Heart Disease - The Right Way To Treat It

February 4, 2009
Interview with Michael Ozner, M.D., author of The Great American Heart Hoax

______________

Mike Carruthers:
When someone is having a heart attack or is otherwise unstable because of heart disease, heart surgery can be life saving.

Michael Ozner, M.D.:
However in stable individuals who happen to have a blockage there is no data to suggest that in the vast majority of these individuals that putting in a stent or doing bypass surgery in any way lowers the risk of a future heart attack - or prolongs their life.

Dr. Michael Ozner, author of the book The Great American Heart Hoax

Yet despite this knowledge and despite the many clinical trials that have shown that stents or bypass surgery does not work in the stable population it's forecasted that next year we'll be putting in over a million stents in patients and doing a half million bypass operations.

A better approach, says Dr. Ozner, is something he calls aggressive prevention, using diet, exercise and other lifestyle changes to get heart disease under control.

Certainly if we cannot do that with nutritional approaches, lifestyle approaches then we have very good medications that can do that and I think this is to me the proper approach. Let's reserve intervention for the people who truly need it specifically those patients that have severe chest pain despite medical therapy or those in the throws of a heart attack.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.