Considering seeing a cardiologist? Why you should really think again…
When it comes to your heart health, you might be surprised to learn that oftentimes, less is more.
In fact, too much medical attention for heart issues can backfire — in a big way.
Heart treatment shocker
A recent article in The American Journal of Medicine, cited an investigation that reviewed outcomes of nearly 3,000 medical treatments, chosen at random. Researchers found that only a mere 11 percent could be confirmed as “clearly beneficial.”
The authors of this review refer to themselves as “medical conservatives” — which isn’t a political position, but rather a careful, calculated approach to modern medical techniques. Techniques that are often fully (and often blindly) embraced by conventional medicine, solely because they’re new.
The authors also added that medical conservatives recognize that “many developments promoted as ‘medical advances’ offer— at best — marginal benefits.”
In short, staying away from the latest and greatest is the smarter choice.
Medically conservative approaches save lives
I wonder if the authors might have seen a shocking report last year from Harvard Medical School. Researchers tracked death rates of heart attack patients in the five weeks prior to a major cardiology meeting, the days during the meeting (when the cardiologists were out of town), and the five weeks following the meeting.
They repeated this tracking for a total of six annual meetings, from 2007 to 2012.
To everyone’s surprise, death rates dropped during the meetings when cardiologists were out of town every single time. How telling!
The survival difference was greatest in patients who had less-severe heart attacks and weren’t given artery stents. In general, their care tended to be noninvasive. In other words: Medically conservative.
And that appears to be the key to heart treatment success: The less aggressive the treatment, the better.
When more adds up to less
In Dr. Marc Micozzi’s Heart Attack Prevention and Repair Protocol, he offers this similar tip for surviving heart disease: “Don’t see a cardiologist!”
To illustrate, Dr. Micozzi cites another study that ended with a shocker, just as the Harvard study did. In this Canadian study, researchers compared health outcomes for about 38,000 patients with coronary artery disease (CAD).
Ninety percent of the patients lived in urban centers, while the other 10 percent lived in rural areas. Researchers measured three aspects of participants’ healthcare:
- Medication use
- Number of diagnostic tests
- Number of doctor visits
In the year after their CAD diagnosis, rural patients made half the number of visits to cardiologists compared to urban patients. The rural patients also made significantly fewer visits to primary care doctors, and they were less likely to undergo various testing.
“And last,” Dr. Micozzi adds, “but certainly not least, they were also less likely to receive statin drugs.”
Conventional “wisdom” would predict higher rates of heart attacks, hospitalizations, and death in the group with less treatment. Instead, their rates in all three of those measures was remarkably similar to the urban dwellers who had higher levels of “care.”
Of course, Dr. Micozzi poses the million-dollar question that most doctors would rather not hear: “If seeing the doctor more frequently, taking more drugs, and getting lots of tests doesn’t help the patient with heart disease live longer, why do it?”
Know the signs and save a life
Of course, treating heart disease and caring for heart-related emergencies are two very different things. Anyone who experiences chest pains or other heart attack symptoms requires immediate attention.
To be fully aware of heart attack symptoms, revisit my article “How to save a life in one easy lesson.” Knowing the signs of a heart emergency — and how to react to it — could save your life, and the lives of those around you.
And as for giving your heart the “conservative” care it needs, Dr. Micozzi notes that there are a number of safe, natural approaches that will help you keep your heart in tip-top shape, while also keeping you out of your doctor’s office.
In his Heart Attack Prevention and Repair Protocol, Dr. Micozzi outlines a variety of simple and effective lifestyle, diet, exercise, and supplement strategies to make you virtually heart-attack proof. Click here to find out more about this unique learning tool, or to enroll today.
SOURCES
“The Case for Being a Medical Conservative” The American Journal of Medicine, 3/6/19. amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(19)30167-6/fulltext)
“Heart Attack Survival Better When Specialists Are Out of Town” HealthDay News, 3/13/19. (consumer.healthday.com/general-health-information-16/doctor-news-206/heart-attack-survival-better-when-specialists-are-out-of-town-731873.html)