Hospitals contain experts in ILLNESS

25. August 2006 William Davis (0)
Hospitals contain many experts in sickness. This seems obvious. But walk down the hallways of any hospital, and you'll quickly be convinced that hospitals contain almost no experts in health.

People (hospital staff, that is, not the patients) in hospitals are especially good at identifying and treating disease. They lack knowledge of health.

If your nurse is 100 lbs overweight and struggles to walk down the hall because of arthritis in both knees, would you entrust her with health advice?

If your doctor sits down in the cafeteria and eats his lunch of a ham sandwich with cheese on a bun, fried onion rings, and a milkshake and pastry, can you believe that he/she possesses any insight into health and nutrition?

If your physical therapist or cardiac rehabilitation counselor struggles nearly as much as you while climbing a single flight of stairs, can you accept their advice on how to regain your stamina and use exerise to full health advantage?

The answer to all these questions is, of course, no. Hospital staff are generally expert at dressing surgical wounds, stopping bleeding, identifying infections, and providing the support services for surgical and diagnostic procedures. In contrast, they are generally miserable at conveying genuine health advice. They certainly fall short in being examples of health themselves.

To hospitals and their staff, health is a temporary situation that persists only until you become ill. Illness is an inevitability in the hospital staff mindset. Health is a temporary state in between illnesses.

We need to shake off this perverse mentality. Health is the state of life that should dominate our practices and philosophies. Illness via the occasional catastrophe, e.g., broken leg from skiing, car accident, etc., is the province of hospitals. We should gravitate towards this philosphy and away from the over-reliance on hospitals that has come to dominate our present perceptions of health. Hospitals are not glamorous. They are, for the most part, profit-seeking businesses intent on portraying themselves as champions of health.

When I walk down the halls of hospitals, I am shocked and ashamed at the extraordinary examples of ill-health presented by hospital staff. Yet they falsely paint themselves as experts in both illness and health. Don't believe it for a second.
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You're at the cutting edge

You're at the cutting edge

26. March 2007 William Davis (3)
If you're a participant in the Track Your Plaque program for atherosclerotic plaque regression, you are at the cutting edge of health.

Few physicians give this issue any thought. Chances are, for instance, that if you were to bring up the subject of reversal of heart disease to your primary care physician, you'd get a dismissive "it's not possible," or " Yeah, it's possible but it's rare."

Ask a cardiologist and you might make a little more progress. He/she might tell you that Lipitor 80 mg per day or Crestor 40 mg per day might achieve a halt in plaque growth or a modest reduction of up to 5-6%. If they've tried this strategy, they would likely also tell you that hardly anybody can tolerate these doses for long due to muscle aches. I'd estimate that 1 of 10 of my colleagues would even be aware of these studies.

Both groups are, however, reasonably adept at diagnosing chest pain, an everyday occurrence in hospitals and offices. Chest pain, for them, is a whole lot more interesting. It holds the promise of acute catastrophe and all its excitement. It also holds the key to lots of hospital revenues. Did you know that 80% of all internal medicine physicians are now employees of hospitals? They're also commonly paid on an incentive basis. More revenues, more money.

Ask Drs. Dean Ornish or Caldwell Esselstyn about reversal of heart disease and they will tell you that a very low-fat diet (<10% of calories)can do it. That's true if you use a flawed test of coronary disease like heart catheterization (angiograms) or nuclear stress tests (Ornish calls them "SPECT"). It would be like judging the health of the plumbing in your house by the volume of water flowing out the spigot. It flows even when the pipes are loaded with rust.

In the Track Your Plaque experience, extreme low-fat diets (i.e., high wheat, corn, and rice diets) grotesquely exagerrate the small LDL particle size pattern, among the most potent triggers for coronary plaque growth. This approach also makes your abdomen get fatter and fatter and inches you closer to diabetes. Triglycerides go up, inflammation increases.

If you were able to measure the rust in the pipes, that would be a superior test. You can measure the "rust" in your "pipes," the atherosclerotic plaque in your coronary arteries, using two methods: CT heart scans or intracoronary ultrasound. Take your pick. I'd choose a heart scan. It's safe, accurate, inexpensive. I've performed many intracoronary ultrasounds for people in the midst of heart attacks or some other reason to go to the catheterization laboratory. But for well people, without symptoms, who are interested in identifying and tracking plaque? That's the place for heart scans.

In our program, 18-30% reductions in heart scan scores are common.
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Comments (3) -

  • farseas

    12/6/2011 5:01:54 PM |

    Dr. Eselstyn claims that animal protein damages the endothelium.  Dr. Weil says that a high fat meal lowers artery function.   But I had a heart attack and have a stent and have been following your diet for about a year.  If I start eating significant quantities of carbs, I used to get chest pains.  Since then I have went from 305 to 235 and want to get to 175.  I got the stent three years ago.

    Is there any truth to either Weil's or Esselstyn's claims?

    Now I take no medication except a daily 325mg aspirin and a bunch of supplements, including hawthorne and of course, fish oil.  I control my blood pressure with medical MJ and it works great to lower my blood pressure.

    Do I need to worry about saturated fat and high blood pressure?  I used to be on Plavix, blood pressure medication, and statins.  I tried three different statins and they all caused me leg pains.  In fact I seem to have chronic but intermittent leg pain since the statins.

  • Dr. William Davis

    12/6/2011 5:28:45 PM |

    I don't think so.

    They understand this disease incompletely. I can't blame an ENT surgeon for not fully understanding a disease he has never treated.

  • bob stanton

    12/13/2011 3:39:07 PM |

    Esselstyn says this based on the fact that animal protein has higher levels of methionine.  But this study,  Toxicity of Methionine in Humans, by Peter J. Garlick, refutes this claim:
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    Conclusions. Although methionine was labeled as being the most toxic amino acid in relation to growth in animals (1), the evidence in humans does not point to serious toxicity, except at very high levels of intake. Despite the function of methionine as a precursor of homocysteine, and the role of homocysteine in vascular damage and cardiovascular disease, there is no evidence that dietary intake of methionine within reasonable limits will cause cardiovascular damage. A single dose of 100 mg/kg body weight has been shown to be safe, but this dose is about 7 times the daily requirement for sulfur amino acids, and repeated consumption for 1 wk was shown to result in increased homocysteine levels (37,42). Daily doses of 250 mg (i.e., 4 mg/kg per day) are only 25% of the daily requirement and have been shown to be safe. Overall, the literature suggests that the single dose which is typically given in the methionine loading test (100mg/kg/d) does not cause any serious complications, except in the extreme case when a 10-fold excess of methionine appears to have been given, and in patients who have schizophrenia or inborn errors of sulfur amino acid metabolism, such as hypermethioninemia.
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