Heart Disease Strikes the Young …and Old
Often people think: “It can’t happen to me. I can’t get heart disease, because I’m too young.”The truth is quite different. You don’t have to be old to be stricken with heart disease. While it’s true that age is an important risk factor for heart disease, you don’t have to be an octogenarian to discover that the arteries to your heart are narrowed by dangerous cholesterol buildup.Yesterday, I was reviewing a heart catheterization (a special x-ray test where dye is used to visualize the heart arteries) with one of my surgical colleagues. I didn’t know the person’s age, but if I had to have guessed I would have thought that the person was in their mid-seventies or late eighties.
The man’s coronary arteries where loaded with cholesterol deposits. The x-rays demonstrated that the width of the vessels were less than 1/3 their normal size. The artery supplying the back side of the heart had an 80% blockage, and the person’s right coronary artery was completely blocked.
When I was told that the patient was 36 years old, I could only shake my head. Having this amount of disease at such a young age didn’t make it likely that the person would live to an old age. Yet, you never know- that’s the beauty and mystery of life. Although things don’t look so good now, we never know what’s going to happen. Perhaps the man will stop smoking and dramatically change his eating habits. Finding out that he has severely blocked heart arteries could be just the wake up call he needs to begin changing his life.Twenty years of practicing medicine has made it clear to me that doctors don’t have all the answers. The people you think don’t have a chance in the world, sometimes live to be a hundred. On the other hand, someone can appear healthy and drop dead tomorrow. One thing I do know, just because you’re young doesn’t mean you can’t have heart disease.
Take a look at what you’re eating, smoking, and your activity level. If you’re a couch potato and dramatically overweight you might need to seriously examine your heart health?
Heart disease doesn’t just afflict the very old. It calls on young people too
October 31st, 2007 - Posted in Medical | | 0 Comments
Letting Go
Letting go is an active process. It also is an energy releaser. So often it seems we want to hold onto things- people, situations, and just things. Why is it so much easier to hold onto the ruts we find ourselves in than to just let go?
So often it seems that the way to maintain our comfort level is to find a place we feel comfortable and then stay put. We hunker down, pulling the covers tight up over us. We wrap them tight around our chin, grabbing on for dear life.
Love is indeed crucial for healing hearts, and learning to let go of preconceived ideas and old ways of being is often what is needed in the healing environment. We have to let go of old ways of eating. We have to let go of old ways of approaching problems.
And most importantly, we may need to let go of being in control all the time. We’ve all heard the saying, “Let go and let God.”
October 29th, 2007 - Posted in Emotional/Psychological | | 0 Comments
Trick or Treat
Halloween is once more upon us. Ghosts and goblins will soon be making their rounds. Perhaps it’s also time to face our own goblins? By this I mean the things we know we should be doing in our life but don’t have the inclination or will to do.
Not long ago, I was supervising a stress test of a man in his early forties. As he walked rather slowly on the treadmill he related that he smoked, was 60-70 pounds overweight, and ate all of the wrong foods. He knew his family had a horrible history of heart disease.
As he huffed an puffed, like a dragon, I asked him if knowing all this would make him change his bad habits or make him consider altering his life style? “No,” he said, “I like what I do. I like smoking. I enjoy what I eat.” His treadmill test showed him to have the stamina of a seventy- year old man, and I could only shake my head.
Why do people do the things they do? Habits. Much of what we do is related to how we have been brought up and what gets ingrained in us as a child. We grow comfortable with how we “fit into” life.
Perhaps you know what I’m talking about? Moving out of our comfort zone can be a little scary.
Exorcising the goblins from our lives is no easy task. The question is: “What motivates us?” Or “what is a big enough motivation to propel us past the comfort zone and into new territory?” A recurring theme of heart patients is that “fear of death” is a powerful motivator. I’ve seen many people kick the smoking habit, drastically alter their eating, and begin exercising all because of they’re afraid of a stroke or dying.
It’s no trick. Sometimes illness is just what we need to improve our lives for the better.
October 25th, 2007 - Posted in Medical | | 0 Comments
What We Feel is Important to Our Health
Feelings are important. We all know this to be true. No one likes to have their feelings hurt. Yet, we often think feelings aren’t real- not like a cold or an illness is real. Meaning- we tend to dismiss feelings as being less important when compared to something we know troubles our bodies.
But feelings are real, and emotions have physical consequences.
Not long ago I saw a patient who had recently suffered a heart attack. She was older in her mid-sixties. Because of my natural interest in the role that emotions play in the development of heart disease, I asked her if she anything emotionally troubling had preceded her heart attack?
Sure enough, her mother who she was extremely close to had passed away just a month before. It had been a bitter blow. A huge gaping wound had been left in her psyche. Even though she was older, a veteran of the ups and downs of life- losing her mother had tremendous effects.
In the past physicians would tend to discount such emotional influences. We would rather focus on the hard medical facts of a person’s health: their cholesterol, smoking, and high blood pressure. But in the last few years it has become clear that what happens to a person emotionally can be just as telling as their “physical” risk factors.
The American College of Cardiology now lists depression as a risk factor for heart disease. Indeed, in the last few years a condition called “The Broken Heart Syndrome” has been written about frequently in the cardiology journals. It’s a condition that mimics a heart attack but is believed to be due to excessive release of stress hormones. It is found more often in middle aged women, and is felt to be caused by overwhelming stress or grief.
Maybe you’ve had such and event? If so write me. I’m sure other readers would find your story interesting.
October 23rd, 2007 - Posted in Medical | | 0 Comments
Freedom from Poor Health
Freedom is a great blessing. Most Americans believe deeply in the concept of freedom, and while to Bill of Rights guarantees certain freedoms- the vast majority of American’s still find themselves imprisoned.
What do I mean by this? What I mean is that although a great many people assume they are free, the truth is that most Americans are prisoners. They are prisoners of their own poor health. They are beholden to faulty eating habits, significant obesity, and lack of sufficient exercise.
And perhaps the greatest limitation that shackles most Americans is “the way they think about their health.” The vast majority of U.S. citizens believe that “a pill” will solve their health issues. They are incarerated by “pills.”
As a board certified cardiologist, I confront this problem everyday. Over 90% of the people who come in for doctors visits because of heart disease want to take a pill to remedy their blood pressure, lower their cholesterol, or prevent getting blocked arteries of the heart.
They have “bought into” his idea that just by taking a pill all their heath troubles will be resolved. The truth is that although pills can relieve symptoms they don’t always get to the root cause of the illness. Pills rarely heal a problem. Now I’m not recommending that a person stop their medications. You should always consult your physician before making any changes in your health care. But what I am suggesting is that we need to really examine our approach to health and wellness.
Take a condition such as the build up of cholesterol in the heart arteries. This condition is called “coronary artery disease.” It is an illness where fatty deposits accumulate within a person’s heart arteries and ultimately lead to chest pain, blocked arteries, and may even cause a heart attack. Each year over 500,000 Americans are newly diagnosed with this condition.
Now Coronary Artery Disease (CAD for short) has been highly studied by physicians, and a tremendous amount of medical research has been published regarding prevention and treatment of this illness. And what is clear is that coronary artery disease is predominately “preventable” by lifestyle choices and eating habits.
Studies of native peoples in Africa, South America, and Australia have revealed that people in those cultures have a very low incidence of CAD. In fact, it hardly exists.
So here in America we too could greatly reduce this illness, but most people rather than making a commitment to modify their diet, exercise, and reduce their stress would rather take a handful of pills each day. Pills for reducing cholesterol, and altering the hormone system of our bodies- these are ingested instead.
What is particularly perplexing is that most people don’t think twice about turning to pills to work on an illness that is largely due to their own lifestyle. Yet, heart disease isn’t the only illness approached in this fashion.
Look at all the television advertisements for heart-burn medications. Pharmaceutical companies must be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince people that a pill will get rid of their heartburn. But the deeper question we need to ask is “What’s really is causing a person’s heart-burn?” Is it stress, overeating, improper foods?
So what I’m suggesting is that it’s time for American’s to take their minds out of their cages. It’s time to open the jail doors that are imprisoning our approach to illness.
We need to change our “pill taking” mentality, and adopt the lifestyle choices that will make us well. In this month of liberty, it’s time to embrace freedom from poor health.
Kirk Laman, D.O., F.A.C.C.
Dr. Kirk Laman is a board certified, cardiologist interested in heart disease prevention. He is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Michigan State University. He offers a free monthly newsletter on his website called “Mending Hearts. ” His book, “How to Heal Your Broken Heart, ” (http://www.HealingYourBrokenHeart.com) is designed to help people struggling with issues of the heart. Go to: www.drlaman.com for further information about Dr. Laman
October 3rd, 2007 - Posted in Emotional/Psychological | | 0 Comments
Balancing our Heart
Everyone knows about the circus-balancing act. A wire is stretched taught between two poles high above the ground. A circus performer makes their way across the wire, often precariously. The trick is not to fall, to maintain balance throughout the journey.
Finding balance for our heart is a similar feat. Like the circus performer’s trip across the wire, our journey though life may sometimes look like a high wire act. Twists and turns, even grave challenges often stare us in the face.
In order to survive, we need to discover and maintain balance. In this case I’m talking about a balancing act within our own hearts.
The human heart is more than a pump. Research from the Heart-Math Institute has shown that the number and types of neurons that lead from our heart and connect throughout our body, suggests that our hearts actually act like a second brain. They carry an innate intelligence.
And what we feel inside our hearts can influence other parts of our body. Indeed, medical research has shown that negative emotions- anger, fear, grief, loneliness, and others, can alter the biochemical processes of the body and ultimately lead to illness. They can also produce a broken heart.
Hence, it is vital that if we want to remain healthy or heal ourselves of illness- we need to cultivate balance in our lives. We need to learn to balance what I call our inner and outer lives.
What do I mean by these two lives?
Our outer life is how we present ourselves to the world. It involves our interactions at home with our family, and at work with our colleagues. Frequently, our outer life is active. We are participating, moving, and doing. The outer life is busy and complex.
Our inner life moves at a slower pace. It is that part of ourselves that we access through introspection and contemplation. The inner life is reflected through our feelings. Are we sad, happy, or fearful? Do we feel contentment?
At times we can let the hectic activity of the outer life overshadow the inner life. If we are constantly running about frantically leaving no time to look within, our inner life begins to recede into the background.
Sometimes it actually seems lost. When this happens our feelings may also seem to be hidden. We begin to feel separated, displaced, or disillusioned. We lose track of ourselves.
Such discordance creates an environment for illness. Anxiety, depression, and even heart disease grow in such an environment- hence the term dis-ease.
So we need to strive to balance our hearts. One simple way to do this is to set aside 20-30 minutes everyday for quiet reflection. Forgo the television or radio and allow yourself time to just relax. Some people find it useful to acknowledge the abundance in their lives. Other people are drawn to reading insightful or sacred books. Still others gravitate towards nature. A peaceful walk through a park can be quite rewarding and insightful.
Less important is what you do, but rather how you do it. Can you allow yourself the freedom to let go of the outer life, and experience your inner heart?
Tapping into your heart’s intelligence and wisdom can be the recipe for true health and well being. Are you open and ready to take your circus act on the road? Are you ready to begin the process of Balancing Your Heart?
Kirk Laman, D.O., F.A.C.C.
Dr. Kirk Laman is a board certified, cardiologist interested in heart disease prevention. He is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Michigan State University. He offers a free monthly newsletter on his website called “Mending Hearts. ” His book, “How to Heal Your Broken Heart, ” (http://www.HealingYourBrokenHeart.com) is designed to help people struggling with issues of the heart. Go to: www.drlaman.com for further information about Dr. Laman
October 3rd, 2007 - Posted in Emotional/Psychological | | 0 Comments
