Treat the cause not the symptom ˜

We heard the program and read the transcript of two interviews by Dr. Norman Swan ABC National Radio 30th. May 2005). The interviews were a near perfect illustration of the fallacies that arise when medical strategies are determined by symptoms rather than cause. I know the cause and they haven't a clue. They, Norman Swan and Professor Ed Hannan from the School of Public Health at the State University of New York at Albany, confidently spoke about life saving research into coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery and its superiority over stents.

My very first point would be that as a lay person the stent must lose over one's own body parts as the body will always try to reject foreign objects. Given half a chance the body will grow its own bypass but to do so the body needs at least a modest amount of real food. This little story is worth telling .We owe this knowledge to a young Australian PhD student who won the Eureka Prize for Research for using pieces of discarded material from bypass surgery on diabetics instead of material from rats.

She grew these discarded materials and discovered that "blood vessels from people with diabetes grow two to three times faster than those from people without diabetes." It appears that blood vessels have greater potential for self-repair than was previously thought. I heard the program and learnt that they achieved the results by not having sugar present in the Petri dish. One can only assume that by removing the sugar from the environment the cells were at long last able to "catch up" by regenerating at three times the rate than in the sugar polluted body of a diabetic. Does this suggest that the sugary diet recommended by the Diabetic Association is inappropriate? The participants in the above Health Report were pleased with the results because the cost of stinting is blowing out cardiology budgets. My criticism is that no natural approach was even thought of.

The interview moved on to Professor David Brown, Chief of Cardiology. Their chief concern was the heart attacks in fit young people. They know the culprit. It's "fatty components like cholesterol and debris of degenerating cells that thicken the wall of the artery." Problem seems to be that "unfortunately a large percentage of patients continue to have events on statins and we really dont know anything about those patients and what makes them different from patients whose plaques are completely pacified by statin therapy." (We really do object to the use of 'therapy' in this context.) I learnt very early in a quite different career that if you don't know where you are going it really doesn't matter which road you take. That is the problem these gentlemen face because they are looking at a symptom not the cause.

The reality is that one particular form of cholesterol has the role of patching up the lesions in the artery walls. It is nature's way of trying to compensate for the damage done by poor diet. If the damage continues the body will continue to produce and transport this healthy cholesterol to the inflamed area.