Book on preventing or reversing heart disease

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Focus on Your Health:

In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective. We do posts on staying healthy; preventing disease; aging more slowly; weight loss; exercise; nutrition; & news in medicine.

Today's post: Wednesday, 5-30-2007

Very valuable book on preventing or reversing heart disease….

Reverse Heart Disease Now:
Stop Deadly Cardiovascular Plaque Before It's Too Late

By Stephen Sinatra, MD & James Porter, MD

It’s available on Amazon in hardcover. I was able to buy it at my local bookstore.

Why this book is extremely valuable & important:

Knowledgeable use of supplements can largely prevent heart disease &, in some cases, help to reverse it.

These two doctors began to research ways they could stop seeing the patients they treated for life-threatening heart disease continually return again or die instead of getting better.

Now, it’s very rare that either of them see a patient who returns in such bad shape.

Between them they cover most of the known supplements & alternative treatments that are effective.

But the exciting thing is that, in addition, they describe some newer & less known supplements that they have found extremely effective.

Two of them show promise for reversing heart disease & increasing blood flow by causing plaque deposits to gradually shrink. They even have gotten excellent results in reversing the blockages that cause strokes with these supplements.

I’m a good deal more knowledgeable than most in this area. There is a family history on my Dad’s side for heart attacks & high cholesterol on my Mom’s side. So I’ve been making a special effort to learn & take the effective supplements.

This book is so complete they have virtually every supplement I’ve ever heard of that helps prevent or potentially reverse cardiovascular disease. And, then there are the newer, & possibly very effective supplements, they discuss that I had not yet read or heard about.

They also explain that they do use statin drugs but find they get better results for the health of their patients if they reserve those for their sickest patients.

I think every doctor who treats heart disease or strokes or peripheral artery disease should read this book & seriously consider using these methods.

And, anyone who has these things or who has any risk factors for them & who is willing to read, should read this book also.

What its legitimate drawbacks are:

A review on Amazon points out that the two doctors who are the main authors mention the importance of eating right; stress relief; & exercise; but do not cover them as well or in as much depth as they do supplements.

That’s true. But those things tend to be best used for prevention in people who are still well. Their experience is with treating patients who are already afflicted with cardiovascular disease.

And, this comment also ignores the fact that people who have cardiovascular disease or who have more of it than they yet know have died by overdoing exercise before they have reversed some of the underlying causes enough to exercise that hard safely.

Further, there are many good resources for information on exercise & healthy eating. And, there are some pretty good resources for information on stress relief.

This book’s strength is on using supplements in a way that gets much better results than conventional medical methods alone.

The reviewer also points out that there are virtually no studies cited for the various supplements. The two authors are reporting their success in using supplements & methods researched elsewhere.

The good news is that we get the information now instead of later. The bad news is that some doctors will not use the information without checking out such studies & references. This may mean they won’t try the things in the book or will be hard to work with for patients who want to do so.

That’s unfortunate. And, perhaps that kind of book will one day exist as there are studies already done that support many if not all of the things these two doctors recommend.

However, this criticism overlooks the fact that these two doctors have patients who got better instead of worse using these methods. And, it overlooks the fact that when they put patients on supplements designed to improve their lipid profiles or lower their homocysteine levels they were able to get the results from blood tests showing the expected results.

The last two points criticized were that:

1. The supplements the authors recommend can cost $100 to $500 per month.

2. And, that the doctors do NOT present the kind of strategic plan for using them that they likely use with their own patients.

The dollar costs are a consideration.

But keep in mind that having cardiovascular disease continue & get worse costs even more. People today who take more than one medicine for high blood pressure, type II diabetes, & take statins as well can easily pay that much or more. And, this is increasingly common.

And, that’s before the costs of doctor & emergency room visits or procedures like angioplasty or bypass surgery are added.

I personally am happy to pay to NOT have myself or my health plan to have to pay THOSE higher costs.

I do agree it would have been very useful to have a strategic guide. But this is more a book on what the doctors have found to work successfully than a mini-course on using the information.

My conclusion:

The information in this book can save your life or prevent you from having disabilities as an older person that trash your quality of life.

So, it gets my highest recommendation.