The American Heart Association has a PR problem

2. March 2011 William Davis (17)
The results of the latest Heart Scan Blog poll are in. The poll was prompted by yet another observation that the American Heart Association diet is a destructive diet that, in this case, made a monkey fat.

Because I am skeptical of "official" organizations that purport to provide health advice, particularly nutritional advice, I thought this poll might provide some interesting feedback.

I asked:

The American Heart Association is an organization that:

The responses:
Tries to maintain the procedural and medication status quo to benefit the medical system and pharmaceutical industry for money
240 (64%)

Doesn't know its ass from a hole in the ground
121 (32%)

Is generally helpful but is misguided in some of its advice
79 (21%)

Accomplishes tremendous good and you people are nuts
6 (1%)


Worrisome. Now, perhaps the people reading this blog are a skeptical bunch. Or perhaps they are better informed.

Nonetheless, one thing is clear: The American Heart Association (and possibly other organizations like the American Diabetes Association and USDA) have a serious PR problem. They are facing an increasingly critical and skeptical public.

Just telling people to "cut the fat and cholesterol" is beginning to fall on deaf ears. After all, the advice to cut fat, cut saturated fat, cut cholesterol and increase consumption of "healthy whole grains" in 1985 began the upward ascent of body weight and diabetes in the American public.

Believe it or not, my vote would be for something between choices 1 and 3. I believe that the American Heart Association achieves a lot of good. But I also believe that there are forces within organizations that are there to serve their own agendas. In this case, I believe there is a substantial push to maintain the procedural and medication status quo, the "treatments" that generate the most generous revenues.

I believe that I will forward these poll results to the marketing people at the American Heart Association. That'll be interesting!
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Comments (17) -

  • Tuck

    3/1/2011 11:46:38 PM |

    Did the monkeys get to vote? ;)

  • reikime

    3/2/2011 12:11:04 AM |

    I would LOVE to read a response from the AHA!

  • Anonymous

    3/2/2011 12:15:46 AM |

    Come on Doc, these statistics are obviously bias. That's like asking the readers of an vegan/animal-rights blog, "Do you think meat is murder?" and trying to transpose the results as being all encompassing.

  • Rick

    3/2/2011 1:32:30 AM |

    I have to agree with Anonymous here. Nothing surprising in the fact that the majority of readers of a blog that regularly criticizes the AHA have a critical stance towards the AHA.

    Move along, these are not the droids you're looking for.

  • Harold

    3/2/2011 2:34:28 AM |

    I think you are being a bit generous to them. I certainly agree about the ADA. They seem to be in it for the money and they are getting plenty of it from drug companies. I am a physician and a diabetic and if I followed their advice my blood sugars would be out of control. As it is I am on a very low carb life style and in excellent control!
    Thanks for your posts.

  • Real Food RD

    3/2/2011 4:13:16 AM |

    certainly it's not a random sample, but nonetheless, I would have to agree that all of these organizations and government agencies are losing credibility with the public and fast.  As a health professional myself, I can only hope my colleagues may begin to soften their stance before our credibility is completely shot with the public.

  • Anonymous

    3/2/2011 1:14:17 PM |

    Tuck, the monkeys must make up the extra 18%.

    Doctor, I truly appreciate your blog, read it religiously and follow much of your advice, but before forwarding to the AHA, you might want to check the numbers.

  • renegadediabetic

    3/2/2011 1:59:02 PM |

    I think the AHA has done a lot of good in the treatment of heart attacks and keeping people alive.  However, I was thinking mainly of the "prevention" side when I voted "Tries to maintain the procedural and medication..."

    Likewise, the ADA and other diabetes orgs are no doubt doing some good research into causes and prevention of type 1 diabetes, but their nutritional approach is a disaster.  Again, just maintaining the status quo for so long that they would be afraid to admit they were wrong if they finally did see the light.

  • Might-o'chondri-AL

    3/2/2011 5:24:44 PM |

    Their heart is in the right place. In another 40 years scientists will be deriding the intriguing bloggosphere theories.

  • reikime

    3/2/2011 5:53:19 PM |

    I just dislike these organizations jumping on a bandwagon d'jour, and trying to apply it to everyone blanketly.

    People are not a " one size fits all " species!  When will the AHA, ADA, etc, stop aligning with big agriculture and pharma and think of individual people and their specific needs?  Is that just a pipe dream?

  • Tara

    3/2/2011 11:20:06 PM |

    Real Food RD, I'm with you!

    I was going to throw the other ADA in that stack too.  I've let them know several times how I feel about their corporate sponsors and partners.  Disgusted.

  • Brian Vickerman

    3/3/2011 2:12:54 AM |

    To be honest... after promoting such a lifestyle for so many years... wouldn't a sudden change in opinion open them to law suits?

    How can they respond to that?

  • reikime

    3/3/2011 3:14:54 AM |

    Great point Brian. I hadn't even thought of it.

    Wouldn't it be the same with any condition that current medical research might up- end the treatment protocols?
    ie..remember when patients with gastric ulcers were advised to drink milk and cream and avoid spicy foods etc?  
    Then enter H. Pylori...albeit some 10 years after published studies and much derision from U.S. gastros. Treatment standards changed dramatically. Never heard of lawsuits over that.

  • Anonymous

    3/3/2011 3:16:21 AM |

    Could people leave more than one response?  The percentages add up to more than a hundred.
    Bob

  • Bob

    3/3/2011 3:27:57 AM |

    OK, I did the math.  Apparently about 375 unique respondents, with 70 or so choosing more than one answer.

  • mongander

    3/3/2011 4:05:38 AM |

    My impression is that 'disease associations' exist primarily to ensure their continued existance.

    I have heard good reports on the Muscular Distrophy Assoc.

  • Anonymous

    3/3/2011 8:37:54 PM |

    Dr D, I don't think the AHA is sending you a Christmas card this year

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The origins of heart catheterization: Part II

The origins of heart catheterization: Part II

13. March 2008 William Davis (0)
On the afternoon of October 30th, 1958, nearly 30 years after Werner Forssmann’s fumbling attempts, Dr. Mason Sones, a 5 foot 5 inch, plain-talking, cuss-every-few-words, cigarette-wielding radiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, was performing a routine angiogram of a patient’s aorta (the large vessel emerging from the heart) in a dark basement laboratory. (In Sones’ day, imaging methods remained primitive, disease diagnosis relying more than anything else on the physician’s powers of observation and crude diagnostic procedures. Abdominal pain was assessed with exploratory laparotomy, headaches with air injected into the brain and nervous system (“pneumoencephalography”), an excruciatingly painful ordeal. Being able to track the course of x-ray dye injected into specific internal organs, whether liver, biliary tree, aorta, lungs, or coronary arteries, represented a huge advance in diagnostic tools for human disease.)

In 1958, no one had yet injected dye directly into the coronary artery of a living human.


Just as the dye injector was triggered, Dr. Sones’ eyes widened in horror when the black and white monitor showed that the catheter had inadvertently jumped into the right coronary artery. The injection pump, already triggered to release its load, proceeded to pump 30 cc of X-ray dye straight into the artery. (Modern techniques usually require only 5–10 cc of dye.) Dr. Sones recounts the incident:

“It was late in the day and we were tired. I hit the switch to rev up the x-ray generator so I could see. As the picture came on, I could see that the damn catheter was in the guy’s right coronary artery. And there I was, down in the hole [a recess to shield him from radiation]. I yelled, “Pull it out! Pull it out!”*? By that time, about 30 cc of the dye had gone into the coronary artery. I climbed out of the hole and I grabbed a knife. I thought that his heart would fibrillate and I would have to open his chest and shock his heart. [In Sones’ day, modern CPR hadn’t yet been developed as a method of resuscitation.] But he didn’t fibrillate—his heart stopped. I demanded he cough. He coughed three times and his heart began to beat again. I knew at once that if the heart could tolerate 30 cc of dye, we would be able to safely inject small amounts directly into the coronary artery. I knew that night that we would have a tool to define the anatomic nature of coronary disease.”


*An observer, Dr. Julio Sosa, reported that Dr. Sones, in his shock, also blurted, “We’ve killed him!” After all, conventional wisdom of that era, based on observations from dye injections into the coronary arteries of dogs, was that injecting x-ray dye into human coronary arteries would result in immediate death from the electrical imbalance provoked in heart muscle momentarily deprived of oxygen-carrying blood.

Thus it was established that it was indeed possible to directly inject x-ray dye into human coronary arteries and reveal its internal contours. That’s not to say that the x-ray dyes of 1958 were innocuous. Far from it. In addition to briefly interrupting heart rhythm, as happened with Sones’ first accidental attempt, the dyes used then typically caused dizziness and the sudden urge to vomit. During the first 30 years of direct coronary catheterizations, it was common for hospital staff to run to the patient’s side, bucket in hand to catch the inevitable vomit, once the heart was jump-started by coughing.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Sones’ discovery set off both an avalanche of criticism and bold predictions of how the new technique might change the course of diagnosis in heart disease.

Over the subsequent weeks and months, Dr. Sones proceeded to purposefully insert catheters into coronary arteries and create angiograms that revealed the extent of coronary atherosclerosis. He learned how to fashion new catheter shapes to facilitate access to the arteries. Sones developed an impressive experience in the new technique. For the first time, clear images of the coronary arteries were routinely obtainable for the confident diagnosis of coronary atherosclerosis before death. Dr. Sones became an unlikely celebrity in Cleveland, entertaining physicians from around the world eager to learn about his methods, politicians and celebrities, even Middle Eastern nobility complete with bodyguards and food testers.

Dr. Sones continued to work in Cleveland, furthering the techniques of heart catheterization after his fortuitous error. He died of lung cancer in 1985, 17 years after his discovery.

Thus was born the modern age of heart catheterization.

Today, over 10,000 heart procedures are performed in the U.S. every day, 365 days a year, the vast majority of which involve heart catheterization or begin with a heart catheterization. Dr. Sones' fortuitous blunder was followed by 30 years of productive refinement and development before the blatant excesses of this technique really began to be exploited.


Copyright 2008 William Davis, MD
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