Heart Disease and Stifled Natural Therapies

In our initial blog, we espoused how the existing pharmaceutical industry has stifled proven natural remedies. Today, 1/6 of our GDP is spent on health care. With trillions of dollars at stake, the situation is becoming more of a disgrace.

Before the pharmaceutical companies were allowed to advertise, you could pick up a copy of the Readers Digest and read an article on the anti aging effects of L-Carnitine. Reader's Digest is now riddled with pharmaceutical ads and is heavily dependent the generate revenue. Today you will never see an article about natural therapies.

Very few of our Congressmen and Senators have maintained an independence from the pharmaceutical political donations. There are roughly 30 lobbyists for every congressman and senator in Washington or roughly 17,000. A major share of these lobbyist are associated with the pharmaceutical industry. Their donations in 2008 approached $30,000,000. With the hundreds of billions of dollars involved in the heart health care industry, such as bypass, stents, drug to lower blood pressure, and cholesterol medications, any low cost natural therapy is immediately stifled. Such natural therapies such as chelation, vitamin E and vitamin C supplementation, policosanol, natural methods to low blood pressure, and Red Yeast Rice are presented with insurmountable obstacles. Chelation is the only know method of treating lead poisoning. Someone that has lead poisoning and also has angina or other circulatory heart symptoms, and is given chelation therapy, experience a reduction in their associated heart symptoms.

Should a doctor advertise chelation for treatment of heart problems, his practice will be closed. A very useful therapy, once again, has been stifled.

In 1998, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) pursued the American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM), an organization that promotes "complementary, alternative and integrative medicine" over their advertising of EDTA chelation therapy. The ACAM claims included "Chelation therapy is a safe, effective and relatively inexpensive treatment to restore blood flow in victims of atherosclerosis without surgery." The FTC found that "scientific studies have not been done to prove that EDTA chelation therapy is an effective treatment for atherosclerosis.” The studies to adequately prove these claims would cost millions of dollars, and without these studies the statements by the ACAM were false. The fact that lead poisoning victim often were relieved of their angina was considered not to be significant by the FTC. In 1999, to avoid the cost of the legal proceedings, the ACAM agreed to stop the so called claimed “misrepresentation” of chelation therapy as effective in treating heart disease.

We will never know what pressure or influence was brought to bear on the FTC to pursue this action. If I ever suffer from angina, I will want to be treated for lead poisoning. We only know that another inexpensive therapy has been stifled. "In the 1950s the Schute brothers (Two Canadian practicing cardiologist) presented a report indicating vitamin E worked to prevent heart disease and cerebrovascular disease. Their work was published in Canada, but was refused by the medical journals here in the United States. A few years ago, the Harvard School of Public Health demonstrated that just 100 units of vitamin E per day decreased the heart associated death rate by 40 percent. Without even considering the huge excess cost of the various conventional therapies, how many millions of lives might have been extended and how much heart ache could have been prevented in the intervening 50 years? The debate over Vitamin C supplementation for heart health is worthy of discussion because it is indicative of the larger debate over nutritional supplementation. On one side was Professor Linus Pauling, the only person ever to receive two Nobel Prizes. The first was for Chemistry in 1954 and the second was the Peace Prize in 1962 (He also received the presidential Medal of Merit in 1947 from Truman).

He was a humanitarian and social activist who wanted his work to “minimize human suffering”. He wrote The Nature of the Chemical Bond in 1939. This was the most influential book on chemistry since Lavoisier’s Elementary Treatise of Chemistry in 1789. Pauling’s work also included "Vitamin C and the Common Cold", and "How to Live Longer and Feel Better". In 1991, Pauling and Mathais Rath, M.D. coauthored an article titled, “Solution to the Puzzle of Human Cardiovascular Disease: Its Primary Cause is Ascorbate Deficiency, Leading to the Deposition of Lipoprotein(a) and Fibrogen/Fibrin in the Vascular Wall.” The technical name for vitamin C is ascorbic acid or ascorbate. Pauling and Rath continued their work and went to actually be awarded a patent for preventing and reversing heart disease.
http://www.heart-disease-bypass-surgery.com/data/articles/34.htm.

Naturally this work was published in the JAMA but no one dares to run test to see the validity of their findings, less their private or government research funding be reduced. After all, how much money could be made by prescribing the use of 2000 milligrams daily of vitamin C and the use of lysine or l-proline to totally stop and even reverse the progression of arterial sclerosis? Shifting gears into the statins or cholesterol medications, (which is now over 15 billion dollars in sales), we have several more outrages that need to be addressed.

Red Yeast Rice has been used medicinally for hundreds of years. Most of the pharmaceuticals in use today have been derived from natural products. The pharmaceutical companies cannot patent a natural product and have to change the molecule so that a patent can be issued. When they do this, they create a molecule that the human body does not know how to handle. The end result is the side effects that are so common when taking a pharmaceutical drug.

The problem is that the primary ingredient in Red Yeast Rice, lovastatin, is also the active pharmaceutical ingredient in prescription drugs for high cholesterol such as Mevacor. In fact, lovastatin was originally derived from another type of red yeast called Monascus ruber. In the wisdom of the FDA, upon this discovery, they immediately required that Red Yeast Rice be removed from the consumer sales.

The FDA had received many millions of dollars in running the double blind cross over studies for Mevacor and they needed to protect one of their pharmaceutical customers whose industry provides ¾ of their operational budget. To add further insult to injury, the pharmaceutical firm knew that the lovastatin not only works in the liver to reduce cholesterol, but through the same mechanism reduces COQ10. Without additional supplemental quantities of this nutritional supplement, a user of this product will experience the common statin side effect of muscle pain. When they originally patented the medication, they added COQ10, but decided to leave it out of their product. They probably had another drug in mind to eliminate the side effect. The High Blood Pressure medications are another example of the pharmaceutical industry promoting drugs for financial gains while delivering very minimal medical benefits. For natural ways to lower blood pressure go to:

Lower Your Blood Pressure

You might enjoy readying my blog of November 16, 2009 in regard to High Blood Pressure medications.With the tremendous expenditures for the country’s huge health care cost, hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved by utilizing inexpensive effective natural therapies. The above examples simply point out the potential savings in the heart health care. Other such examples exist in almost every other area of health care. The cost of these collaborating studies proving the validity of the individual therapies should be paid by the government. The total operational cost of the FDA should also be paid by the government to maintain the FDA’s objectivity.

The lobbying and advertising efforts of the pharmaceutical industry need to be curtailed. If we could ad to this effort Tort Reform, and reduce the doctors’ $10,000to $20,000 month malpractice insurance, we might have an affordable Universal Health Care.