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Know Your Real Risk of Heart Attack: Is the Single Biggest Killer Lurking in You and What to Do about It
A number of years ago something incredible, an amazing coincidence, happened that started Warrick on the mission to prevent heart attacks rather than try to cure them. He was driving to work one day when he stopped at a commotion by the side of the road. A fun runner had collapsed during a fun run with a heart attack. He helped in his resuscitation only to find out that had seen the very same man two years earlier and reassured him that he was fine.
Warrick had missed the chance to make a difference and it nearly cost a life!! . Based on risk calculation and the best practice of the time, he shouldn't have been at high risk.....but he was!
That meant that he had reassured a patient based on treadmill testing, the best care available at the time that he was fine, only to be part of the team that resuscitated that man when he dropped dead during a running race, this was just not good enough, and he asked himself could this be done differently?
This important question started him on a journey which meant he was open to looking more closely at new and emerging technology to help in being more precise about risk of heart attack.
It became clear to Warrick the more precise we can be in the information we have in regard to a patients heart health and real risk of heart attack, the better we can look after that person, it seems so obvious when you say it like that, but that opportunity is still only new and not broadly utilised in the medical community.
Building on that success, Warick has decided to create a program to help people manage their risks better. It's called "The Healthy Heart Network." With The Healthy Heart Network he can now help reduce heart disease as a major killer in the world!
Warrick had missed the chance to make a difference and it nearly cost a life!! . Based on risk calculation and the best practice of the time, he shouldn't have been at high risk.....but he was!
That meant that he had reassured a patient based on treadmill testing, the best care available at the time that he was fine, only to be part of the team that resuscitated that man when he dropped dead during a running race, this was just not good enough, and he asked himself could this be done differently?
This important question started him on a journey which meant he was open to looking more closely at new and emerging technology to help in being more precise about risk of heart attack.
It became clear to Warrick the more precise we can be in the information we have in regard to a patients heart health and real risk of heart attack, the better we can look after that person, it seems so obvious when you say it like that, but that opportunity is still only new and not broadly utilised in the medical community.
Building on that success, Warick has decided to create a program to help people manage their risks better. It's called "The Healthy Heart Network." With The Healthy Heart Network he can now help reduce heart disease as a major killer in the world!
158 pages, Hardcover
Published March 9, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 20, 2019
This book is a prime example of what Dr. Seamus O'Mahony in Can Medicine Be Cured?: The Corruption of a Profession calls "disease mongering," which goes as far as the outright invention of diseases by doctors, in a game he calls "my disease is better than your disease." The point is Western medicine has become a for-profit disease racketeering system, that is predicated upon the ability of practitioners to sell the patients on the idea that they have a disease or are at risk for one. The primary causes of premature death are diet and doctors, for all these avoidable medical interventions introduce risk - the biggest one being the risk of unnecessary medical treatment and overtreatment in general and polypharmacy in particular, as you will generally be diagnosed with more diseases, depending on how many specialists you visit.
The simple point is that medicine is a disease treatment system that inevitably ends up finding multiple 'diseases,' which really aren't, because we are simply failing to focus on being healthy first. In the industrialized world, we have come to sacrifice nutrition to convenience to an incredible degree, and a whole plethora of chronic illness is the result. This is how, eventually, polypharmacy is one of the biggest problems we have, when instead, people could go on a Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet (see The China Study: Revised and Expanded Edition: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health). Specifically about heart disease, a good reference is Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven, Nutrition-Based Cure. Esselstyn will tell you "If the truth be known coronary artery disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never, ever exist and if it does exist it need never, ever progress." Nowadays, Esselstyn is up over a thousand patients who have completely reversed their heart disease with a #WFPB diet, without any added Sugar, Oil or Salt, and in many cases these patients were given less than a year to live by their 'expert' cardiologists before they ever got to Dr. Esselstyn.
The current book, in the typical tradition of disease mongering by the medical profession in order to market its services, provides very clear explanations of the symptoms of heart disease, but it never ever addresses the causes and the simple way of completely preventing heart disease in the first place, as much as all the other chronic illnesses of which people predominantly die in the West, including Type 2 Diabetes, cancer, IBD, MS, RA, Alzheimers, various autoimmune diseases such as lupus that all have a single cause - the western diet and its processed foods, excess fat, sugar and salt, and predominantly animal protein. In short, the two leading causes of death in the industrialized world are diet and doctors, for all that medical interventionism, without ever addressing the cause, comes with endless side effects and drug interactions because of polypharmacy. For people are diagnosed with tons of different conditions, that only have one single cause: diet. And doctors are not educated in nutrition, and if they are, they are generally on a #WFPB diet, or as Dr. Kim Williams, former president of the American College of Cardiology puts it: "There are but two types of cardiologists: vegans and those that haven't read the data."
In conclusion, if you want to understand more about heart disease, this is a good book, but do not get sucked into the medical sales job. You can avoid all the expensive diagnostics altogether, and do a simple self-test at https://www.4leafsurvey.com and improve your diet until you reach 4 Leaf status, which is a complete Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet. Once you are used to this, your relationship with your doctor will change and either your doctor will get interested, or else you will end up switching doctors. Your focus will become maintaining health, and not treating disease. In my own case my total cholesterol was 151 in 2016, after switching to #WFPB for about 7 months and has been mostly in the 145/146 range ever since. At my latest physical, I had no markers of inflammation at all, and as a result, the discussion was simply about tweaking some minor things in my diet and exercise routine, relative to a few parameters that seemed a slight bit off. At times you might need some support of medication, but mostly that will be temporary, as long as you are addressing the lifestyle issues. This is why Lifestyle Medicine is the future, and this book represents the culmination of the old disease treatment system.
The book is dangerously behind the times in ignoring diet, but it also explicitly makes some very foolish recommendations, including recommending obtaining dietary calcium in "the most natural way" from cheese, dairy, meat and yoghurt, all things you should absolutely avoid in order to prevent heart disease, and which are moreover proven to weaken bones, not strengthen them - populations with high dairy intake have more hip fractures than people with vegan diets.
The simple point is that medicine is a disease treatment system that inevitably ends up finding multiple 'diseases,' which really aren't, because we are simply failing to focus on being healthy first. In the industrialized world, we have come to sacrifice nutrition to convenience to an incredible degree, and a whole plethora of chronic illness is the result. This is how, eventually, polypharmacy is one of the biggest problems we have, when instead, people could go on a Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet (see The China Study: Revised and Expanded Edition: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health). Specifically about heart disease, a good reference is Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven, Nutrition-Based Cure. Esselstyn will tell you "If the truth be known coronary artery disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never, ever exist and if it does exist it need never, ever progress." Nowadays, Esselstyn is up over a thousand patients who have completely reversed their heart disease with a #WFPB diet, without any added Sugar, Oil or Salt, and in many cases these patients were given less than a year to live by their 'expert' cardiologists before they ever got to Dr. Esselstyn.
The current book, in the typical tradition of disease mongering by the medical profession in order to market its services, provides very clear explanations of the symptoms of heart disease, but it never ever addresses the causes and the simple way of completely preventing heart disease in the first place, as much as all the other chronic illnesses of which people predominantly die in the West, including Type 2 Diabetes, cancer, IBD, MS, RA, Alzheimers, various autoimmune diseases such as lupus that all have a single cause - the western diet and its processed foods, excess fat, sugar and salt, and predominantly animal protein. In short, the two leading causes of death in the industrialized world are diet and doctors, for all that medical interventionism, without ever addressing the cause, comes with endless side effects and drug interactions because of polypharmacy. For people are diagnosed with tons of different conditions, that only have one single cause: diet. And doctors are not educated in nutrition, and if they are, they are generally on a #WFPB diet, or as Dr. Kim Williams, former president of the American College of Cardiology puts it: "There are but two types of cardiologists: vegans and those that haven't read the data."
In conclusion, if you want to understand more about heart disease, this is a good book, but do not get sucked into the medical sales job. You can avoid all the expensive diagnostics altogether, and do a simple self-test at https://www.4leafsurvey.com and improve your diet until you reach 4 Leaf status, which is a complete Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet. Once you are used to this, your relationship with your doctor will change and either your doctor will get interested, or else you will end up switching doctors. Your focus will become maintaining health, and not treating disease. In my own case my total cholesterol was 151 in 2016, after switching to #WFPB for about 7 months and has been mostly in the 145/146 range ever since. At my latest physical, I had no markers of inflammation at all, and as a result, the discussion was simply about tweaking some minor things in my diet and exercise routine, relative to a few parameters that seemed a slight bit off. At times you might need some support of medication, but mostly that will be temporary, as long as you are addressing the lifestyle issues. This is why Lifestyle Medicine is the future, and this book represents the culmination of the old disease treatment system.
The book is dangerously behind the times in ignoring diet, but it also explicitly makes some very foolish recommendations, including recommending obtaining dietary calcium in "the most natural way" from cheese, dairy, meat and yoghurt, all things you should absolutely avoid in order to prevent heart disease, and which are moreover proven to weaken bones, not strengthen them - populations with high dairy intake have more hip fractures than people with vegan diets.
November 18, 2018
Reading about heart
Although a lot of this book is hard to comprehend i believe that i did benefit from reading this book. Thank you for the oportunity.
Although a lot of this book is hard to comprehend i believe that i did benefit from reading this book. Thank you for the oportunity.
July 7, 2019
The author of this book, Dr. Warrick Bishop, is an Australian practicing cardiologist who has created a program called “The Healthy Heart Network” to help people manage their risk of heart attack better. The result of this is a book he wrote which is clear, concise, and lays out a plan to be proactive in preventing a heart attack. His writing style for this book is easy to follow and understand for the layman, which I appreciated.
He starts out by explaining the components and functions of the heart. From there he goes into detail how plaque is formed in the arteries and then how to detect, monitor and if appropriate, treat it. To this end he advocates primary prevention of heart disease and outlines the steps he recommends to accomplish this.
Once you have read this book, you will be in a better educated position to advocate for your heart health while having a discussion with your doctor.
Disclaimer: I was offered the opportunity to read this book and then give my honest opinion of it.
He starts out by explaining the components and functions of the heart. From there he goes into detail how plaque is formed in the arteries and then how to detect, monitor and if appropriate, treat it. To this end he advocates primary prevention of heart disease and outlines the steps he recommends to accomplish this.
Once you have read this book, you will be in a better educated position to advocate for your heart health while having a discussion with your doctor.
Disclaimer: I was offered the opportunity to read this book and then give my honest opinion of it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews