Because knowledge is power, to benefit and empower my patients even further, I have decided to pursue yet more medical education. This time, I will be serving a Fellowship in Advanced Metabolic Cardiology. To explain why I must do this, here is important background information you need to know:
I earned my medical degree from Des Moines University and served my hospital internship at Northwest General Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Because medical education only begins in medical school, I didn’t stop there. In addition to a medical degree, I earned a post-doctoral Master of Science degree in Metabolic and Nutritional Medicine from the University of South Florida College of Medicine. This advanced degree provided a deeper understanding of cellular biochemistry and human physiology than was taught in medical school.
The Master’s degree gave me a greater understanding of the intimate connections between aging and disease, and metabolic dysfunction and faulty nutrition. It allowed me to provide even better care to my patients by giving me the knowledge on how to use the science of metabolic and nutritional medicine to prevent and reverse age-related diseases, and stimulate metabolism, immunity, and cellular rejuvenation. Out of the 900,000 physicians in the United States, less than 0.01% have this important and cutting-edge degree.
After the Master’s degree, I earned a post-doctoral Graduate Certificate in Metabolic Endocrinology and another in Clinical Neuroscience—both from the University of South Florida College of Medicine. This was followed by a Fellowship in Integrative Cancer Therapy with the Metabolic Medical Institute. And starting this fall, I will be serving a two-year Fellowship in Advanced Metabolic Cardiology under the direction of world-renowned Drs. Mark Houston and Stephen Sinatra.
Why so much education? Because medical school is no longer enough. With scientific research proceeding at a pace that grows ever more rapid, by the time a doctor enters practice, medical knowledge has advanced at least a decade. To stay on the cutting-edge of integrative medicine and provide the most effective, evidence-based therapies to our patients, conscientious and forward-thinking doctors like myself have chosen to go back to school. The Fellowship in Advanced Metabolic Cardiology will be the most important education of my medical career.
Cardiovascular disease remains the #1 cause of premature death in the United States. Over 2,500 Americans die from a heart attack or stroke each and every day, costing our country nearly $1 billion per day in medical costs and lost productivity. Cardiologists have reached a limit in their ability to reduce the incidence of coronary heart disease utilizing the traditional evaluation, prevention, and treatment strategies. Cardiovascular medicine as it is practiced today needs a complete makeover.
In 2003, the Mayo Clinic published a major scientific review article whose intention was to understand the risks and benefits of coronary artery bypass surgery. The Mayo Clinic came to the following conclusions:
- Bypass surgery can effectively relieve symptoms
- Bypass surgery does not prevent future heart attacks
- Only high-risk patients benefit from bypass surgery regarding better chances of survival
In other words, having a bypass operation with its associated mortality risk is effective only at reducing symptoms in most of the patients who undertake this procedure. There is no evidence that it prevents future heart attacks or that it extends life.
Similar results have been found for the more common procedure of stent placement. Instead of using surgery to place new grafts in the heart, the blockages are mechanically opened and stents are placed in the coronary arteries to keep the vessels open and the blood flowing. Again, while this procedure is effective for symptom relief, it does not reduce the risk of a future heart attack nor does it extend the life of the patient.
Armed with the above information, you would think that cardiologists would be relentlessly pursuing other paths for treatment—paths that would prevent heart attacks and increase healthy lifespan. Ironically, since these results were published, the numbers of these procedures have increased rather than decreased, reaching a peak of nearly 5 million worldwide. Something is clearly wrong with the way modern cardiology is practiced. This is why I must pursue the Fellowship in Advanced Metabolic Cardiology.
One important clue to understanding why bypass surgery and stent placement have not lived up to the hype comes from the important work of famed Italian pathologist Dr. Giorgio Baroldi. In his groundbreaking book The Etiopathogenesis of Coronary Heart Disease: A Heretical Theory Based on Morphology, Dr. Baroldi found that after doing autopsies for four decades on countless patients who died of heart attacks, only 40% of these patients had a noteworthy blockage (plaque build-up) in the artery leading to the area of the heart affected by the heart attack. And half of these blockages came after the heart attack occurred, not before, as one might think. This means that nearly 80% of heart attacks have an underlying cause that has nothing to do with blocked coronary arteries. Given this information, it should come as no surprise that, in most of the cases, unblocking arteries with bypass surgery or stents will never be the solution to America’s heart-disease epidemic.
So, what are the underlying biological mechanisms of heart disease that are ignored or overlooked by cardiologists? There are five:
- Chronic systemic inflammation
- Oxidative stress
- Autonomic nervous system imbalance
- Microcirculatory dysfunction
- Metabolic acidosis
Sadly, modern cardiology has no tools to address the above conditions. As a result of the knowledge I will gain in the Fellowship in Advanced Metabolic Cardiology, I will have ample tools and strategies to prevent and treat the underlying causes of our nation’s #1 killer: Heart disease.
The questions now become, what is your doctor doing to become a better doctor, and what are you going to do to demand it? You have every right to expect more from the medical profession.
