thing. Oxidized (rancid) cholesterol is. One connection between the amount of cholesterol in your blood vessels and heart disease, and this is a tenuous connection at best, is that the higher your cholesterol level, the higher your chances that that cholesterol is oxidized. Cholesterol isn't the problem; a lack of antioxidants is, or as you will see below, a lack of certain fats.

So, we’d found a chink in Dr Ornish’s armor.

Our next discovery concerned nuts. Dr Ornish says to avoid nuts because of their fats. We had already learned that in Scandinavian countries, their relatively low incidence of heart disease was attributed to their dietary practice to end meals by cracking open and munching on fresh mixed nuts. Further research led us to the belief that not all oils/fats are the same, that they should not be all grouped into one category and labeled bad for you. We discovered certain oils are essential to human health and to a healthy heart. Further on you will read:

Countries with diets high in Alpha-Linolenic acid (LNA) have the lowest incidence of heart disease. LNAs keep your cholesterol from oxidizing (becoming rancid). Seeds and nuts are your best source of LNA.

The AHA grew and grew right along with heart disease. In October of 1999, the American Heart Association finally broke down and acknowledged the truth. They reported that partially hydrogenated oils are harmful. The truth being, they’ll kill you.

The worst oils to put in your body are the partially hydrogenated oils, or trans-fats as some call them. In parts of Europe there is a movement to ban their use; margarine was the first to go. Nondairy coffee creamers and Crisco should be banned from our supermarkets.

Dr Ornish’s work also insisted that animal fat caused heart disease. This is a modern belief based entirely upon nothing. No research has ever backed this up; it is simply a belief. There have been other beliefs held by the medical profession, that when tested, did not stand up. Take for instance the belief that foods high in sugars, such as fruits, cause a rapid rise in blood sugar. This was just accepted without proof. When finally tested, it turned out that carbohydrates, a potato or a piece of bread, raised blood levels of sugar much more quickly than fruit. High levels of blood sugar produce high levels of insulin and this too can lead to CHD.

Interestingly enough, it was also during this time that a new disease showed up that befuddled all the doctors. They were only able to come up with a name for it: Non-Insulin Dependent Diabetes, or Type II Diabetes. At this same time, new diseases, newly classified and named autoimmune disease, were on the rise (like lupus), and attributed solely to genetics. Wrong.

The belief that animal fat is linked to heart disease predominates medicine’s thinking today. From naturopaths to cardiologists, everyone preaches this line of thought, even though no study ever conducted supports this stance. The only possible connection between diets high in animal fats and heart disease is that these same diets are low in fiber, enzymes, and certain vitamins, not to mention the spate of drugs (75% of all antibiotics used in America are used on our livestock) and chemicals in our meats.

Once we’d realized the “red meat” theory of heart disease was fantasy, we then began to suspect that all the cholesterol factors were fantasy too. It did not take us long to find the truth. Too much valid research shows that cholesterol is only a secondary factor in heart disease, and not the cause. However, do not hold your breath waiting for the medical profession to tell you this. The medical profession is shackled to the pharmaceutical interests, whose real interests are a 12 billion-dollar cholesterol-lowering drug program. Sadly, these drugs have not extended our years on this planet, and very possibly lead to early death, though we are finding out that they do contribute to an anti-inflammatory response, which turns out to be, interestingly, a very important factor in preventing heart attacks and strokes. But there are alternatives that do much less collateral damage.

The absolute truth about cholesterol is that it is only an indicator, and not the perpetrator. Blaming cardiovascular illness on cholesterol is like blaming the speed of your car on the speedometer

There is no such thing as bad cholesterol. The LDL (low-density lipoprotein), the thicker substance, is not being bad when it lands on your artery. It is drawn there to lay a patch, to fix a problem. The real culprit is the damage to the arteries in the first place, not how that damage is patched. The amount of cholesterol in your system is of no great importance; the amount of oxidized cholesterol is.

That’s about as simple as it gets: the Big Lie (that high cholesterol levels cause heart disease) is the prevalent conventional theory. It gets even worse for our elderly population who are so over drugged and undernourished. Studies done by the Veterans Administration show conclusively that the higher the cholesterol in older people the longer they live (especially the HDL). Yet we still have them on cholesterol lowering drugs.

Because of the cold-hearted profiteers in our society, all sorts of money is being made to make you sick (food industry) and to cure you at the same time (pharmaceutical industry). Even if you’re not sick we can give you pills to fight this imaginary disease called high cholesterol. High cholesterol, in the early fifties when it wasn’t yet a disease, was registered around 300. Anything over that number was getting “way up there.” Then someone invented a drug to lower cholesterol and, whammo, the standards dropped too. All the medical literature had to be rewritten to accommodate the new lower numbers, subsidized in part by the pharmaceutical companies (who could get you to these lower numbers with a little pill). Pharmaceutical companies are the largest contributors to our medical schools. Young physicians learn what they are told to learn and now we believe that the lower your cholesterol the better—even though people with cholesterol levels under 180 have the highest suicide rates (as told to me by my own psychiatrist).

In all our research, the most surprising discovery was that there is not one heart disease medication that actually cures a heart problem. Heart medication treats the symptoms, manages the symptoms, and masks the symptoms. We also uncovered some interesting evidence that many heart medications actually cause heart disease. We hope this will enrage you as much as it did us.

[Editors Note: We currently live in a society that has placed the pharmaceutical industry in charge of our health care system. Medicine means pharmaceuticals, which means drugs. We have a drug therapy system of medicine. The FDA, whose mission was originally to regulate food and drugs that came into this country, now validates this drug system of medicine. While most of us realize that there might just be something to natural therapies, the Food and Drug administration must approve all therapies we are allowed to access. The only interests that can afford to pass rigorous FDA testing are the pharmaceutical interests (it costs millions of dollars to certify a “therapy.) Thus we have somehow managed to get our health care system run entirely by interests who profit from our illness and not from our health. Go figger. For the complete story of how we got the medicine we have today read: Health Care for Dummies.]

Since the fifties, while modern medicine monitored your cholesterol levels (your ability to patch damage to your arteries), it did nothing about the actual causes of arterial damage because doctors were never taught its causes, only that high cholesterol levels were somehow connected.

Today, because of orthomolecular biology, the work begun by two-time Nobel Prize winning scientist, Linus Pauling, we know pretty well the pathology leading to this initial damage to our arteries. It is called, for the most part, malnutrition . Funny, isn’t it? That here in the land of plenty, where we have so much food we throw out more of it than some under- developed nations eat, we have some of the highest rates of malnutrition.

Malnutrition affects first our immune systems. It affects our hormones, our nerves, our connective tissues, and our systems: digestive, respiratory, reproduction.

What most people don’t realize is that the inside of your intestines is the outside of your body. Taking this one step further, just because something is inside your gut does not mean it is inside your body. There is this process called absorption, and only a properly working, healthy digestive tract can absorb the nutrition from your food (if there is any).

Next we have the infections in the blood that are making recent headlines. These damage our arteries, and amazingly enough, they also cause the majority of heart attacks and strokes.

As you read on (in our articles on cardiovascular care) we will introduce you to the studies and programs that have reversed heart disease. Oh, and did Dean Ornish’s protocol reverse heart disease? Yes. It sure did. But not by eliminating the things he wants you to eliminate but rather by motivating his patients to get off their butts, exercise, eat the things needed for a healthy heart, and by giving them hope and a positive attitude. This always works.

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