Bottom Line Health
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| People who are taking low-dose aspirin to help their hearts benefit substantially if they continue to take it in the days prior to bypass surgery, a Mayo Clinic study indicates.
THE STUDY
The researchers looked at more than 1,600 people who had bypass operations at the Mayo Clinic, and found that the in-hospital death rate for those who took aspirin in the five days before surgery was 1.7%, compared with 4.4% for those who did not take aspirin.
Some surgeons have patients stop taking aspirin before bypass surgery because of the fear of excessive bleeding. |
Andreas Moritz
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 A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine by the Coronary Artery bypass surgery Cooperative Study Group clearly demonstrated that the three-year survival rate for heart disease patients undergoing bypass surgery is almost the same as for patients who have no surgery.
According to numerous heart disease studies, most heart attacks do not occur because an artery is narrowed by plaque. Instead, researchers say, heart attacks occur when an area of plaque bursts in a coronary artery, causing formation of blood clots that abruptly block blood flow to the heart. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Gastric bypass surgery is good for you!
The Allopathia press is also reporting this week that gastric bypass surgery is really good for you! The more people who undergo the barbaric procedure, we're told, the healthier the population will be. Removing huge sections of a person's digestive organs is, we're told, a great way to reduce their risk of heart disease. Apparently, it's even better than teaching people how to be healthy in their food and dietary choices. In Allopathia, surgery triumphs yet again!
Raw foods are not raw, they're pasteurized!
The Allopathia version of the USDA (U.S. |
Bottom Line Health
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| A University of Washington study found the death rate for Medicare recipients 30 days after gastric bypass surgery was 2%. After 90 days, that rate was 2.8% and after one year, the death rate for bariatric surgery patients receiving Medicare benefits was 4.6%. This study also found that when the surgery was performed by a surgeon who had not done many of these procedures the death rate was 1.6 times higher than when the procedure was done by a more experienced surgeon.
REACTION
"I was not surprised by these findings. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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 In 1978 and 1984 he had suffered heart attacks, and he had quadruple bypass surgery in 1984. On this day a few weeks after the election, surgeons install a stent to prop open a narrowed coronary artery. The operation is termed a success.
March 5, 2001: The Vice President suffers another small heart attack, this one caused by"restenosis, " meaning scar tissue resulting from the original stent—which happens in about half of all cases. The affected vessel is reopened. The procedure is termed a success.
There is an indirect connection to our hometown, noted by our local newspaper. Dr. |
Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D.
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 Pharmaceutical drugs, bypass surgery, angioplasty, stent emplacements, pacemakers, and implantable defibrillators all have their place, and many lives would be lost without these high-tech interventions. Cardiologists face a daily dilemma concerning the best diagnostic procedures to recommend for their patients, and then, based on those test results, which surgical and/or pharmaceutical interventions to select. |
David W. Grotto, RD, LDN
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 HEART HEALTH: Researchers studied the effect of eating one grapefruit a day on fifty-seven patients who had bypass surgery. Those who consumed one red grapefruit a day for thirty days showed decreases in total cholesterol, LDL ("bad") cholesterol, and triglycerides.
WEIGHT LOSS: One study found that obese individuals who consumed one half of a fresh grapefruit before meals for twelve weeks lost a significant amount of weight and had improvements in insulin resistance associated with metabolic syndrome. |
Byron J. Richards, CCN
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 Gastric bypass surgery was once reserved for the morbidly obese. It is being promoted as a glamorous way to lose weight with various celebrities on covers of magazines and in the media. The frenzy is backed by a medical profession that is too eager to make money removing body parts. In fact, not only do they want part of the stomach, they want to take the gallbladder for "preventive purposes."287
Gastric bypass surgery is complicated and requires considerable skill. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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| Add to that the incteased risk of stroke and the cognitive decline associated with bypass surgery.
"Caveat emptor," said Fran. "Let the buyer beware."
I could only shake my head.
It turns out that stenting and cabbages don't work, but not because of—as previously believed—various technical deficiencies. They don't work because the very model of why a heart attack occurs was incorrect. The old idea was this: "coronary disease is akin to sludge building up in a pipe. |
Bottom Line Health
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| I needed emergency bypass surgery. Fatigue had been the only symptom of a serious heart condition.
Symptoms we all experience occasionally, such as upset stomach or headache, are rarely cause for concern. Yet even mild symptoms may be a sign of serious underlying illness. The challenge is knowing when you can treat yourself and when you need medical attention.
Common symptoms—and when they may be dangerous...
ABDOMINAL PAIN
This is one of the most difficult symptoms to evaluate because it can be caused by hundreds of conditions. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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| In chapter 3, we examined the efforts of surgeons, and found that the seemingly obvious benefits of cardiac bypass surgery and stents are maddeningly difficult to demonstrate with clinical evidence, a statement that is strangely and counterintuitively true for many common surgeries.
Surely emergency medicine saves lives. Such a statement, which would seem to have what logicians call "face validity," is difficult to substantiate. |
Eric R. Braverman
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 While I was searching for this grand solution, I met a celebrity who had recently undergone bypass surgery. As I listened to him, I realized that he wasn't getting his thoughts across as quickly as he used to on television; it seemed that his whole personality had slowed down. As an abstract matter, I knew that bypass surgery slowed brain speed by ten milliseconds. All of a sudden I realized that the man had lost his edge: his thinking was simply not as sharp as it once was, even though his medical problems seemed to stem from his heart, not his brain. |
Bottom Line Health
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| The case for using aspirin immediately after bypass surgery has been proven by a number of studies showing major benefits, Topol says, but there has been a debate about its use before surgery because the data has been mixed about whether aspirin creates a bleeding hazard.
The Mayo study shows that "the bleeding hazard doesn't appear to be in any way prohibitive," Topol says.
In practice, surgeons at The Cleveland Clinic generally continue aspirin therapy if the bypass patient has been taking it, he says. |
Ray D. Strand
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 We have our MRI and CT scanners, angioplasty, bypass surgery, total hip and knee replacement, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, antibiotics, advanced surgical techniques, advanced drugs, and intensive care units. Did all our medical advances increase U.S. life expectancy?
In 1990 our nation ranked eighteenth in life expectancy when compared to the same twenty-one industrialized nations forty years prior." In spite of the billions of dollars Americans spend on health care, we are now considered one of the worst industrialized nations in the world when it comes to life expectancy. |
Bottom Line Health
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| The data from this study would justify carrying out a randomized trial in patients getting bypass surgery."
THE CASE FOR ASPIRIN
"These new data from the Mayo Clinic certainly help support the case for using aspirin before surgery," says Dr. Eric Topol, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at The Cleveland Clinic. |
Mehmet C. Oz., M.D. and Michael F. Roizen, M.D.
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 Surgery: Surgeons would try bypass surgery on arteries that brought blood to the penis-because it used to be thought that veins were leaky and they needed a better arterial foundation to allow blood in. These new but small arteries didn't work well. Now we have better options. your partner is experiencing erectile problems, it's important to seek treatment, not just to improve what happens when you're lying down in bed but also to make sure that the next time you're lying down isn't on a surgeon's table. |
Bottom Line Health
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| THE STUDY
The study participants had all undergone at least one heart procedure, such as bypass surgery, or had at least a 50% blockage of one coronary artery. While a majority of the patients did take the drugs occasionally, many did not take them regularly.
There were suspicions about inconsistent use of heart drugs, but it's always a surprise when you see numbers like these.
Kristin Newby, MD
For aspirin, presumably the easiest drug to take, 71% said they took it consistently as directed. |
Andreas Moritz
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| Although bypass surgery was found to extend the lives of some patients with severe illness, it does nothing to prevent heart attacks. As we shall see, heart attacks don't occur because of an arterial blockage, as most people assume, but because of one of the four reasons mentioned above. Overall, none of the currently used surgical procedures have been shown to significantly lower the mortality rate from heart disease.
One of the main reasons for the poor success rate of these treatments is that the vast majority of heart attacks do not originate with obstructions that narrow arteries. |
Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D.
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 Several years ago, I encountered a doctor from Pittsburgh who had been advised at his own hospital to undergo bypass surgery but was reluctant to do so. He sought a second opinion from an eminent cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, who finally talked him into having a stent. The surgery was performed, but the stent was unsuccessful. The Pittsburgh doctor knew about my program, but declined to participate, fearing that it would cramp the active social life he and his wife enjoyed at home. He found that by reducing his activity, he could live within the limits of his angina. |
| Patients who undergo bypass surgery have, on average, a 2.4 percent chance of dying and another 5 percent chance of sustaining a stroke or heart attack during the procedure. Four percent of patients who get stents have heart attacks during the stenting, and 1 percent die. Let's put flesh on that statistic: since there were more than 1 million stent operations last year in the United States, that means 40,000 patients had heart attacks during the procedure— and 10,000 died. If 10,000 American soldiers died in one year in Iraq, it would be called carnage. |
| Two years after he refused bypass surgery and started my nutrition plan, his doctor in Akron was still deeply concerned about Jack's choice. He suggested the following wager: Jack would have another angiogram, and if it showed further progression of disease, he would agree to have the bypass. The angiogram did not show disease progression. Quite the contrary, it showed that Jack was reversingthe effects of his disease.
Ultimately, Jack moved to Piqua, Ohio, where he signed on with a new cardiologist. |
| Don and Emil, both of whom had undergone bypass surgery before joining the study, teach an important lesson in the downside of that procedure: the vessels used for bypassing blocked arteries simply cannot last forever. Eventually, they scar shut. In Don's case, a vein had been used to bypass his clogged coronary artery. It lasted for twenty years—about twice as long as most vein bypasses— but eventually had to be replaced. In Emil's case, an artery had been used for the bypass, and it lasted for fully thirty years. |
| His unstable condition persisted and seven months later he underwent bypass surgery. His left heart chamber was so badly damaged and scarred that it was able to pump blood at less than 20 percent of its normal capacity.
Such patients have a very poor outlook. Nevertheless, this man survived. And after he had spent nearly five years on the program, a follow-up angiogram compared four of the areas where his arteries had narrowed. Two were unchanged. Two had improved.
Ten months later, he died of a cardiac arrhythmia. Postmortem study showed no new blockages or heart attacks. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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| Although direct comparisons are not feasible," claims a 2003 publication, "the immediate mortality benefit of EMS may be similar to that of bypass surgery."33 This conclusion has two important implications for our book: the "chain of survival," which is community-based, holds great hope in keeping people alive; and bypass is less effective than generally touted in the popular media.
Saving lives is supposed to be the purview of the physician. The proposition that EMS personnel can prevent death is subversive; it undercuts the physician's supposedly unique authority. |
Tori Hudson, N.D.
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 Ades and colleagues studied 60 older patients (41 men and 19 women) who had had previous MI or bypass surgery and participated in a rehab program that included treadmill running for 25 minutes, stationary biking for 15 minutes, and machine rowing for 10 minutes for three and twelve months.371 The results showed improved fitness and increased number and size of capillaries in the thighs.
Women should be encouraged to gradually increase their exercise and engage in an exercise program that is safe, convenient, and hopefully satisfying and even fun, at least at times. |
Thomson Healthcare, Inc.
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 Ginkgo biloba extract (EGb 761) pretreatment limits free radial-induced oxidative stress in patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery. Cardiovasc Drugs Ther; L 1(2): 121-131. 1997.
Pincemail J, Dupuis M, Nasr C et al. Superoxide anion scavenging effect and superoxide dismutase activity of Ginkgo biloba extract. Experiment; 45(8):708-712. 1989.
Pittler M & Ernst E. Ginkgo biloba extract for the treatment of intermittent claudication: A meta-analysis of randomized trials. Am J Med; 108:276-281. 2000.
Porsolt RD, Roux S & Drieu K. |
Andreas Moritz
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| All artery-opening methods, like bypass surgery and stents, the widely used wire cages that hold plaque against an artery wall, can alleviate crushing chest pain for a certain period of time. Stents can also rescue someone in the midst of a heart attack by obliterating an obstruction and keeping the closed artery open, at least for a while.
But as it turns out, the vast majority of heart attacks do not originate with obstructions that narrow arteries. "There has been a culture in cardiology that the narrowings were the problem and that if you fix them the patient does better," said Dr. |
| Angioplasty, a relatively new procedure used to open arteries, offers an even lower survival rate than bypass surgery. Several research studies confirm that patients who have undergone these types of surgery are as likely to suffer a heart attack as those who haven't. The relief of chest pain (angina) that patients may experience after a bypass operation cannot always be attributed to an actual improvement of the condition. |
| In fact, in 75 to 80 percent of cases, the hardened plaque obstructing an artery is not a culprit and should not even be considered for bypass surgery or stenting. The most dangerous type of plaque is soft and fragile. It produces no symptoms and would not even be seen as an obstruction to blood flow. The soft, newly-formed patches of plaque are much more likely to break off than old, hard ones; and when they do, blood clots are formed that enter the heart, causing a heart attack. |
| A number of the heart patients who received the actual bypass surgery also reported relief of pain. If the "success" rate in the bypass group is higher than in the placebo group, then the bypass operation is considered to be an effective method to relieve chest pain.
An early carefully controlled study with patients suffering from angina pectoris showed that 5 out of 8 patients who had genuine surgery and 5 out of 9 patients who only received a sham operation, felt much better afterward. |
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