Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. M.D. on STENTS

Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn for more than thirty years was a surgeon, clinician, and researcher at the Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio. In 1991 he organized the first National Conference on the Elimination and Prevention of Heart Disease. In 2005, he became the first recipient of the Benjamin Spock Award for Compassion in Medicine. The following seven paragraphs are quoted from pages 32-34 of his book, PREVENT AND REVERSE HEART DISEASE, published in 2007, by AVERY, a member of Penguin Group. The ISBN is 978-1-58333-300-6.

“Traditional cardiology has approached this disease primarily by relying on mechanical interventions. In angioplasty, for instance, a physician inserts a hollow tube into an artery in a leg or arm and guides it, using X-ray images, into the clogged coronary artery that is his target. A smaller catheter, with a deflated balloon at its tip, is then fed through the first. When it reaches the clogged area, the balloon is inflated–usually several times–to press the plaque against the artery wall, fracturing the plaque and the arterial wall, widening the vessel, and stripping away the delicate endothelial lining.

“In recent years, the use of stents has become more common. A stent is a wire mesh tube that is inserted during angioplasty. When the balloon is inflated, the stent expands and locks into place inside the artery, holding it open after the balloon and catheter are withdrawn.

“Bypass surgery is exactly what its name implies. The physician uses a short length of blood vessel from another part of the body to provide a way for blood to go around blockages in coronary arteries, much as a detour functions to route traffic around the congestion caused by an accident or by highway construction.

“But as I have already argued, these interventions are aimed at alleviating the symptoms of coronary artery disease, not at curing the disease itself. And their results erode with the passage of time. Patients have second and third bypasses. Arteries widened with angioplasty tend to clog once again. Stents may have to be reopened because scar tissue reblocks the artery. The newer drug-eluting stents (coated with drugs to lessen the body’s natural healing response to the injury caused by the stent’s insertion) may also suddenly block after a few years because a clot forms where the endothelium was injured; the drug in the stent that prevents inflammation also inhibits the endothelium’s capacity to heal.

“We can do better. We can go right to the source of the disease. We can cut off the supply of fatty substances that accumulate in the arteries to such catastrophic effect.

“We can go directly to the bottom line. This is it: IF YOU FOLLOW A PLANT-BASED NUTRITION PROGRAM TO REDUCE YOUR TOTAL CHOLESTEROL LEVEL TO BELOW 150 mg/dL and the LDL LEVEL TO LESS THAN 80 mg/dL, YOU CANNOT DEPOSIT FAT AND CHOLESTORAL INTO YOUR CORONARY ARTERIES. Period.

“And although some patients may need cholesterol-lowering drugs to help them achieve those safe, low cholesterol levels, drugs alone are not the answer. Nutrition is the real key to saving your life in the long term. Eating the right way not only will help reduce your cholesterol levels, but also can work additional wonders you may never have imagined.

Note: On Thursday, February 11, 2010, I shook Dr. Essy’s hand in the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. I had had open-heart surgery in October of 2009. When I met Esselstyn I weighed 236, my blood pressure was averaging 160/80, my triglyricides were over 200 and my overall cholestrol was over 200. On Tuesday of this week, August 21, 2012, Dr. Esselstyn called me on my cell phone. He was vacationing with his grandkids on his farm in New York. He was responding to my latest lab results furnished me by my Piedmont Physician, Patrick Coleman, M.D.. My overall cholesterol is 148 and has been for nine months. My triglycerides are 85. My blood pressure averages 128/68. Incidentally, on my last doctors visit a week ago I weighed 195. On February 11, 2010, I committed to the plant-based nutritional program spelled out in PREVENT AND REVERSE HEART DISEASE.

I want my family, my friends and my enemies to study Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s plant-based nutritional program in order to ponder a new way of eating.

James Wilson Beaty
Jeremiah 22:16
August 24, 2012

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