Hi,
Let me first say…hello, and how much I love the concept of this blog platform.
Here I will endeavor to chronicle (briefly) the horrible lifestyle choices that led to my (should have been fatal) heart attack some 8 years ago.
More importantly, I want everyone to benefit from the research that I did and the adjustments that I made that have enabled me to live a
very fulfilling, complete, unrestricted and MEDICATION FREE existence.
I, just like most Americans, was enjoying (?) the frenetic paced, fast food eating, soda guzzling, fat consuming lifestyle that finally resulted in a
90% blockage of my left anterior descending heart artery (the “widow maker”, as it is often called). Amazingly (stupidly), my symptoms began to manifest at around 8 PM
on a Monday evening. They were ALL there: cold sweats, difficulty breathing, pain in center of chest (thought heart attack had to have pain in left side, not center),
pain spreading from face all the way down left arm…you know the drill.
I say “stupidly” because I was sure what I was experiencing couldn’t have been a heart attack, thus I didn’t even go to the hospital until Wednesday morning when the pain during breathing became unbearable. The one thing I did do that, along with obvious divine intervention, likely saved my life was to take a bunch of muscle relaxers and aspirin. I just thought that this combo seemed right. Good guess.
After about seven days in the hospital, after scaring the admitting er nurse about half to death from my EKG, lol, I was released. My “souvenirs” included a stent and a $40, 000 bill:
Along with a mile long list of meds that I would have to take “for the rest of my life”.
This all seemed ok to me since the doctors that saved my life must also know what the best protocol was going forward. Perhaps…not so much.
Shortly after starting my “regimen” of beta blockers, ace inhibitors, blood thinners, blood pressure meds, statins, etc, etc, I began to feel really crappy. I had little to no energy, muscle pain and weakness, the 1st inklings of what I can only describe as: fuzzy headedness. Surely these wonder drugs couldn’t be causing these symptoms…or so I thought.
During this period of mounting “symptoms”, I was under the care of an eminent cardiologist..
I had frequent blood work done, but they only seemed concerned with my cholesterol and triglyceride levels.
It was also around this time that I began to do extensive online research into the side effects of the various medications that I had been taking. The most startling bit of info that I picked up on was the fact that “statin” drugs (Zocor, Lipitor, etc ) either depleted or blocked the uptake of Co Q 10. Co Q 10Co Q 10 is an essential building block for tissue in the human body. Knowing that the heart is a muscle and that I had sustained tissue damage of nearly 60% to my heart muscle gave me pause to think. If my damaged heart muscle needed Co Q 10 to help rebuild it and statin drugs diminished the Co Q 10 in my system, wouldn’t it be a REAL good idea to start taking C o Q 10? I posed this very question to my doctor Who replied…” it couldn’t hurt I suppose.”
Further research revealed that nearly everything they had me taking seemed counterintuitive to my recovery. Blood pressure meds, for example, cause fats to be trapped in the cells of the body resulting in weight gain and increased risk for developing diabetes. Blood thinners carry an increased risk of internal bleeding and certainly cause heavy bruising from the lightest of abrasions.
Many studies have revealed an alarmingly increased risk of dementia to patients on statin drugs. This is not really surprising when one stops to consider that the human brain is composed almost entirely of cholesterol and that a chemical compound that limits cholesterol isn’t selective enough to “know” which cholesterol should be limited and which should be left alone.
Another HUGE myth is that cholesterol is responsible for arterial blockages. While this is not entirely untrue, it is misleading, to say the least. As with most “Western medicine” models, we tend to treat the “symptoms” as opposed to the root cause of our maladies. Cholesterol is released into the bloodstream to “patch” tiny cracks or fissures in our arterial and vein walls so we don’t bleed to death internally. It is our diet and lifestyle that causes this “hardening” (and ultimate fracturing) of our blood vessel walls. Cholesterol is more like the hero than the villain in this scenario.
While I would love to lay out all the findings that my research revealed pertaining to each and every med that seem to be prescribed whenever heart issues are discovered, that wouldn’t be practical here.
All I can assure you is that once I “weaned “ myself off of ALL the “lifesaving” meds they had put me on, I began to recapture my mental faculties, muscle strength and dexterity, stamina, and, in short, a “real “life once again.
I am not giving any medical advice here! All I can do is tell you what I experienced and what changes I made after weighing the alleged benefits of theses meds vs. the very real side effects that I was experiencing. Do your own research, but make sure that you are getting unbiased viewpoints for any protocol that goes against “conventional medical wisdom”. I’m thrilled that I did.
