This blog will be divided into four parts. I will publish Part 1 and Part 2 first. This blog is about heart disease, more specifically, arteriosclerosis, and, EDTA and chelation therapy, a therapy that I have seen first-hand that can remove fatty plaques from inside arteries and how the medical establishment views this therapy and how it treats its practitioners.
Part 1 is concerned with the basic thesis of this web blog, namely, how scientists have failed to live up to science itself.
Part 2 is a bit of history regarding heart disease, as I learned about it. I personalize this because, in fact, we have to experience “paradigm shift” to really know it. My own experience trying to understand heart disease in general and heart attacks in particular sets the scene for the story of EDTA chelation and my extended family member and the MDs simple refusal to embrace science.
Part 1.
Well, here it is, my blog readers.
Thesis: that medical science has consistently failed to live up to the word scientific. Furthermore, that while all human beings and the institutions they run have some innate right to be fallible, what is going on here and now in the medical/scientific world is more like an abandonment of reason than any mere temporary lapse in the capacity of said medical and scientific people to come to a consensus.
What is going on is more like “bad faith”, and, I mean it in the sense of some conscious decision employed with a rationale, to abandon reason and accountability for some alleged “greater good”.
So, and what would the “greater good” really be about?
One would answer with control of the scientific field. But, actually, in the end, this control, exercised in bad faith, would be about maintaining their own apparent identity, their role as such, their own self-exaltation, an egomania regarding what they were about. Of course, we need gatekeepers, but only gatekeepers with reason and conscience who can exercise their role in good faith.
Essential to this? A capacity to recognize one’s own limitations. The emotional intelligence that makes that possible.
While we have many who can exercise their role in good faith, there are too many, in this writer’s eyes, who, not only fail in this regard, but succeed in absconding with control of the process of establishing the scientific truth and then succeed in getting programs and policies set up that will accomplish little or nothing, or, tragically, make the problem worse.
Their need to be the One drives their ascension to power. And, there you have it.
The political-scientist glad-hander “hare” pushes aside the slower, truly objective “tortoise” of science.
They lead and control with a misbegotten idealism. They “protect” the public from “harm”. They have no sense of the legitimate area over which they have purview. No sense of their own limitations.
Well, let’s look at this next case, this straw that broke the camel’s back of my patience. It regards a therapy that can reverse arteriosclerosis. It is in Part 4. Part 2 and 3 are background information.
Part 2.
What a heart attack is and some other questions. Background on general attitude I experienced growing up regarding major health questions.
As a youngster who grew up in late fifties, who lived through that whole period of increasing frequency of heart attacks and heart disease in general, I had a great interest in what heart attacks were, as well as real confusion, as I never seemed to be able to get a real explanation of what exactly a heart attack was.
I remember the day my great uncle got a heart attack. We got the phone call, and I naturally asked exactly what a “heart attack” was.
My mother looked at me with this confused look that was not about the fact that she could not explain what a heart attack was, but, rather, as I discerned over time, a look that reflected confusion over exactly how I could have come to request her to explain “the obvious”. That would be that it was an “attack” on the heart.
There was no real news or explanation of this ever-increasing phenomenon that peaked in the early ’70s.
What killed the rise and got the frequency of heart attacks down?
It turns out that the anti-smoking campaigns did it. By the early ’70s, men in their early thirties were having heart attacks. Smoking had gone up year-after-year, decade-after-decade, due to very successful advertising campaigns created by the actual “Mad Men” of the day.
Smoking had become so important, such a manipulation of one’s identity, of one’s persona, that I, myself, as a kid, had all kinds feelings as to who smoked which brands and why. All summed up in Jagger’s “Satisfaction” where he sings about knowing someone wasn’t really a man because “he didn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me”.
Why smoking, though? Because it damages the lining of the arteries, prompting the process of arteriosclerosis. Free radicals. Oxidation. (A future blog.)
Well, heh, let’s look at the next vital piece of information and that would regard how the heart gets “fed”, oxygen and glucose, so it can perform its job. “Circulation”.
My impression is that some basic information regarding the heart and how it works has made it out into the general public. So, I don’t know how many people today are under the illusion I was under as a young teen that the heart’s need for oxygen to allow it to burn blood sugar to have the energy to contract the heart muscle cannot be satisfied by getting oxygen directly from the blood the heart pumps, but, that is what I thought.
The very phrase, “coronary arteries”, was never heard on TV. I use to read the newspaper, almost cover to cover every day. Time magazine, cover to cover, every week. Got A’s in biology, chemistry, in school.
So, there I was in an anatomy class where I finally heard the explanation.
Corona, as in “crown”. The arteries that feed blood to the heart wall. They form a “crown” around the top side of the heart. They are there to get that blood just ejected from the left ventricle. They get blocked by “arteriosclerosis”, a fatty lining. No oxygen means that those muscle fibers die. The heart goes into malfunction. Either cannot beat or beats irregularly or incompletely. You don’t get your supply of oxygen and blood glucose and you die. Or, maybe, you get just enough and live.
Worst case. Affects the Purkinje fibers. Lose all coordination of the heart as a pump. That’s when you defibrillate. You get out the “defibrillator”, attach the electrodes and depolarize the cells that initiate and coordinate the contraction of the heart. This allows a reset and, hopefully, the heart begins to contract again as a coordinated unit. Hey, and you get to live! (We will return to this.)
It turns out that smoking speeds up the process of arteriosclerosis. Hence, we had a major public health problem, “heart attacks”, something relatively rare in the early 20th century, had become a leading cause of death due to a widely sanctioned practice of smoking.
Even doctors smoked and, worst of all, often were featured in cigarette advertising talking about their favorite brand. When the first studies of the relationship between cigarettes and cancer came out, what I have read says that doctors mocked the studies.
Not since the day of doctors refusal to wash their hands before assisting in childbirth after WORKING ON CADAVERS.
On top of this, while I heard that obesity contributed to the process of arteriosclerosis, there were people who were thin, as I was, who got “intermittent claudication”. They had just enough blockage in the arteries of their legs that their leg muscles ran out of oxygen and glucose and became cramped. “Claudius”. Latin for lame.
I was appalled. What? So, even if I am skinny as a rail and doing a lot of exercise, I can still come down with arterial blocks in my legs? I don’t know why, but, even young, I was rather forward-looking regarding my health.
There was no real concern from the professors of medicine. No matter what the disease, they seemed to be indifferent to the significance of the problem outside of the pure science. Worse when they actually brought someone with a disease out on stage during lecture. Or, maybe, I should say, more obvious.
Over the next few years, I found articles about arteriosclerosis. Some concerned experiments with rabbits where the arteriosclerosis got reversed. All of this was never discussed in the med school I was attending.
Then, a counter-movement to the self-indulgence and bad habits began. The ’70s, for all its faults, was the decade in which millions of Americans quit smoking, began to run long distance, eat better, and publications and organizations such as LEF.org got started, dedicated to increasing our health and longevity. That’s when thousands and thousands of gyms opened. It was the aftermath of Schwarzenegger in “Pumping Iron” as the Boomers hit adulthood.
Next. Part 3. Exercise, diet, and chelation therapy. The war against chelation therapy, in spite of its success in reversing arteriosclerosis to a significant degree. Cost? Compared to by-pass surgery?
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