peterants

You’ve had a heart attack. Now your MD is suggesting an angioplasty (now called Percutaneous Coronary Intervention, or PCI-it sounds more impressive, but its the same thing). The purpose of this is to force the blockage in your artery open. This would be followed by implanting a stent to keep the blockage from closing. Angioplasties are supposed to be done within 12-24 hours of the heart attack, but many are done later.

If the PCI is to be done more than three days after the heart attack, you should opt not to do it. A large study regarding angioplasties performed more than three days after the heart occurrence was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in December, 2006. It found that when PCI’s were done between 3 and 28 days after the heart attack, there were more heart attacks in the angioplasty group than in the group which was treated with drugs.

Then there’s the stent, needed to keep the blockage from closing back up (restenosis) after the balloon forces it open. Dr. Julian Whitaker has this to say about stents:

[E]ven stents can become blocked over time, so most are coated with drugs to reduce this risk.
While this may sound like a good idea, three new studies show that it is anything but. Although the drug-coated stents may decrease restenosis, they interfere with the creation of collateral circulation that naturally bypasses blocked arteries, increase the risk of potentially fatal blood clots-and more than double the risk of heart attack or death!

To reduce the risk of blood clots caused by the stent, Plavix is prescribed at a cost of about $1,400.00 per year.

When the stent fails, which it will if you don’t die from its adverse effects, the next step is coronary bypass surgery. Dr. Whitaker refers to a study done on bypass surgery in 1983, the Coronary Artery Surgery Study (CASS).

CASS showed that bypass was a bust. Rates of heart attack and death from heart disease were no lower in patients who had surgery than they were in a similar group of patients treated without surgery. The death rate in the patients who didn’t have bypass surgery was a surprisingly low 1.6 per cent per year. …
The findings from this study are as relevant today as they were 24 years ago. At the time of the CASS trials, the death rate of patients 65 and older hospitalized for bypass was 11 per cent. While the in-hospital death rate for bypass has dropped to 2.2 per cent (this includes all age groups; its higher for older people), the annual mortality rate for patients treated with noninvasive methods has fallen below 1 per cent-meaning you’re still twice as likely to die from the surgery as you are from the disease.

Alternatives to bypass surgery include chelation therapy (See Chelation post on this site), enhanced external counterpulsation (EECP), and hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), along with fish oil to counter inflammation, red yeast rice, krill oil, and policosanol to lower cholesterol (See Cholesterol post on this site), and Co-enzyme Q10 to strengthen the heart (See Top Ten Health Tips post on this site).

And why are these procedures still performed when no studies have found them to be helpful? Dr. Whitaker again:

These procedures generate more than $121 Billion a year, a windfall that makes up approximately 45 per cent of the revenue of most hospitals! That’s why angioplasty and bypass remain popular, despite dozens of studies that have been done over the past quarter-century–not one of them showing that either of these procedures prevents heart attacks or premature death for the overwhelming majority of people.