Novel Treatment Options for Heart Disease. By Dr. Mercola. We have an epidemic of heart disease in this country and the conventional treatments, such as the use of statin drugs and surgeries involving artery bypasses and stents, typically do not work well. Thomas Cowan is a family physician and a founding member of the Weston A. Price Foundation. In his book, . It's a fascinating book, and not overly technical, making it an excellent addition to any layman's health library.
The first part is my . I say that the heart is not a pump. Then I explain why the blood moves and what the heart is doing, and the interesting ramifications of that. In some places, it says three. In some places, it says two. Even the basics of how many major coronary arteries we have is actually in dispute. It's a matter of semantics.
Heart Failure In The Elderly
If one or more of them gets blocked with plaque, a bottleneck forms that prevents blood from getting through. The area downstream from that blockage doesn't get any blood, and hence no oxygen or nutrients. The first indication that this is occurring is pain, which we call angina.
As the problem progresses, the pain worsens, which is called unstable angina. Eventually, if left untreated, you end up with a heart attack. The field of cardiology is primarily focused on getting rid of the plaque, whether by using stents, doing bypasses, angioplasties, lowering cholesterol (since the plaque is supposedly caused by excess cholesterol) or putting the patient on a low- fat diet.
Cardiology is a branch of medicine dealing with disorders of the heart as well as parts of the circulatory system. The field includes medical. Heart is an international peer reviewed journal that keeps cardiologists up to date with advances in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease. Heart failure is a costly and deadly condition that currently affects nearly 5 million Americans. The incidence approaches population among persons older. The condition or fact of not achieving the desired end or ends: the failure of an experiment. One that fails: a failure at one's career.
In essence, the heart is viewed as a pump — a pressure propulsion system caused by the muscular contraction of the ventricles. However, your body actually contains an enormous amount of blood vessels. Most of the blood vessels in your heart and body are capillaries, which are very thin- walled, very narrow tubes. If you were to spread these blood vessels out, they would cover three football fields.
Heart failure develops when the heart, via an abnormality of cardiac function (detectable or not), fails to pump blood at a rate commensurate with the requirements of. Coordinating Care for Patients With Chronic HF: Recommendations e295 11.2. Systems of Care to Promote Care Coordination for Patients With Chronic HF e296 11.3. Read the latest Cardiology news, opinion, conference coverage, thought leader perspectives, medical journal articles and more from theheart.org and Medscape. Learn about heart disease symptoms, risk factors and prevention, as well as information on heart attack, heart failure, and heart health.
That 1- pound, thin- walled organ can . But it actually gets worse than that. If you do a flow velocity diagram, it turns out that the blood is moving the fastest at the heart, both before and after the heart. As it goes into the arterioles and then the smaller arteries, it gets to the capillaries .
It has to go slow — it has to stop almost — to exchange the gasses and the food. So not only are we pushing all the way around the Earth, but halfway around our travel, we stop and then we get going again. You're expecting that to be all from the push from behind .
Heart Failure Symptoms
The blood goes from the left ventricle, out the aortic valve, through the arch, then down to the body. The analogy here is if you stick a similarly shaped arched garden hose off your spigot outside your house, and then turn it on really hard, which recreates the pumping . In fact, you can look on any angiogram and catheterization and you can see that arch actually bends in a little bit during systole, which from a pressure propulsion model makes absolutely no sense at all.? In his book, Cowan describes the heart as a hydraulic ram, which he explains thus: ? The blood is moving fast. It comes into the heart. The heart stops the blood, and like a hydraulic ram, it holds it back.
Each area of the trabeculae is connected with a certain part of the body. If there's a cut on your leg, it dissolves some of the inner fibers, puts that in a vortex and sends that to the cut on your leg. Again, there's an article about this on my website, as hard as it is to believe, that actually documents that in very clear terminology how this happens. First off, if any pumping action were to be involved, it would actually have to occur at the capillaries because that's where the blood stops and needs to get moving again. However, the solution nature came up with is far simpler.
As the blood moves up the venous tree, the blood vessels narrow and eventually coalesce to come back to the heart. This narrowing of the vessels makes the blood flow faster, in and of itself. Valves and muscular contractions also play a role. However, the primary way blood moves has to do with water.
As Pollack has described, water can exist in four phases, not just three. The fourth phase of water is formed by the interaction of water and a hydrophilic surface. Therefore, the opposite of positive charge is dissolved into the bulk water in the middle of the tube (capillary or blood vessel) . The positive charges repel each other and that starts the flow going up the hill. Sunlight charges up your blood vessels, which increases the flow of blood. When the sun's rays penetrate your skin, it causes a massive increase of nitric oxide that acts as a vasodilator.
This helps absorb solar radiation, which then causes the water in your blood to capture the energy and become structured. The ideal is to be exposed to the sun while grounding, meaning walking barefoot. This forms a biological circuit that makes it work even better. Negative ions from the Earth, also known as earthing or grounding. This also charges up your blood vessels, creates a separation of charges, creates more positive ions and allows the blood to flow upward, against gravity. The field effect or touch from another living being, such as laying on of hands.
As noted by Cowan, . That's how you structure the water. It doesn't get a whole lot easier or less expensive than that. Those inputs separate the charges, charge the battery, the battery does work and it starts flow.
That flow, just through Bernoulli's principle, which is the wider it is, the slower it goes, . That is the reason the blood moves, in a nutshell.? As mentioned, Cowan does not ascribe to the plaque theory of heart disease.
What's wrong with the plaque theory? For starters, if plaque were responsible, there would have to be something in the blood or blood vessels causing the plaque, such as cholesterol or inflammation. And, since all blood vessels are identical — there's no difference between the splenic artery, the femoral artery or the coronary artery, for example — if there's plaque in one artery, there should be plaque everywhere, and an attack should theoretically occur just about anywhere in the body, depending on where the blockage is. Yet people do not have . But basically, there are only two organs that have attacks. The brain, we call that a stroke, and the heart, we call that a myocardial infraction (MI) or a heart attack,? Because that suggests there's something different about those organs.
It's not the blood vessels because the blood vessels, they're the same. It's not the blood flow. It doesn't really matter whether one area gets blocked or not, because the whole thing is like the wetlands; it will simply compensate for a blockage in one area by increasing blood flow elsewhere. What's Wrong With the Plaque Theory? Post- mortem autopsy studies — which are available on Cowan's website, humanheartcosmicheart. That means that in 8.
NOT the cause of the heart attack. So, what caused it? In another study, 6. Yet none of them had any symptoms.
I'm not saying plaque is good. What I am saying is it's nowhere near sufficient to explain why people have heart attacks. I have some chest pain, a little shortness of breath walking up the hills. I went on a 5- mile walk yesterday and I'm not doing as well as I used to. I went to the cardiologist. He did tests and found I have a 9. He said if it blocks any more, I'll have a heart attack and die.
In fact, how is he even standing upright if he's got less than 5 percent blood flow to a major part of his heart? So, you mean to tell me if he blocks from 5 percent to 2 percent, that's it? Curtains in, you die? The reality is 5 percent is 0 percent, and blocking to 2 percent is the same as 0 percent. It's very clear that the theory that the blood squeezes through the bottle neck in the vessel is complete nonsense.
The blood does not squeeze through the bottleneck. It goes through these collateral vessels and the flow is more or less normal, although there is some problem in the heart, but it's not because of that blockage. That's why the Mayo Clinic and other studies, when they unblock the blockage, it doesn't do any good for the patient.? Cowan makes a strong case for three basic causes of heart attacks, in the following order of importance or likelihood: 1. Decreased parasympathetic tone followed by sympathetic nervous system activation. You have two nervous systems, a central and an autonomic. Your autonomic nervous system has two arms: the sympathetic fight- or- flight, and the parasympathetic, which governs rest and digestion.
Then, while under the influence of a low parasympathetic tone, you experience some sort of emotional, psychological or physical stress that activates your sympathetic nervous system. Once that glycolytic shift occurs, you enter into glycolytic metabolism where you burn sugar for fuel and make lactic acid. As in other muscles, lactic acid in the heart muscle causes the telltale cramps and pain known as angina. Since your heart cannot stop contracting to allow the blood flow to flush out the lactic acid, the lactic acid builds up, causing localized metabolic acidosis that necroses or destroys the cardiac tissue.
Also, when the tissue becomes acidic, calcium cannot enter the tissue. As a result, the heart muscle cannot contract properly. This chain of events, Cowan believes, is the real cause of most heart attacks. Collateral circulation failure. Particularly badly placed plaque formation.
This is not the norm, but could occur. Indeed, one of the problems with using carbohydrates as a primary fuel — which a majority of people in the West are doing — is that it generates more reactive oxygen species (ROS) and secondary free radicals.
Chronically, this will cause mitochondrial damage. I like to simplify it by saying that carbs are dirty fuels — dirty in the sense that they generate excessive amounts of free radicals that poison the mitochondria. It's this dirty fuel — the net carbs — that creates fermentation metabolism and subsequent lactic acid production. The answer is not to take more antioxidants.
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