Lessons from Jon Barron
Drugs & Heart Disease

In this week's excerpt from Lessons from the Miracle Doctors, Jon Barron explains why the use of drugs to treat heart disease is a fatally flawed approach.

"Consider how the medical community handles heart disease. Say you have clogged arteries. This eventually causes your blood pressure to rise, so your doctor prescribes blood pressure medication to eliminate the symptom - but not the problem, the clogged arteries. To reduce blood pressure, doctors have essentially four classes of medication.

1. Diuretics, which reduce pressure by making you eliminate water from your body. Reduce the volume of fluid in the blood, and you reduce the pressure. Unfortunately, side effects can include dizziness, weakness, and impotence. (Not to worry, there are more medications to alleviate these side effects.)

2. Calcium channel blockers, which work to relax and widen the arteries, thus reducing blood pressure. Unfortunately, a major side effect of channel blockers is a 60 percent increased risk of heart attack.

3. Beta blockers, which work by weakening the heart so it won’t pump as strongly, thereby reducing blood pressure. What genius thought this one up? One of the major problems with beta blockers is the increased risk of congestive heart failure. Nevertheless, despite the increased risk of heart failure, leading doctors have recommended putting every heart attack survivor on beta blockers.

4. ACE inhibitors (the new drug of choice), which like the calcium channel blockers also work to relax and widen the arteries, but with fewer side effects (just “minor” things such as kidney impairment, upper respiratory problems, headache, dizziness, and congenital "anomalies").

Keep in mind that, in addition to all of the side effects that these drugs cause (which require further medication), there is a fundamental flaw in your doctor’s treatment. All the doctor has done is treat the "manifest' symptom - high blood pressure - but has done nothing to deal with the underlying problem - clogged or hardened arteries. So, eventually, as your arteries continue to clog and harden to the point where even the medication no longer helps, you start getting the inevitable chest pains. Your doctor then chases the next set of symptoms and performs a coronary bypass or angioplasty to relieve those symptoms - until the next, even more radical, intervention."