Track Your Plaque shows how to use CT heart scans as the 1st step in a proven program to slow, stop, even REVERSE heart disease!

In this issue:

• Another Track Your Plaque success story: A 500+ point drop in score—without prescription drugs!
  After surviving cancer 15 years earlier, Roy tried to live as chemical-free as possible. Roy came to the Track Your Plaque program firmly committed to following the program without resorting to any prescription drugs. He then proceeded to reduce his starting score of 1730 by over 500 points!
• Do heart scans make it too easy?
  Risk factors, cholesterol testing, and stress tests: What else does the average doctor order to determine whether or not you have a heart attack in your future?
• Wisdom of the masses:
  Conventional wisdom is often a result of outmoded notions, marketing, and misinformation. When it comes to heart disease, conventional can be tragically wrong. It’s time to stop following the crowd and chart your own course.

Hello, everybody!

Heart disease is big business.

In the next 24 hours, 10,000 heart procedures will be performed in hospitals across the U.S. It’s a process that is repeated 365 days a year, year after year . . . and growing.

No doubt, many heart procedures are truly necessary. Go to the emergency room with a heart attack, what choice is there?

But what if every lump, wart, or spot was suspected to represent cancer, and surgery and chemotherapy were initiated each and every time? We’d have a nation of pointless incisions and perhaps a few cured cancers. We’d run up an enormous national tab that might even threaten the country’s financial balance.

This is what transpires in heart disease. Not every heart problem requires a major heart procedure. But what doctor or hospital can resist thousands of dollars, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, generated by a continuous flow of heart procedures?

The solution? Don’t allow yourself to be caught in the procedural trap of modern cardiovascular care. Prevent the disease in the first place.

Track in health!


Dr. Davis
 

Another Track Your Plaque Success Story: A 500+ point drop in score—without prescription drugs!

Roy is a cancer survivor.

After a gut-wrenching several years of struggling with the disruption of his life and health, followed by two years of chemotherapy treatments, Roy tried to live as chemical-free as possible.

Roy also developed a commitment to prevention of disease. So Roy had a heart scan. His score: 1730. The very high score at age 60 put him well above the 90th percentile. The score came as a complete surprise to Roy and his wife, since he’d essentially led a flawlessly healthy lifestyle since his cancer 15 years earlier. His list of nutritional supplements included about 20 different nutrients, all of which he’d taken for years.

Roy came to the Track Your Plaque program for answers. He also expressed his firm commitment to following the program without resorting to the use of any prescription drugs.

Despite his slender build and healthy lifestyle, our evaluation uncovered six new causes of coronary disease. We showed Roy how to correct each pattern with specific modifications in food choices, along with changes in nutritional supplements, rather than the shotgun approach he’d used previously. And, of course, without any prescription drugs.

A second heart scan 14 months after the first: 1182, a drop of 548, representing a reduction of 31.6%

Dr. Davis:

I’m especially proud of Roy’s incredible success.

After enduring the rigors and emotional trauma of cancer, Roy could have easily ignored his risk for heart disease. Many people are so terrified of uncovering yet another health problem that they often deny themselves preventive strategies like a heart scan.

Roy overcame his fear and, indeed, uncovered a substantial score that carried a heart attack risk as high as 25% per year. But just as he conquered his cancer, he also overcame heart disease, succeeding in obtaining dramatic reversal of coronary plaque and reducing his risk from high to virtually non-existent. And he accomplished it without medication, but with better information on how to use diet and nutritional supplements to reverse plaque.

Had Roy shied away from getting a heart scan, the path would have been clear: Heart attack, hospital procedures, a painful and emotionally shattering déjà vu of his cancer ordeal. Instead, he is celebrating an enormous second success in maintaining health.
.
 

Do heart scans make it too easy?

Many revenue-producing heart tests like stress tests are based on their enormous uncertainty factor.

With 30% of tests yielding equivocal results and another 20% false-positive abnormalities (i.e., appearing abnormal when there is not truly an abnormality), it’s natural that a scared patient will desire greater certainty.

The traditional response to critics of stress tests has been: Is there anything else short of heart catheterization and other invasive testing?

If you were to believe the American Heart Association, to diagnose heart disease your doctor 1) examines a cholesterol value and other risk factors for heart disease such as smoking and family history, 2) performs a stress test when sufficient risk factors are present.

Let’s paint an all-too-typical picture: Joan, a 46-year old real estate agent, wife and mother with an LDL cholesterol of 143. She’s non-smoker, 15 lbs. overweight, and feels fine with her daily walks. Joan’s father had a heart attack at age 60. She had a cholesterol panel recently that revealed total cholesterol of 200 mg/dl, LDL of 142 mg/dl. She does not have high blood pressure and other standard screening laboratory tests were all normal.

Based on this information, can you tell if Joan has heart disease or not? If you can, then you’re better than your doctor. In truth, nobody can tell whether a typical and very common profile like Joan’s signifies hidden heart disease. Yes, if Joan went to the emergency room with clear-cut chest pain and was about to have a heart attack, the diagnosis can be made confidently. But what of the preceding decades before Joan needs the services of an emergency room? For all we know given her “risk factor” profile, she might have a heart attack next Tuesday, or she might outlive all her friends and neighbors and never suffer a stitch of heart trouble.

Joan has risk factors. She is without symptoms of heart disease (as the great majority of people with unrecognized heart disease are), but her doctor would be fully justified (by conventional criteria) in pursuing the sort of testing that yields equivocal, uncertain results. If Joan underwent a nuclear stress test, for instance, there’s a 20% likelihood of a “false positive” result that commonly results in heart catheterization, a 30% likelihood of an equivocal result that may also prompt a heart catheterization.

Isn’t there a better way to diagnose hidden coronary disease?

Actually, there is: a heart scan. CT heart scans have proven to be the standout technology to identify, quantify, and track your coronary plaque.
 

Wisdom of the masses

(Reprinted from The Heart Scan Blog)

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."
Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962


"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929


"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre, France


"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Office of Patents, 1899


No doubt, conventional wisdom can often be laughably (tragically?) wrong. The problem is that, as absurd as all the above sentiments seem to us now in retrospect, they represented prevailing views years ago. These views were held by many, including people in positions of power and decision-making responsibility.

A more relevant but nonetheless laughable and widely held belief in 2008: coronary heart disease should be treated with hospital procedures.

Why is a disease that requires 30 years to develop treated only at the final moments with a procedure to pull you back from the brink of disaster? Do you only change your car's oil when the engine is on its last legs? Or, do periodic, relatively effortless oil changes during the life of the car make better sense?

I witness just how brainwashed the public has become with this crazed notion when I meet someone socially at, say a fundraiser or cocktail party. When they ask what I do, I tell them I'm a cardiologist. The invariable response: "Oh, what hospital do you work out of?"

I tell them I don't, that I take care of the majority of heart disease right from the office and rarely need hospital procedures. 99% of the time I get a puzzled look. If we had comic bubbles above our heads revealing our internal thoughts, I suspect it would read "Yeah, right. What a kook."

The notion that coronary heart disease is something that is manageable with simple tools for the majority of us in the early stages is entirely foreign to most people. The hospitals and the medical industry have so succeeded in dazzling the public with images of staff in scrubs, rushing from emergency to emergency, lights flashing, scalpels flying. . . How can you possibly accomplish this at home or anywhere outside of the high-tech world of the hospital? Perhaps the public needs a figurative dose of electroshock therapy to shake ourselves of this crazy notion.

Interested in becoming a Track Your Plaque Member?

If you’re interested in finding out more about becoming a Member of Track Your Plaque, go to the Track Your Plaque Member Benefits page. See why more and more people are finding out that there are alternatives to the conventional answers (or lack of answers!) for heart disease.

Track Your Plaque Members

Watch for our new and upcoming Special Reports on:

What is plaque?
We track it. We try to control it, stop it, reverse it. But what exactly is plaque? If we were unable to identify and measure plaque, there would be no Track Your Plaque program. In other words, without the ability to detect, quantify, and track coronary plaque, there would be no need for our program or any effort to try and exert control over this thing.

Our new Complete Handbook of Vitamin D

Next Track Your Plaque WEBINAR on Small LDL—Number one cause of coronary plaque: What it is; how to get rid of it.

Copyright 2008, Track Your Plaque