I recently had a spontaneous dissection of a coronary artery causing an acute Non-St Elevation MI all discovered via an angiogram after chest pain/ heart attack like symptoms while out hiking at 6 am.
Previous to this incident, my husband has been concerned about his heart due to family history (his father) and has been taking statins for several years. We ( really I) had been looking for ways to get him off statins because they are dangerous ( in my opinion) and I think there are better ways to address the problem. Linus Pauling's Therapy has been of interest but other than starting my husband on taking vitamin C but not therapeutic amounts, we hadn't come to any decision about where or how to start.
Now with my situation and the Doctors wanting me to take beta blockers and statins due to calcification they found during the angiogram, we both want to start the LP therapy. I found the websites and the forum and want to register to learn all I can. I just got your book "Practicing without..." and am reading that and have also read Dr Levy's book.
I haven't been back to see any doctors since my hospitalization (Nov 9-11) and am trying to decide what to do, besides not taking the statins prescribed and discontinuing the beta blocker, which gave me chest pain, weakness etc even when taking 1/4 of the dose prescribed. I'm wondering if I shouldn't start the LP first and then wait a month or so and then go see a doctor to see if it's helping. One heart clinic here offers the X-ray test to look at Coronary Calcification ( Recommended by Dr. Jeffrey Dach) which my husband had done and wants me to do to check against the angiogram. I think he wants to know how accurate it is since I just had the angiogram (for his benefit also, since he's worried about possible problems in his heart ) and because the calcification they found during my angiogram is of concern .
He still thinks that lowering cholesterol in the old/conventional medical sense is the way to go to prevent heart disease, in spite of evidence he's read about to the contrary. I'm more afraid of the drugs and therapies recommended by typical Cardiologists. I think from what I've read so far I need to get a Lipoprotein test to see how I am on that but I'm not sure if regular doctors will order that test if I ask for it.
My situation is complicated by a stroke I had at 34, 5 1/2 months after our son was born. The cause has the dissection of one of my carotid arteries due to fibromuscular displaysia. This left me with a completely occluded carotid on one side a 50% narrowing in the other one. It was congenital and it's usually discovered during autopsies, according to the neurologists! Anyway, they put me on Coumadin. I had some minor episodes in the year following this. Seven years later, I had another major stroke on the other side, this time due they thought to a patent foramen ovale in my heart, also supposedly congenital. So I had open heart surgery to repair it after I recovered from the stroke. The original stroke left damage that caused central pain syndrome, which in my case, is severe constant pain on the left side of my body, worse in the areas with the most deficit from the stroke. Consequently, I have been taking pain medication and have gotten very little sleep since the first stroke in 1993. They found a small aneurysm during a MRI and stopped the Coumadin after I had taken it for 7-8 years.
So, that's why I want to join the forum rather than just be a guest. Hopefully, someday I might have something positive to contribute to help other people trying to help their hearts get healthy again.
We both want to begin the LP Therapy but I don't know which of those products: Cardio-C, Heart Tech or CardioAde to try. I noticed someone on your forum mentioned that the Lysine caused trouble with their Rosacea which I have, .so I might have a problem with that too.
Any help you could give from your experience would be very much appreciated. I hope I haven't given you to much information but I thought I'd better try to include all the complications with my health situation if I was going to ask you for any ideas you might have.
Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing from you,
After the first read, both you and your husband, and especially you need to supplement vitamin C. All humans have a genetic defect that feeds our medical system. You can overcome the defect by supplementing vitamin C, and a good amount to shoot for to cover a lot of bases is 12 grams daily, eg. 1 gram every 2 hours. This would just about mimic what most animals make for themselves. Linus Pauling took more - less frequently.
The choice of products, they all include lysine, based on the knowledge of how atherosclerotic plaques form in our arteries. but each product adds more heart-healthy nutrition. You probably should be taking everything in Ascorsine-9, for example, but people have their own vitamin E, vitamin A, etc., so it depends on what other supplements you are taking. (From your description I assume few or none.)
Unfortunately, the coumadin they put you on leads to the calcification in soft tissues. (If you need studies, you can find over 200 in medline about this.) And the standard Pauling therapy will not resolve this alone. You need to add vitamin K. Vitamin K works like a hormone moving calcium from soft tissue into bone. Drugs like warfarin and coumadin actually block the action of vitamin K, leading to the calcium build-ups.
I take LEF.ORG Super-K daily. Neither my wife or I have any calcium from the scans. There is some concern that the K1 might interfere with your drugs, so it may be wise to start with a version of vitamin K2... Which has no effect on clotting, or so I am told.