Here is an excerpt from their Frequently Asked Questions page:

What Does Breast Cancer Choices Mean?

The concept of “choices” encourages women to consider all their options. Breast Cancer Choices offers an alternate way to approach the whole process of being diagnosed and treated for breast cancer by asking questions and reviewing the available information with your doctor. We don’t advocate any specific treatment. Many of us feel conventional medicine hasn’t had a good track record treating breast cancer with toxic therapies. If the survival statistics had improved from 50 years ago there would be no need to discuss options in breast cancer therapies. We look forward to a time when conventional medicine gets better results and there won’t be a need for a question-based site like this. Our main goal is to put ourselves out of business. If your physician is well-versed in the literature, she will be able to tell you what these particular statistics are without blinking.

How is breastcancerchoices.org different from all the other breast cancer websites?

Breastcancerchoices.org is a question-driven resource site. It relies heavily on the veteran patients from the Amazon Group who have raised questions and researched the answers. But the questioning continues. Some patients choose not to take radiation therapy, chemotherapy or have lymph node procedures. This site begins the dialogue and documents the reasoning behind those non-standard choices. Also, as veteran breast cancer patients, we’ve all made mistakes along the way in the procedures we went along with. Hopefully, visitors to this site can learn from our mistakes and will benefit from the information many of us learned after the damage was done. Since 1996, when the Amazon Listserv began, many of the same questions came up in discussion every few months as newly diagnosed patients signed on. We tried to answer them by researching the medical literature and posting it to the group. Although most of our stockpiled studies answered the questions, new ones kept appearing so we needed an efficient, easy to use place to keep all the questions, documented answers and the medical studies. But, more disturbingly, we realized some important questions almost never came up because we never thought to ask or we believed the answers we were given. Only through time and more research did we realize that these needed their place too. That’s why questions are the centerpiece of this site.

If you suspect you have breast cancer, don’t just visit any conventional oncologist, visit www.breastcancerchoices.org first!

(PRWEB) March 15, 2008 — “Let thy Food be thy Medicine and thy Medicine be thy Food” — Hippocrates. That is the message from the founding father of modern medicine echoed in the controversial new documentary film Food Matters from Producer-Directors James Colquhoun and Laurentine ten Bosch.

With nutritionally-depleted foods, chemical additives and our tendency to rely upon pharmaceutical drugs to treat what’s wrong with our malnourished bodies, it’s no wonder that modern society is getting sicker. Food Matters sets about uncovering the trillion dollar worldwide ‘sickness industry’ and gives people some scientifically verifiable solutions for curing disease naturally.

If we can help people become more aware of the choices available to them, they can start to reduce their reliance on the ‘sickness industry’. It’s about education not medication

In what promises to be the most contentious idea put forward, the filmmakers have interviewed several world leaders in nutrition and natural healing who claim that not only are we harming our bodies with improper nutrition, but that the right kind of foods, supplements and detoxification can be used to treat chronic illnesses as fatal as terminally diagnosed cancer.

The focus of the film is in helping us rethink the belief systems fed to us by our modern medical and health care establishments. The interviewees point out that not every problem requires costly, major medical attention and reveal many alternative therapies that can be more effective, more economical, less harmful and less invasive than conventional medical treatments.

“We need to get this message out there. It will change people’s lives,” says Laurentine.

The documentary film comes at an appropriate time where health care is high on the agenda in many industrial nations. As the US approaches elections, major health care reform is a hotly contended issue. The American health care system has received a great deal of scrutiny after Michael Moore’s exposé, Sicko, in which he voices the views of around 50 million Americans who don’t have access to health care insurance. But will giving people access to a system that is already in crisis solve the problem?

This is exactly what film makers James and Laurentine bring to light in this new film. “If we can help people become more aware of the choices available to them, they can start to reduce their reliance on the ‘sickness industry’. It’s about education not medication,” says James, “with access to solid information, people invariably make good choices for their health.”

In a departure from traditional distribution models, the film will be made available to viewers all over the world, using streaming technology provider Vividas, on a pay-per-view model. Using this cutting edge solution, the film will be accessible to an unlimited number of simultaneous viewers at exceptional quality. This same technology helped the producers of the 90-minute feature film The Secret expand their exposure worldwide contributing to their enormous international success.

“The internet is a ready and accessible medium for us,” says James. “People all over the world are able to receive this message and apply it to their own lives immediately.”

The production has remained independently funded from start to finish. “We wanted to remain as unbiased as possible in the way that we presented this information to the public,” says James, “especially on such a sensitive topic.”

This has also been part of what has attracted others to the project with the team having recently joined up with the acclaimed Australian Triple Platinum ‘John Butler Trio’ who will be contributing music for the film. “We’ve been extremely fortunate to have John Butler on board; it will go a long way to help get the message out there,” says Laurentine.

The film’s official trailer and website can be found at http://tinyurl.com/foodmatters

You want to switch to raw food but do not have the time to read a book?

At last here is a quality DVD production for the aspiring raw foodist.

The title is Raw For Life: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of the Raw Food Lifestyle

People in the raw food community routinely cure all the so called incureables such as cancer, diabetes, heard disease, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, etc. Rich people, smart people, athletic people, beautiful people, healthy people use the raw food lifestyle as their secret edge.

You know raw is good for you. You may have heard me repeat it all the time that raw food is the official God & nature specified fuel of humans. Now you can be informed the easy way how to go raw.

See the cover of the DVD:

See the DVD Introduction:

Special Chapters on:

Starting out on the Raw Food Diet, Weight Reduction, Detox and Cleansing, Nutrition, Rejuvenation and Longevity, Recipes from leading world-class chefs, Health and Wellness, Wisdom of Eating Raw, Optimal Athletic Performance, Spiritual Aspects, Beating Diabetes

>> Click here to see their official website!

Hulda Clark in her book Cure for All Diseases looks more at the pollution angle due to cadmium as a cause of high blood pressure. Dr. Clark also mentions just like every real healer for people to ingest REAL SEA SALT, not those poisonous factory made “salt” made with pure Sodium Chloride.

This is an excerpt directly taken from Dr. Hulda Clark’s Cure for All Diseases:

High Blood Pressure

High blood pressure is one of the easiest problems to correct without resorting to drugs.

The most important change to make is to stop using caffeine as in coffee, tea, or carbonated beverages. Don’t use decaffeinated coffee or tea either because of the solvent pollution in them. Switch to hot milk or hot water if a hot beverage is desired, or any of the beverages given in the recipe section. If being without caffeine leaves you fatigued, take an arginine tablet in the morning (500 mg).

Blood pressure is mainly controlled by the adrenal glands which sit like little caps on top of the kidneys. Whatever is affecting the kidneys is probably affecting the adrenals, too, since they’re so close to each other. You must find out what it is. You could do your search in the kidneys since kidney tissue is available in grocery stores. Adrenal tissue is available on microscope slides. What will you find? Probably cadmium. Search for the cadmium source in your drinking water!

Cadmium comes from the metal pipes. In fact, you could scrape a galvanized pipe to get a cadmium test substance. Conducting or storing drinking water in containers of metal is as foolish a practice as eating food off the floor. Water picks up everything it touches simply because it is wet! You may not see what it picked up any more than you can see if it has picked up sugar or salt. The cadmium and other metal is dissolved in the water. The older the pipes the softer, more corroded they are, and the more metal is picked up as the water rushes by. If you find cadmium in your hot or cold water, you will never be able to filter it out. Nor should you switch to bottled water. The amount of cadmium in your clothing from doing laundry with this water is already too much for your adrenals and kidneys. Change your galvanized pipes to PVC plastic. If you believe you already have plastic pipes or all copper (which leads to leukemia, schizophrenia and fertility problems) you will need to search every inch of plumbing for a very short piece of galvanized pipe left in the system! A piece as short as a 2 inch T or Y can be causing all the trouble.

The toxicity of cadmium, in fact, the high blood pressure connection, has been known a long time. After finding the cadmium, start on the kidney cleanse. You might miss the cadmium problem if you don’t attend to it first. Also remove all metal from
your mouth.

All (100%) cases of high blood pressure I have seen could be easily cured by eliminating cadmium and other pollutants, followed by cleansing the kidneys.

To test whether you still need your blood pressure medicine, wait until your pressure is down to 140/90 or better. Then cut the dose in half. Check it again next day. If it has climbed back up you are not ready; go back to ¾ or a full dose of medicine. Try again a few days later. If your blood pressure stays down, cut your medicine in half again (you are now down to ¼ the regular dose) and see if your blood pressure stays improved. When you are down to 130/80 go off completely. But stay on the kidney herb recipe. At 120/80 try yourself on a few shakes of sea salt. The amount of salt eaten, once the pressure is down, has little influence. In fact increasing salt intake improves energy without raising blood pressure. Take no more than one teaspoon a day (2,000 mg sodium), total, including cooking. Better yet, make a salt that is a mixture of sodium and potassium chlorides (see Sources). Mix it for yourself in a 1 to 1 ratio or whatever your taste can accept. The sodium portion could be sterilized sea salt (test and make sure it has no aluminum silicate in it first).

Mold toxins have specific kidney effects! Especially T-2 toxin, found mostly in dried peas, beans and lentils. Rinse these thoroughly first, throw away shriveled ones, and add vitamin C to the cooking water. All cases of serious kidney disease show a build up of T-2 toxin. Be extra careful to avoid moldy food (read Moldy Food, page 381).

High Blood Pressure Cure Cases

Bala Cuzmin, age 72, had high blood pressure for ten years but the upper (systolic) pressure remained high in spite of various medicines that were tried. She had three kinds of kidney stones and only one functional kidney. She stopped using caffeine, switching to arginine tablets to get over the let-down. Her diet was changed to reduce phosphate and add calcium, and she took magnesium and Vitamin B6 to assist the kidneys. She was very anemic and her mean cell volume (MCV) was high due to Ascaris infestation. She killed parasites, cleansed kidneys but saw no drop in blood pressure which stayed at 150 to 170 systolic. Her adrenal glands were choked with copper and platinum. She had all the metal in her mouth replaced and promptly saw a blood pressure drop to 145-1 50. Three months later it was at 128 to 133 on half her medicine. She had not been tested for T-2 toxin yet, nor changed her copper water pipes.

Sabrina Patton, 66, had a long list of health problems, including high blood pressure for six years. She was on CorgardTM and diazide drugs which kept it down to 140-160/74-80. She had phosphate crystals in her kidneys and was started on kidney herbs and a diet change to include milk and exclude soda pop. She had high levels of mercury and copper in her immune system. She was feeling so much better after the kidney cleanse that she decided to remove her last fillings and replace her bridge, too, since it was shedding ruthenium. On her way home from the dentist, her ears stopped ringing and soon her blood pressure was down to 126/68. She was still on half a dose of drugs because she was too afraid to go off entirely. But when her pressure stayed down she found the courage to go off completely. This gave her the energy she wanted to play basketball with the grandchildren again.

Rolf Ehrhart, 61, had 80% blockage of heart arteries and high blood pressure for which he was on a HydropresTM patch, TenorminTM, and LogolTM (diuretic). He had phosphate and uric acid crystals in his kidneys. He was started on kidney herbs followed by the parasite herbs. His Ascaris and flukes were zapped. He stopped using store-bought beverages. Then he could cut back on his medicines, measuring his blood pressure daily to guide him. After seven weeks it was down to 140/85, so he decided to do without medicine, a bit early. He was also getting chelation therapy and was now able to walk 2-4 miles a day. His next chore, which he approached gladly, was removal of all metal from his mouth. Len Gerald, 45, was on VasotecTM for high blood pressure. He was constantly sleepy; his blood test showed a low thyroid level in spite of being on Euthyroid.TM He was started on kidney herbs followed by parasite herbs. In two weeks, barely into his program, his blood pressure dropped. He had to go off his blood pressure medicine. It stayed at 126/80. He still had some Ascaris and other health problems but was highly motivated to clean them up, too.

http://www.curezone.com/forums/fm.asp?i=493274#i

Question:

Hi Andreas. My husband was diagnosed with borderline hypertension a few months ago. He has watched his eating habits (though he’s certainly not perfect), flushes his liver on a regular basis, and regularly gets out stones. He’s taking fish oil, coq10, and eats reasonably healthy, as I already stated.

I have read here at Curezone that hypertension is relatively easy to cure by doing a kidney cleanse and detoxing. Is this true to your knowledge? Hulda Clarke said that usually hypertension can be traced to cadmium overload, and that a kidney cleanse always helps.

We purchased one of those blood pressure monitors and his blood pressure fluctuates from 122/80 to up to 135/95. There isn’t a lot of consistancy. We don’t know if his treatments are making matters better or no, because of the fluctuations.

What is the root cause of hypertension, Andreas? Is it heavy metal toxicity, which can be easily remedied by a kidney cleanse? Should he up his dose of fish oil? What do you advise people to do in this type of situation?

Thanks so much for your wisdom and advice. I hope you don’t have to keep working 12 hour days indefinitely!
————–

Answer:

You didn’t mention his age. His borderline blood pressure may actually be
completely normal for him, and for his age. The recommended “normal blood
pressure” has been “adjusted” so many times that I would not give any
credence to those who claim they know what is normal for a person.
Different body types have different blood pressures. Plus,they fluctuate
all the time. There are millions out there who suffer from a false
positive hypertenstion diagnosis. I wrote quite a bit on this subject in
my book Timeless Secrets of Health and Rejuvenation (ener-chi.com). See
the excerpt below.

The biggest cause of hypertension is not drinking enough water and
avoiding real salt (normal table salt should be avoided). Lack of water
consumption thickens the blood, reduces blood volume and thereby forces
the blood vessels to tighten, which increases the blood pressure. Also,
eating proteins foods leads to thickening of the basal membranes of blood
vessel walls, also tightening the blood vessels. If this happens in the
kidneys, it can damage them and lead to permanent hypertension. The
kidneys greatly benefit from the kidney cleanse (see my book The Amazing
Liver and Gallbladder Flush, ener-chi.com) ,which also help balance
elevated blood pressure.

” Hypertension Produced in the Doctor’s Office?

If your visit to the doctor is accompanied by the fear of anticipating a
serious physical problem, your anxiety may trigger a stress response and
raise your blood pressure. This phenomenon is known as “white-coat
hypertension.” While the doctor is measuring your blood pressure (using
the old system of measurement), the pressure of the inflating cuff against
your blood vessels and accompanying nerves raises it even more. By the
time the pressure in the cuff is lowered to read the pulsation level, you
inevitably have an artificially raised blood pressure. Both factors, the
anxiety and the taking of the blood pressure, may be sufficient to “make”
a person hypertensive.

A healthy blood pressure can vary tremendously – as much as 30 mm Hg –
over the cause of any day. To be really certain that you are hypertensive,
the doctor would either have to take several readings each day over a
period of six months (as recommended by the WHO) or give you a portable
electronic device to do the same. Another problem arises because the
systolic blood pressure may vary between each arm by as much as 8 mm Hg.
In some cases the difference can be up to 20 mm Hg.

Also, there is the question whether the doctor or health care worker takes
the blood pressure while the person lying down, then sitting, then
standing? If the person is asked to stand, how long does the doctor wait
before taking the blood pressure? And, is he checking the person’s heart
rate in the three different positions? Just taking a blood pressure when
the person is sitting will not tell him much about what happens when he is
standing for any amount of time. But who is the patient that asks his
doctor to do all that? The general mode of behavior I in a doctor’s office
is to let the doctor do his job without questioning him. A recent study
revealed that more than 70 percent of health care workers failed to use
the proper arm position established by the American Heart Association.
This position calls for the elbow to be slightly flexed and held at heart
level.

In a study from the University of California, San Diego, 100 subjects were
given six blood pressure readings in different positions. The researchers
found that when subjects were seated with the arm perpendicular to the
body, hypertension was recorded in 22 percent. But when the same subjects
held the arm parallel to the body, 41 percentshowed BP readings indicating
high blood pressure. This raises a very important question: “How many
people leave the doctor’s office or hospital with a blood pressure
prescription in hand who ‘suffer’ from high blood pressure because the
doctor or nurse didn’t follow the proper measurement guidelines?” My
conservative estimate is, hundreds of thousands of them.

With regard to testing the blood pressure in pregnant women, there is no
consensus as yet on which of the several available tests are truly
reliable.

Furthermore, high blood pressure often is a temporary stress-related
phenomenon and returns to normal after things calm down. In the case of
white-coat hypertension, your blood pressure may drop to normal levels
soon after you leave the doctor’s surgery. But whether your blood pressure
is chronically elevated or not, you may be asked to take anti-hypertensive
drugs that have little or no effect on your real condition, but may
produce severe side effects including headaches, lethargy, nausea,
sleepiness, and impotence. Anti-hypertensive drugs are so popular today
because patients believe that just by swallowing a pill a day they can
prevent a possible heart attack. Research published in 1997 by the Journal
of the American Medical Association found that drugs for high blood
pressure may be over-prescribed, especially if blood pressure measurements
are taken by the doctor instead of by the portable device used for
ambulatory monitoring.

Mass-producing Hypertensive Patients

What is more disturbing in all that is that the medical system is trying
to create a problem where there is none. What is considered to be “normal”
blood pressure has been modified nearly a dozen times in the past 30
years. The American Medical Association’s recommendations now cite
anything over 115/70 as being “high.” Just 6 years ago, that number was
140/90, which is actually still quite low. Perhaps, soon everyone with
100/60 may be considered at risk. How far do they want to take this
deception before everyone is declared as being in the risk group for high
blood pressure?

We are certainly heading in the wrong direction with our medication
policies in the U.S. other countries. We have indiscriminately turned huge
portions of the population into hypertensive patients that in actual fact
are not sick at all. According to a recent Reuters online article, a Ben
Gurion University study with 500 subjects showed that patients over 70
years old with what modern standards call “mild hypertension” actually
thought more clearly and creatively than those with lower blood pressure.
Both men and women in the study whose blood pressure was deemed high
enough to warrant treatment with prescription drugs – and also those with
clinically uncontrolled (untreated) hypertension – performed significantly
better on tests of cognitive function, memory, concentration, and visual
retention. Surprisingly, those with “normal” blood pressure showed the
worst performance among all three groups in the study. The research
clearly implies over-medication of senior citizens, not just for blood
pressure. Just as we have seen with blood cholesterol levels, a normal
blood pressure among the elderly population is naturally higher than it is
for the younger population. Suppressing their blood pressure down with
side-effect causing drugs is not only harmful to their brain cells and
other parts of the body, but it is highly unethical, too.

It is a well know fact that high blood pressure is not responsible for
causing heart disease; it is heart disease that causes high blood
pressure. Despite the large amounts of hypertensive drugs and other heart
medication being pushed by the medical industry, mortality rates have not
improved. Quite to the contrary, the side effects are often severe and
include collapse of the lungs and heart attacks.

By contrast, there are many controlled studies, which show that relaxation
therapies, and a change of diet and lifestyle can lower a person’s blood
pressure faster and more consistently than medication. Going on a balanced
vegetarian diet alone can normalize blood pressure on a permanent basis.
The water therapy described earlier on is also a natural and quick method
to restore normal blood pressure. The daily full body oil massage and all
the other cleansing methods described in this book can significantly
improve blood pressure, too. In many cases, a series of liver cleanses and
one or two kidney cleanses are sufficient to eliminate hypertension
altogether.

There is one more widespread myth about blood pressure that most people –
and their doctors – don’t seem to know about:

While research has established that mortality rates remain uninfluenced by
the drugs, their side effects are often severe and include collapse of the
lungs and heart attacks. By contrast, there are many controlled studies,
which show that relaxation therapies, and a change of diet and lifestyle
can lower a person’s blood pressure faster and more consistently than
medication. Going on a balanced vegetarian diet alone can normalize blood
pressure on a permanent basis. The water therapy described earlier on is
also a natural and quick method to restore normal blood pressure.
Furthermore, the daily full body oil massage (especially with sesame oil)
greatly benefits blood pressure. Also if taken internally as a cooking oil
or salad dressing, sesame oil helps reduce high blood pressure and
dependence on medication. According to a recent study, participants
(average age 58 years) consumed 35 grams of sesame oil a day for 60 days
and thereby lowered their blood pressure readings from an average of
166/101 to 134/84.”

Andreas

This is just one in a series of hypertension articles I will be posting to help my very best friend.

http://thedoctorwithin.com/index_fr.php?page=articles/heartpatient.php

Are you really trying to drive me crazy? I see you come into my office year after year, usually for other reasons, and I take your blood pressure and it’s usually above 140/100. Sometimes above 180/100. You’re overweight, sweating, dehydrated, can’t breathe well, and have no energy. But you think everything’s under control because your doctor, very well-respected, knows about your problem and has decided that you need to have your ‘problem controlled’ with drugs. Here they come – Lotensin, Mevacor, Cardizem, Procardia, on and on. And the months turn into years and your blood pressure problem turns into a degenerative heart condition, mainly because of the drugs. The drugs weaken the heart muscle.
DRUGS

There are two main types of heart medication: calcium channel blockers and beta adrenergic blockers. (Merck) Without going into a long winded harangue, let’s just say that one slows down muscle activity – heart muscle, that is, and the other dims the nerve signals that must link the brain with the heart for normal operation. The brain sends thousands of signals every second to the heart to make minute little adjustments in heartbeat and blood flow in order to accommodate variation in demand coming from the organs and muscles. So. When blood pressure elevates due to plaque in the arteries, or because of stress tightening up the arteries, the heart has to work twice as hard to push all that blood through the system.

But instead of trying to do something to ease the burden on the heart, to unblock the flow, what do our doctors do? We drug the heart so that our blood pressure gauges will read normal, even though the heart is still struggling to keep up with the oxygen demands of the body, demands which have not changed. But now since the heart is shackled by the added pharmacological deadweight, the oxygen demands don’t get met. Short-term effect: decreased circulation, oxygen deficit, fatigue. Long term effect: heart muscle degeneration, enlargement, degeneration of any other organ or tissue which is not getting the blood it keeps calling for, lung congestion, and death.

Heart muscle is different from skeletal muscle. When you work out and your biceps get bigger, it’s getting stronger. The biceps is skeletal muscle. Heart muscle is different. When heart muscle enlarges, it’s because it’ s getting weaker – overstretched and thinner and flimsier. (Guyton, p 282) That’s why an enlarged heart is a problem. Why does the heart enlarge? Increased resistance from blocked arteries makes it harder to push all the blood through the system.

In 1900 the term “heart attack” didn’t even exist. In this century, for the first time in history more people are dying of heart problems than any other disease. This is insane. If no one has ever brought it to your attention, allow me this opportunity to point it out – this is insane. Heart drugs were supposed to be a temporary solution. Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution, right? Result of heart drugs and the “foods of commerce” both of which are new in this century: 1 out of 2 Americans dies of congestive heart failure. (CDC website) this statistic has gone unchanged since 1994. (Statistical Abstracts)

A partial list of side effects to the above-cited heart drugs

Headache Dizziness Slowed heart Edema Abnormal EKG Angina Irregular heartbeat Low blood pressure Fast heart Fainting Amnesia Depression Hallucinations Insomnia Personality change Tremors Ringing in the ears Anorexia Constipation Vomiting Weight gain Photosensitivity Nosebleed Muscle cramps Joint pain Sexual difficulties Anemia
source: Physician’s Desk Reference

DEATH BY BYPASS

Angioplasty? Bypass? Think these are gonna save you? Know what the re-occlusion rate for angioplasty is after two years? Guess. It’s about 57%. (Willix) Re-occlusion means the arteries close up again. In 1992, a study in Journal of the American Medical Association reported that at least half of angioplasties were unnecessary. Long term benefit of bypass? What do 90% of people with bypass surgeries eventually die of? Take a wild guess.

In a 1997 study, two groups of heart attack patients were followed for one year. The first group had either angioplasty or bypass. The second group had nothing. Guess what the difference in mortality was? Zero. After one year both groups were exactly the same! (New England Journal of Medicine May 22, 1997) That means that neither bypass nor angioplasty extends people’s lifespan whatsoever – statistically you’ll live just as long without either, by doing nothing.

This is a common finding in many other studies. In a 22 year follow-up study of 682 heart patients, it was found that the bypass surgery had no effect on the survival rate or the day to day pain.( Am J Cardiol 1998 Jun)

Same thing in a 16 year follow up study showing bypass surgery makes no difference whatsoever in survival rate. (Caracciolo)

We could go on and on citing similar studies, but the conclusion is inescapable. After several years, every heart surgeon must eventually confront reality: bypass surgery doesn’t save lives. 13% die on the table. The rest come back for more later on.

Most bypass surgeries these days are done before the patient is in acute distress. Often the patient is intimidated into surgery with mild chest pain as the only symptom, perhaps even with normal blood pressure. The diagnosis is made quickly before the prey gets better and flies away. We’re talking sales and marketing here, and the surgeons are very good at closing the sale. Fear and panic are very persuasive motivators.

Even for those with verified arterial blockage, surgery is a temporary housecleaning procedure, and all the studies show the same thing: bypass does not increase overall survival rate. People die of heart disease just as soon.

Stands to reason – if the coronary arteries were crammed full of atherosclerotic plaque, enough to require surgery, what kind of condition do you think the rest of the arteries of the body are in? All those years of chips and fries and burgers – did all that residual sludge just select the big arteries near the heart as its final resting place? Not likely. Blood cholesterol level is everywhere the blood goes – that means all the arteries, throughout the body. So after the fanfare of the surgical rituals dies down, what happens? The arteries that have been roto-rootered immediately begin to take on the condition of the rest of the cardiovascular system, i.e., clogged. How could it possibly be otherwise? Nature abhors a vacuum.

The above statistics don’t even take into account the actual risk of death from the bypass operation itself. In a bizarre advertisement in the 23 Nov 98 issue of Newsweek, we see a comparison of bypass surgery death rates on the operating table among the leading hospitals in the country. Here are the odds they advertise for bypass surgery

* Texas Heart Center 87%
* Johns Hopkins 90.2%
* Mayo Clinic 93.3%

A 13% chance of dying from a surgery that isn’t even going to prolong survival? That, my friend, is marketing.

LIFETIME PROGRAM?

Let me ask you something else. Remember when you were first diagnosed as having high blood pressure and were first put on medications to “control your blood pressure”? Remember that? OK now, when was the next time your doctor took your blood pressure? Two months later? Six months? One year? Never? The point is, if you’re taking these powerful medications to ‘control’ blood pressure, how will you or your doctor know if they’re working or not unless you monitor your blood pressure every few days? The body is not a car. Everyone responds differently to medication.

Heart medications are like most medications – fine for short-term, life-threatening situations. But long term, as with any drug, legal or illegal, eventually your body will pay the price. Looking in the Physicians’ Desk Reference, we find that even the manufacturers of most heart medications don’t recommend them for indefinite, open-ended use. This book is easy to get. Look up your medication and see the recommended duration of prescription. One reason is that the testing they did to put the drug on the market probably wasn’t long-term. The other reason is that everybody knows that all side effects of drugs are cumulative.

So people say – look at my BP – 125/80. And I’ve been on medication for 4 years. I need it to keep my blood pressure down. Well how do you know that you still need the drug to do that? Perhaps the heart has accommodated after all this time, or else maybe you have learned to do less and to make less energy demands on the system. Is this health? Are you getting stronger or weaker, year by year? Others will say, yes I’ve been on medication for several years and my blood pressure is 160/105. Guess what? It’s not that your medication is ineffective – it is definitely having a physiological impact. It’s just that the effect is not the one your doctor predicted. He wanted to lower your blood pressure. This drug didn’t work – it’s still high. That doesn’t mean the drug did nothing. It did plenty. See above list. Patients like this are at double the risk – high blood pressure plus drug toxicity and side effects.

Or they say – yeah I know it’s high, but if I stop with the medication, it’ll go through the roof. Long term or short term? How do you know? What if you were on vacation and your cruise ship marooned you on a desert island somewhere, without your drugs. Would you die? What would happen?

OPTIONS?

What’s the alternative to this one-way downward spiral? Well, it’s obvious that such a lifestyle isn’t working too well and probably won’t last too long. Do people you know on heart medications look healthy? Are they getting stronger or weaker, year by year? Look at all the people you used to know in this category who are no longer around. A universal principle for any life form is that either it’s improving or it’s dying. Day by day the inner systems are either becoming stronger and more refined, or else they’re degenerating and breaking down. Can’t be both. Unless they’re in a serious accident, most people don’t die all at once. No, most people die by stages, day by day, very often with no pain or symptoms. Just like heart attacks. Do these people get a warning? Sometimes, but for 33% of them, their very first symptom was death. (Willix)

These days it seems everybody and his dog is on the healthy heart bandwagon. No fat, low fat, fat free – often these labels are found on some very heart-unfriendly foods. How can you make any sense of all this? Well for starters, with very few exceptions if a food has any pasteurized dairy derivatives at all, it’s either hard fat or chemicals. You can definitely live without it. This group includes pizza, yoghurt, clam chowder, ice cream, meringue, whipped cream, cottage cheese, linguini alfredo, tapioca, brie, creamed chicken – get the idea?

LOWFAT?
Next, if you want to calculate the true percentage of fat in any item, take the number of grams of fat, multiply by 10, and divide by the number of calories. Your answer may surprise you, especially if the product is supposedly low fat.

For example, let’s say a bag of ‘low fat’ snack food has 350 calories and 20 grams of fat. Add a zero to the fat grams – that’s 200. Two hundred divided by 350 is 57%. That’s 57% fat for this ‘low-fat’ food. Don’t read the advertising; read the numbers. We need fat. We need it in the form of essential fatty acids, which compose many important structures of the body, such as nerve linings and hormones, for example. But most fat we eat is manmade, chemical, rancid, oxidizing, harmful fat from chips, fries, and fast food. This fat is largely indigestible. Good fat comes in avocados, bananas, raw nuts, fish, small amounts of clean lean meat, and raw butter.

WEIGHT LOSS PLATEAU

A small percentage of at-risk patients actually make a serious change in their day-to-day food intake. They make great progress and begin to feel much better. But then they may get to a point where even though they are eating very reasonably, they just don’t seem to be able to lose any more weight. They’ve hit the plateau, the brick wall, the glass ceiling. This is a different stratum of problem from simple food intake. Here we are dealing with fundamental issues: digestion, metabolism, fat storage, colon blockage. Why can’t a person of normal weight lose cellulite in the hips and legs no matter how good the diet becomes? Answer: digestion, enzyme metabolism, fat storage.

ENZYMES

The surprise here is: it doesn’t matter what you eat; it only matters what you digest. That is why most discussions of calories and fat/protein/carbo ratios are meaningless. If the food isn’t being digested, what does it matter what percentage protein you eat, or for what blood type or in what Zone? And that brings us round to the subject of enzymes. For the whole story, see the chapter on enzymes at thedoctorwithin.com.

Enzymes are proteins made by most life forms whose purpose is to control the chemical reactions necessary for the second-by-second maintenance of normal cell function. What’s that mean? Well, think about it – how can your body take in fried chicken, Fritos, and Dr. Pepper and turn them into bone and blood, as well as a thousand other substances your body needs to stay alive another day? It’s enzymes. Enzymes break down foods into their simplest components, the only usable forms. The body has its own enzymes for digestion – amylase, pepsin, lipase, chymotrypsin, (Guyton), to name a few. The problem is that there is a limited supply.

The other problem is that, because of food processing, most foods we eat contain no enzymes necessary for their own breakdown inside the body. So the body simply does the best job it possibly can with its own enzymes. The best foods humans can possibly eat are those which contain within them the enzymes necessary for complete breakdown and assimilation by the body. (Howell) That way the body’s stores of enzymes are not taxed. Examples: raw fruits and vegetables. The more raw fruits and raw vegetables in the diet, the more digested the food becomes, resulting in a greater nutritive value by the time the blood nourishes the individual cells in all organs and tissues. It’s a very simple idea, very simple indeed. Many modern processed foods contain some strange and brand new chemical configurations, stuff that didn’t come from nature. Ever see a Hamburger Helper tree, or a Velveeta plant? How many meats in the deli case never had parents? The result is that the body simply cannot keep up with the enzymatic demands being made upon it week after week, month after month.

So what do you think happens to what doesn’t get broken down, what doesn’t get digested within your digestive tract every day? Right. It stays there. Comes in but never goes out. Does the word putrefy mean anything to you? It’s a big word for rot. The undigested food rots and clumps up and blocks your stomach and intestines. Year by year we simply fill up, like a balloon. The body dehydrates, toxifies, and degenerates. No energy. Bad circulation.

DEBRIS IN THE BLOOD

Undigested food then makes its way from the intestines to where it doesn’t belong – into the bloodstream. Leaky Gut Syndrome. (Garland) This makes the blood cells clump together, like bunches of grapes, or stacks of coins (rouleaux). Blood cells are supposed to circulate through the smallest vessels, single file. When they’re all stuck together, blood flow slows way down. Increased resistance for the Main Pump – the heart. Harder to push all that blood through the system.

Once in the bloodstream, the undigested food can no longer be digested, because digestive enzymes only exist in the digestive tract, not in the blood. The only thing the undigested stuff can do is lodge somewhere – in muscles, joints, or any organ. As debris which doesn’t belong in those locations, the undigested food triggers a response of inflammation. After awhile, that chronic inflammation can actually begin to destroy the cells of that organ.

The weakest organ, the one that goes first, will malfunction. Then you go to Emergency and have all efforts focused on this one organ, whatever it may be, and they’ll even give you a name for your condition. And each condition has a certain protocol of tests, drugs, and surgery. None of which has anything to do with the original problem, which is still ongoing, especially if we factor hospital food into the equation. The original problem was simple: you’re not digesting your food.

Long-term intake of enzymeless foods blocks the colon Toxification of this organ can cause practically any disease you can name. For a long look into this area of awareness, please see the chapter on the colon.

FREE RADICALS

The second half of the artery story has to do with free radicals. Remember, those are the unstable little molecules we get from drugs, alcohol, stress, processed food, smoking, radiation from TV and computers, trauma – the usual culprits. A free radical is a molecule that is missing an electron. It tries to steal an electron from a normal cell or molecule in the body, making that molecule able to do the same thing to another one, in a chain reaction, like musical chairs. This is how DNA gets altered, and how cells change – how cancer starts. Doctors call it mutagenesis. In the arteries, free radicals are the guys who make the little cuts or nicks in the artery lining. Babies’ arteries are as smooth as looking down the inside of the barrel of a shiny new shotgun. With these little cuts, the free-floating bits of undigested fat, called plaque, now have a place to stick onto.

CEMENT LINING

After the bits of fat accumulate in the arteries for years, they eventually get dried out and hardened into a cement-like matrix called plaque.

And that’s exactly how atherosclerosis starts. Now follow this, please: one of the biggest producers of free radicals in the body is rancid (rotting) indigestible hard fats, which just sit there in the tract for too long a time, because they’re too weird to be broken down by the body’s own enzymes. Fats like these are new to our species – only within the last 75 years – chips, fries, deep-fried foods. With 50% of the population now dying of heart disease; something has obviously changed for the worse.

That’s right – of all the people who died this year in the U.S. 1 out of 2 of them died from heart disease. Not very good odds for the rest of us, would you say? People aren’t born with a bad heart, most of the time. The genetic theory is pretty shaky – it really doesn’t matter if your parents or grandparents died of heart attacks. People inherit eating habits. These habits determine the health of the heart far more than genetics can. What were the grandparents eating?

We dig our graves with our teeth – it’s not just an epigram; more often, it’s an epitaph.

CHELATION

Between two and three thousand MDs are now offering a medical alternative to bypass surgery. It is called chelation therapy. EDTA is an amino acid compound that is introduced into the blood for the purpose of dissolving the plaque out of the arteries. Practitioners claim high rates of success.

Chelation therapy can be either intravenous or else given orally, with tablets. Originally developed for cleaning heavy metals out of the blood, the application with arterial plaque soon became obvious. Because chelation therapy cuts into the $25 billion heart surgery turf, many insurance companies won’t cover it unless the diagnosis is to resolve heavy metal poisoning. Although EDTA may place some temporary stress on the kidneys, at least it actually does what it advertises, which is to remove plaque from all the arteries. This is in contrast to bypass surgery and angioplasty, which only rearranges the plaque temporarily.

NATURAL ALTERNATIVE TO HEART MEDICATION

If you’re on medication now, there is a natural way to lower blood pressure and get off drugs. Many people have done it. Two natural supplements can actually do the trick:

1. Enzymes ( 800 572 6204, 1 (ask for Brent)

2. Oral Chelation — www.extremehealth-autism.com

NOW WHAT?

So, the alternative to blocked arteries. The alternative is – digest everything you eat every day. A few hints:

1. Stop all dairy immediately

2. Cut way back on white sugar: soft drinks, donuts, cookies, ice cream, etc. White sugar destroys digestive enzymes, which prevents fats from being broken down

3. Eat as many raw foods as possible, because they contain their own enzymes and won’t drain the body’s own resources. 4. Take whole food enzyme supplements – only the absorbable kind, like DigestAMeal –408 298 1800

5. Take a powerful antioxidant (free radical neutralizer) Like Megahydrin. If you’re still smoking cigarettes, throw this chapter away, disregard everything you’ve just read, and light up! Sayonara.

Enzymes taken at mealtime will not only ensure complete digestion at that meal. In addition, they will break down the toxic, residual, undigested fats and protein that have been lurking in the intestines and in the bloodstream. This is no theory. You can see it. You can feel it. It’s not medication – it’s nutrition. See Enzymes chapter.

CANCER

Does your doctor ever tell you that heart medications cause cancer? A study in top British medical journal Lancet shows as much as a 65% increase in cancer risk for those who take calcium channel blockers. (Lancet 349:525,1996)

That stands to reason. Since the 1920s the relationship cancer and oxygen has been widely studied. In the chapter titled “To The Cancer Patient” we see in the work of Nobel laureate, Dr. Otto Warburg that cancer is closely associated with the presence of oxygen in the blood. Heart drugs artificially reduce blood flow, thus decreasing the amount of oxygen that is available to the tissues. Cancer does not like oxygen. The less oxygen, the more the cancer is promoted. How often does the cardiologist explain that risk to the patient who is to be taking heart drugs for the first time?

LIFETIME OF DRUGS

Don’t think you can do it? Ask you doctor when he plans on taking you off drugs. Not in this lifetime? Several medical doctors are helping their patients get off heart drugs. Willix, MacDougall, Atkins, even Whittaker. Dr. Kavanaugh, a Canadian cardiologist, instead of bypass and angioplasty, takes his patients and puts them on a specialized exercise program , initially very light, and gradually increasing in duration. One of his bypass patients actually went on to run in the Boston Marathon!

But even easier than these programs are the simple enzymes and chelation supplements cited above.

Ever notice the pattern of how the cause of every disease seems to be a deficiency of drugs? Very curious. One of the most famous heart surgeons in the US, Robert Willix no longer recommends either drugs or surgery because of all the years of watching his own failures and realizing that angioplasty and bypass simply do not heal people. They just postpone the inevitable for a short time. Willix has come to the same conclusion: no matter how far gone the patient is, there’s a greater chance of lasting improvement simply by diet and exercise. In fact, that’s the only chance. It’s really going against the grain, though isn’t it? I mean Americans don’t think like that. Responsible for my own health? I just trust my doctor. That way I don’t actually have to do anything, except take my pills. I can continue my present course of my toxifying self destructive lifestyle. I’m sure Doctor knows what’s best.

The death statistics however indicate otherwise – in 75 years, it’s gone from less than 1% all the way up to 50% of all deaths being caused by heart failure. Today almost a million Americans die of heart disease every year. The doctor knows what’s best? Best for whom? The surgeons, hospitals and drug companies? Some of us are coming into a new phase of mass consciousness – a quantum shift in which the old ideas of drugging the body into submission are losing credibility. Reason: it usually doesn’t work. What’s the main cause of death in the U.S. today? Side effects from prescription drugs.

The new idea is – work with the body, facilitate its own inner systems of regulation, minimize stress from food overload. Detox the blood, the milieu in which all cells are bathed. The holistic approach, in evidence since the days of Hippocrates.

Drugs? If drugs worked, you’d already be better.

- copyright MMV Dr Tim O’Shea

REFERENCES Howell, Edward, MD Enzyme Nutrition Medical Economics Physicians Desk Reference 1998 MacDougall, John MD McDougall’s Medicine: A Challenging Second Opinion Merck Manual Sixteenth Edition Tu JV, et al. Use of Cardiac Procedures and Outcomes in Elderly Patients With Myocardial Infarction in the United States and Canada. New England Journal of Medicine. 1997;336(May 22):1500-1505. Peduzzi P.et al. Twenty two-year follow-up in the VA cooperative study of coronary artery bypass surgery for stable angina. Am J Cardiol 1998 Jun 15;81(12):1393-1399. Garland, Leo, MD “Leaky Gut Syndrome: Breaking the Vicious Cycle 1995 Jensen, Bernard Empty Harvest Avery 1990. Willix, Robert, MD 3 Minutes a Day to a 120-Year Lifespan 1994. Caracciolo, E et al. Comparison of surfgical amnd medical group usrvival in patients with left main equivalent coronary artery disease. Circulation May 1, 1995 p2335 advertisement 23 Nov 98 Newsweek Statistical Abstracts of the U.S. Pahor, M Calcium channel blockers and incidence of cancer in aged population. Lancet 349:525,1996 Lazarou J, et al. Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients JAMA 15 Apr 98, v279, p1200