82 A JOURNEY INTO YIN YOGA
Isn’t it ironic that when treating a condition, the treatments sometimes have
side effects that actually worsen the condition? It seems pretty insane to me.
Too many people suffer and lose their lives in an attempt to treat a condition
with pharmaceuticals. Although in some circumstances, prescribed drugs are
helpful, we also need to be open to a more holistic approach that treats the
cause and not just the symptoms.
The number one killer in the United States is heart disease. Personally, I’ve
lost close family members to heart disease, and as I was writing this chapter,
my wife’s grandfather suffered a near-fatal heart attack. In the past, this condi-
tion mostly targeted men, but now heart disease increasingly affects women.
According to 2016 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
one in four deaths each year among women in the United States are caused
by heart disease.
High blood pressure is a major precursor for heart disease, which includes
heart attack and stroke. Again, according to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, one-third of all Americans have high blood pressure and
another one-third of Americans suffer from prehypertension, which means
they are at high risk for developing high blood pressure (2016a). The number
of people afflicted by this disease is staggering.
The science used to discover what causes heart disease has evolved. Back
in the 1950s, the main cause of heart disease was said to be high cholesterol
levels. Because of this belief, cholesterol-rich and high-fat foods were slandered.
Doctors advised their patients to limit or avoid these foods. They also pre-
scribed patients cholesterol-lowering drugs, especially statins. Statins continue
to be the most widely prescribed class of medications in the United States.
Galitzer and Trivieri state the following (2015, 355):Statin use has done very little to combat heart disease. In fact, a me-
ta-analysis of more than 65,000 patients without a pre-existing con-
dition of heart disease who were prescribed and used statin drugs
for a period of five years found that the drugs provided no benefit
whatsoever in 98 percent of patients.According to this study, statins aren’t doing their job. Even the placebo effect
works significantly better. In addition to their underwhelming effectiveness,
statin drugs also have serious side effects. Dr. Galitzer and Trivieri write the
following (2015, 355-356):The results of these and other studies on statins raise this question:
Is cholesterol truly the villain in the story of heart disease? In a word,
no. So, if cholesterol isn’t the real villain, what is? A growing body of
research is attributing it to inflammation, which can be caused by a
poor, acidic diet and high levels of stress. When inflammation rises
in the body, so does the cholesterol. The cholesterol is part of the
human body’s defense system to protect it from imbalanced inflam-
mation.