FACEBOOK.COM/WDDTYAUNZ ISSUE 01 | AUG/SEP 2019 | WDDTY 39
SPECIAL REPORTN
ancy Bradley dropped
her dog’s leash when she
suddenly felt a crushing
pressure like someone was
sitting on her chest. A shot
of pain ran up her neck
into her jaw and down her
left arm simultaneously.
A month earlier she
had gone to the hospital with milder
sensations like this, but they had
dissipated while she waited in the
emergency room. Then, an ECG and
blood tests hadn’t shown anything
abnormal, so a doctor sent her home
with a bottle of antacids.
She was skeptical; both her older
brother and sister had suffered
heart attacks, and her dad had died
following a quadruple bypass at
age 53. Nancy was 57. Now, on a
warm morning in August 2017 as she
walked her terrier mix Marley alone
on a forest trail, the agony returned
with a vengeance.
At first, she thought her struggle for
breath was caused by the smoke from
wildfires that had hung in the air for weeks
and settled on the mountain landscape in
Kamloops, British Columbia, like a sea fog. As
nausea swept over her and she started trembling,
she knew it wasn’t that.
She fumbled in her pocket and found her
pack of cigarettes but remembered she had left
her phone at home. Sweat dripped
off the end of her nose. She could
barely move her legs. The trees
started to spin, and she crumpled to
the ground. I’ve got to make it home,
she thought, or I’m going to die on
this trail.
Usually Nancy would pass
neighbors out jogging or walking their dog,
but this Saturday morning, there wasn’t a soul
in sight. Marley stayed by her side, however, for
the whole 40 minutes it took Nancy to crawl the
five-minute walk back to her home.
On the phone to 911, she became
unresponsive, and a second ambulance with a
cardiologist was dispatched. A team was waiting
for her in the operating room; scans revealed
permanent damage to her heart tissue, and she
underwent immediate surgery to place a stent in
a major artery that was 95 percent blocked.
Nancy became a survivor of an event that
strikes one American every 25 seconds and
claims the lives of 17.9 million people across the
globe every year. Heart disease is still the leadingcause of death worldwide, and groups like the
American Heart Association like to remind us
that for half of the people who suffer from it, the
first symptom will be sudden death.
However, some cardiologists believe that
statistic can be slashed and cite a large body of
published science that identifies those people
who are most at risk for heart attacks before
they happen. Better yet, they have numerous
suggestions on how to counter those risks and
put your heart right to prevent a heart attack
from ever striking.
“There is a mantra I would like you to repeat
over and over,” says holistic cardiologist Joel
Kahn, professor of clinical cardiology at
Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan,
and director of the Kahn Center for Cardiac
Longevity: “Heart attacks are preventable.”
Kahn is convinced that upwards of 90 percent
of heart attacks can be thwarted, primarily
through fewer than 10 diet and lifestyle changes.
The enormity of this assertion is staggering. It
means that in the United States alone, more than
700,000 of the 785,000 first-time heart attacks
experienced each year could be prevented. More
than 360,000 of the nearly 400,000 lives claimed
by heart disease annually could be saved.
That’s nearly four football stadiums packed
to the rafters with fathers, mothers, brothers,
sisters, cousins, friends and coworkers—to
say nothing of the dent a new health paradigm
might put in the $555 billion expended each
year on medical costs and lost productivity from
heart disease in America alone.^1Like other cardiologists critical of
mainstream medicine, Kahn, who has used an
integrative approach to treat and reverse heart
disease in more than 10,000 patients, says the
current paradigm not only is a colossal failure,
but actually contributes to heart disease by
treating everyone with pills or balloons and
stents, which carry dangerous side-effects and a
false sense of security.
“In current cardiology, none of the pills, none
of the drugs, none of the procedures, none of the
surgeries, have one single, solitary thing to do
with the causation of the illness. However, we’ve
built a billion-dollar industry over an illness
that does not exist in half the world,” Caldwell
Esselstyn Jr., director of the cardiovascularIN THE US ALONE, MORE THAN 360,000 OF THE
NEARLY 400,000 LIVES CLAIMED BY HEART
DISEASE ANNUALLY COULD BE SAVED