The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition amicably King and welcome to the mother's market podcast, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, do you wanna know what your risk is for heart trouble, we explore the very latest in heart help, and you know how one test can let you know if you're at risk.
Plus, major will tell you what's going on around town.
But first up, we're joined today by another prominent physician when it comes to alternative medicine, Dr. Allan sasson, and he is the founder and medical director of the institute for progressive medicine. He's been practicing medicine for over 40 years. His Institute treats people of all ages through comprehensive state­of­the­art new medicine techniques, and we welcome him back to the mother's market podcast.
Dr. saw and how are you? Good, Kim, how are you?
I'm great, thank you. And before we get to today's topic, please fill us in on your mission and your work... Well, I'm trained as an internal medicine doctor, which I did for many years and still do, but about 30 years ago or so, I started getting involved with other ways of working with people because I was seeing that medications were not the answer, and people were running into complications from medications and from surgery, so the purpose of our practice now is to work with folks to try and handle their problems without resorting to medications, if possible, although we still use them and without resorting to surgery, although we still use it, but you can initiate treatments in other ways, nutritionally, lifestyle changes, nutritional supplements and a lot of other things that can help them without exposing them to so many side effects and complications and a better effect to... And this is great, you said for 30 years, you've been transitioning and learning about this, your practice of natural alternative medicine. Yeah, I mean, we still do regular medicine, I think it's really important to be on top of things that are happening in conventional medicine because there's a lot happening, it's enormous amounts of changes going on, so I think a physician needs to know about new medications and new techniques and all of these things. Otherwise, you're not really on top of things, you're telling people alternatives, but alternatives to what... So you really need to know what's going on. And it takes work and it takes study, but I think it's the right way. It's necessary.
So with you, you bring the best of both worlds, which I like that you stay on top of everything here, which is wonderful. Today we're talking about the latest alternative and traditional therapies for heart disease, doctor and heart disease. What is heart disease? Can you explain that?
Now, we most people think of heart disease as blockages occurring in the arteries that supply the heart with blood, so the heart's not getting enough blood, and if you have an acute blockage, that's a heart attack, so a blood vessel that's been building up plaque, usually four years one of the plaquesfinally split, splits apart and that creates a blood clot, so now the pathway for blood into that part of the heart is gone, it's been included and part of the heart dies. That's a heart attack.
Who gets heart attacks? Who gets these blood clots?
Well, it's extremely common, and folks may not realize 'cause they're so much care about cancer these days that people are dying from cancer, but there are many, many more people dying from heart disease that are dying from cancer, and there's a lot of things going on in our society now that are leading to more heart disease because we're not exercising and we're not eating right, and we're getting chubby or even fat, and all of those things predispose, another thing to know is that congestive heart failure is another major cardiac problem that results when the heart muscle itself stops pumping properly, so it just gets weaker and weaker, and fluid builds up in the lungs and the rest of the body and legs well up, and that is a major cause of death these days as well, and oftentimes comes about... After a person has had heart attacks, 'cause every time a piece of the heart dies, the heart itself is getting weaker and over years, the heart gives out, and this is what we've seen more in people who are older generally in what's happened with all of the changes that have occurred is that people are still dying of heart disease, but they're dying later, so instead of dying at 60 or 70, they're dying at 80 or 90, which I think is quite a bit of benefit, they're getting more years of useful life. It would be nice, however, to eliminate this as a disease itself, are you seeing more men or women or is it pretty even... Well, it's more common in men earlier in life and becomes equally common in women past the age of 60, we're not sure exactly what protects women from getting heart disease earlier, but it probably has something to do with hormones. Although I think it also has a lot to do with personality and approach the life, maybe.
That is interesting. What about... Can you kind of expand on that a little bit? So men, earlier... What about stress? Distress have anything to do with it. I think stress is an enormous contributing factor, I mean, to talk about heart disease without talking about stress is a mistake, and there have been papers put out there or I trust is maybe not the greatest factor, but very close to the greatest factor, and in some people is the greatest fact, you can look at people who are stressed out all the time, and then a week later and say, Oh, Joe just got into the hospital with a heart attack. I say, Well, what do you expect?
He's bouncing off the walls. He doesn't sleep well. His eating is bad, he's not exercising and yes, stressed the max and the stress itself creates hormonal changes in the body, raises blood pressure and tends to constrict the arteries, so stress itself is a big factor. It's up there in the top five, I would think. And these days maybe Elsie in the top three.
And so that makes sense for maybe perhaps men on the earlier side, and then women after 60, then you had mentioned exercise or lack of exercise, the diet... Is there a diet specific for a heart healthy diet, you may be talking about that later on, but I thought I'd throw it out here to you now, when there's a lot of diets that are offered, the one that I've seen work for which there's plenty of evidence that it works is a diet that is very, very low in fat, and there's been research and studies that have been put out for more than 30 years, probably 50 years, as I recall, cretin, who wasn't even a physician, but had heart disease and learned about this from his physician set up the critic, an institute, which teaches people how to be on vegan type diets, which is very low fat, they don't have animal products, they don't have dairy products, and heart disease goes away, except when those people are done with their training and they go back home, they often times resume the prior lifestyle and it comes back again, there's been more recent work... When I say recent, I mean like 25 years, through Doris and Dr. Shelton called well­eston, putting out basically the same idea of a vegan type of diet preventing and reversing heart disease, and both of these individuals have books that are out there, easy to read, that show you that heart disease is reversible and people who have had bypass surgery who are on medications, who are still having chest pain, go on this program and their symptoms go away, and they even have had angiogram that show the blood vessels in the heart with getting bigger and more vessels, so it is a preventable and reversible program.
The diet itself is not easy, there's not too many people who are able to go on completely vegan diets with less than 10% fat, so there are compromises you can make that are still effective, which to me is something like a paleo program where you're getting animal proteins and an awful lot of vegetables and fruits.
So you mentioned your mental outlook and its effects on heart disease, can you expand on that? Can you explain that?
Well, we need to be able to handle the stresses in life without having this stresses handle loss, and there's more out there these days with the proliferation of cell phones and the internet, most of what you see on there is not good stuff.
It's like, you know What mountain is caving in today and what country is blowing up and what revolution is happening and who's getting killed and whatever, whatever... These are the things we see 'cause I turn my cell phone on every day just to learn something, but I get struck by these pictures and stories that are just awful, and everything's breaking news and sensational for the most part. Yeah, they're not putting out the good things so much, who just got a degree in dentistry or who became a doctor or who just climbed another mountain, you don't see that so much, you see the bad stuff that alarms people and scares them and motivates them to be more scared. That's so true. And if we flipped that script a little bit and start telling people of the inspirational things or things to look up to, or people to look up to, and those stories of the climbing the mountains or the Nobel Peace RPI winners or things that... That won't be alarming. I wonder what that would do to people's are... Right now, it would change things if we change their focus, but there's just too much incentive out there to sell things or whatever, that brings people in a lot of movies out there, and violence and blood and whatever, and you know, it draws people in, but it's not good for him. Yeah, I know, and even the video games that our kids are playing now, it's a different world now, how often do people die from heart disease or... Heart attack, so different, I guess without heart disease, I guess we would say Because it's the disease.
Yeah, well, as I mentioned, it's the single most common cause of death by far, there isn't anything close to it, not even cancer, and I should mention that the statistics are improving for both, so the survival with heart disease is much more extended than it used to be, although eventually, most people will still die of heart disease, and the statistics on cancer are also considerably better, but both remain major problems, and heart disease, I think, is gonna stay that way until we can change things around with our lifestyles, which is really not quite happening, there's a lot of people out there, and we see him in our practice all the time, who are on very good diet of our exercise and you have the right weight, but this is not the majority of people, it's just there's so many things out there that are preventing them from doing it. And they haven't decided to do it, because you have to make a decision. You know, this is what I'm gonna do, this is how I'm gonna protect my body, this is how I'm gonna protect my brain.
Can you talk about... This is... We see sometimes, or about the stories of the athlete or somebody that maybe that's a predisposed possibly that is always shocking to us, when we see somebody who's physically fit, who seems to be eating a good diet and who's young, and that all of a sudden drops from a heart attack or something. But apparently it might be in a predisposed... In his family or her family.
Can you talk a little bit about that? Is that what it is? Is it in their family line that very like a... It's a really interesting area, Kim, and there've been a lot of articles written about it, and I read articles and butter all the time. I think these folks oftentimes have family genetic predispositions and they don't know it, 'cause a lot of times, heart disease is silent, that silent, they told something happens to you, but the thing that happens to you may be sudden death, and heavy duty exercise is known to be stressful to the heart.
In the short term, so if you go out and run a marathon in 89 degree weather, your chances of dropping dead in the middle of that are going to be greater than if we're seeing at home watching TV, so we know that occurs... The thing about exercise is that over the long term, it protects you if you can survive what you're doing in the short term, right.
So there have been some recommendations that people who are doing marathon running in their 40s and 50s or older should probably take an aspirin before they go running to prevent these sudden breaks in plaque. I think, personally, that there's a really nice test out there that tells you whether you're at risk, which is a coronary calcium score, it's a CT scanner that you lie on a table for a couple of minutes, and it takes pictures of the heart and the CT scanner can see calcium within the coronary arteries. So if you have a high calcium score, you're at greater risk, and if you have a zero calcium score, you're not at risk, basically.
So I think this is something that a lot of people should be getting, and I'm ordering them more in our practice all the time, just to get this number, 'cause you can see someone who looks fine, but the calcium score is 950 and that's not fine. And I see other people, particularly women with high cholesterol levels, who are being told to go on statin drugs to bring it down, and they don't wanna go on them and they feel good and they say, Why do I need to do this? I say, Get a calcium score and they come back with a calcium score of zero in spite of the fact that cholesterol was 300, and I say, You know what, not a big deal for you, it doesn't mean you should go out and start eating hot dogs and hamburgers and all the rest of that stuff, you should still have a good lifestyle, but your risk is much lower than a person whose calcium score is high, and this has been shown repeatedly in the literature, and so... Yeah, numbers don't lie. And so people can go to their anywhere and their doctor, they ask for the CTO coronary calcium score, that would be what they were asking, I think you can even get it without your doctor... I've seen people who just called up the radiology place and say, I wanna get this done, it's pretty cheap study, you can get it for a couple of hundred bucks, insurances that generally will not pay for it, but it gives you data what it tells you. What's my risk?
Right.
So that's great information.
Thank you for explaining that. Is it preventable? Is heart disease preventable?
It is, I mean, the same things that reverse heart disease, prevent heart disease, and it was shown in these books, books written by Hornish and by Esalen, they were having patients come to them who had heart disease who were having chest pain, who had already had stents put in who had already had bypass surgery, who were already on all of the medications people get and still having symptoms, and then they were put on this program, which was a very low fat, less than 10% fat diet. completely vegetarian, not easy to do, but after a period of six months to a year and even two years, it's not gonna work overnight, although chest pain can disappear within a week or to believe it or not, but the disease itself takes time to reverse. You have to stay with it, but they had many patients where symptoms went away, findings when away, blood pressure came down, weight always comes down, cholesterol can drop a 100 or 200 points depending on where it starts, and you can get off medications and feel fine.
Medications like what you mentioned earlier, like the statin drugs, blood pressure pills, beta blockers, all of these things that are routine, and if you don't put every one of your cardiac patients on all of these drugs, you know you're subject to legal recourse, you can be sure. malpractice because you didn't put a patient on a statin drug, and I get letters from insurance companies about this, why is it your patient on a statin drugs... Pushy, a diabetic, every diabetic officially should be put on a statin drug... Well, I have a lot of patients that wanna be on statin drugs and we work with their cholesterol, there's other ways of lowering cholesterol, not just with diet, but there's nutritional supplements like Nias and other items that will lower cholesterol, substantially, the side effects from the statin drugs going back to it, and maybe I don't know if you can talk about that, but people are scared to be on or just don't wanna change their lifestyle to be on these statin drugs, which is why you ever come in and why you're talking about this, the alternatives then in and things that... Anyway, there are a lot of risks to being on statin drugs, whether there are some risks, and I think they're sort of downplayed in the literature because the cardiologist themselves are taking statin drugs 'cause they think they work, which they do, if you're not getting trouble with the side effects, which I have seen multiple times, and people basically getting pains in their lower extremities, numbness tingling, almost neuropathic types, nerve problems and weakness, so they have trouble walking and running, playing tennis, if that's what they're used to, and that's not been unusual. It's happened a fair amount. And the other thing I have seen not as often, it's been uncommon, but nobody wants to have a memory loss, nobody wants to be concerned about getting into Alzheimer's disease, but I've had a number of patients who found that their thinking was impaired and their memory was impaired while they were on the statin and when they stopped it, which they did on their own, they got better now, it hasn't been a lot of patience, but it's something that raises concern, like I don't wanna lose my memory, I don't wanna get impaired... Right, we still use statin drugs a lot. You know, I think a person who has a cardiac history should be honest at, however, if you can reverse everything and get their cholesterol really fired down without a statin, have them exercising and losing weight and getting rid of their high blood sugar and getting a good of their abdominal fat, the risks are gonna be way down and they can get off Statins, you still have to be concerned about them, but you'd be concerned about them anyway, and Statins do not eliminate cardiac risk, they reduce the incidents of events by about 30%, just... It's one third, which is appreciable, it's a lot, but it's not 100%.
It's not a cure­all, and lots of folks have been out there, and I've heard doctors say they ought to put statins in the water, and I hear the ice, I just cringe is really, this is what you wanna do to everybody. And I believe that, you know, I've heard it many times, and it's just... It's not the right way to go.
Well, this is very interesting information and we appreciate you being on... There's much more to learn from Dr. Susan, so please stay with us, we'll be right back in.
And now, back to our interview with Dr. sasson, and we're talking about the latest alternative and traditional therapies for heart disease, and doctor, we have been talking about what leads up to heart disease and what is happening in the area of heart disease. What do you practice in your alternative medicine for heart disease? What is going on in your practice or the lifestyle approach is by far the most important, that's the first thing you do, so you wanna get the person on the right diet, you wanna get them into an exercise program, that's a graded program, so if they can only walk for five minutes to start with, that's what you do, and the more they do this for a few weeks or longer than that, then they can get up to 10 minutes and 20 minutes and 30 minutes, if you wanna get them in an exercise program that's not gonna wipe them out and have them do something that they enjoy doing, like dancing or playing tennis or whatever for a sufficient length of time, which should be at least two and a half hours a week all together, so the exercise is really key, and those two things will help with the weight reduction that has to happen, and those two things, the lifestyle and the exercise will handle the blood sugar and the obesity and the diabetes, and these things that are coming up more and more for folks as far as medications go, I think if you can start reversing the factors that you're dealing with, then you can start reducing medication, a blood pressure has been high and they're on three blood pressure medications and you see it coming down with the program, then you can start backing off on the blood pressure pills, little by little, one by one. And some people can get off entirely if a person's 50 pounds overweight and not exercising and he changes that around... He can get off those medications. You can even get off statin drugs frequently, the things will do after that, or sometimes if the patient is ill or is really interesting, we'll do things like chelation therapy, which has been around for 50 years, where you're giving an intravenous treatment of vitamins and minerals, including magnesium we use glutathione also, all these things will help the body, help the Heart, help circulation, and you're also giving them these chemicals that will remove heavy metals from the body.
So things like EDTA, DMPS, these are the names of the chemicals. They will remove arsenic and lead and mercury and aluminum that we all have in our bodies to a certain degree, so I have more than others, but these heavy metals are thought to be involved in the development of heart disease and other conditions in the body, so you wanna get them out as much as you can, and if you can give them vitamins and minerals at the same time, you're doing a few things at once, so we do a lot of chelation therapy, usually it's once or twice a week for a series of about 30 treatments, and I've seen heart disease get better and there's literature indicating that diabetics who have heart disease will have reduced incidents of cardiac events, heart attacks by Du incubation therapy. So that's one group. That should benefit from it.
The other things we do, when I really like is something called external control satin therapy, where you're lying on a table and these inflatable cuffs put around your legs and your thighs and your pelvis, and they are blown up with air to force blood out of the legs, toward the heart, and it builds up collateral circulation in the heart, it also reduces resistance in the arteries of the body and a loss of an increase in resistance or a loss of elasticity is one of the first things you see in the development of heart disease.
So controls Aton therapy, I've been working with that for 20 years, and I've seen patients who had heart disease who have chest pain, even congestive heart failure has improved a lot with counter­ pulsation therapy usually combined with cation. The thing about these treatments is they're so safe, you can use them together, and often times we're gonna be more effective that way.Econometri.
Do you want a... They're picking up all of the noises everywhere in... How are you doing? Good, fine, thank you.
Yeah, I don't know why they mean they're have to clean, but they vacuum in right by the doors and he put signs up everywhere, owerri, but yeah, these walls and the doors are paper thin... Are they ahead?
Stop it. I know you're like, Don't do it, right back into it where... Yeah, so you were just talking about how you're combining both the chelation therapy and the external counter questions, what makes your program so successful, you were just talking about how you combine both of these... Yeah, I was... A combination of therapies is easier to do it because they're both very, very safe, so you can use them together and get additional benefits at the same time, instead of just doing one thing at a time, and there's another treatment we've been working with in the last few years, which is ozone therapy, everybody has heard about ozone therapy, and it's very interesting because it's a powerful treatment, basically you take oxygen and then you connect the oxygen to an electrical current and that creates ozone.
So now you have a very highly charged molecule and you can give this into people's bodies in different ways, but we're using it for heart disease intravenously, and that has the effect of reducing the inflammation within the arteries of the body, and it also provides energy... Ozone is an energy maker, so you can use ozone along with cation, along with Connor pulsation, along with everything else, and we always use a number of supplements that are heart­friendly, so things like coenzyme Q10 and in that I mentioned, will reduce cholesterol levels in their L­carnitine, there's a few other items that are all been official for the cardiovascular system and very safe, you don't have to worry about statin­type side effects with these supplements, use them a lot, and again, you're saying they're safe, but they're all natural, and you've been doing these kind of treatments, you've meant you have been in practice with your alternative medicine for 30 years, is that... That's about right. Yeah, yes. And so you've seen great success with combining this, to know the success depends a lot on the patient's willingness, if this is what the patient wants, this is what they decide to do, the chance of it working is very great if they don't really wanna do it, and if they won't commit to it, it's probably not gonna happen, it requires determination, and the need for lifestyle change is essential, so that has to be involved as the number one priority items, so you know I have to get people away from smoking, have to get people away from fast foods, have to get people away from fried foods and unhealthy foods, which are all over the place, we live near a university, and you see a lot of these fast food places that the students go to that are cheap and fast. And the food isn't good. And all these kids are getting set up 20 or 30 years from now for the kind of problems that we're dealing with... Yeah, they're getting set up for failure is really ultimately what's happening.
Yeah, you do have a question for you, with the usual medical approach, do you find... And because you were in that practice was... And I'm not necessarily just asking you because I know where you've come from, and what you're just saying with all of the treatment that you're offering, you're also offering lifestyle advice, but do you find that in the medical approach, do they also offer lifestyle Lifestyle Treatment... Well, I mean, it would probably depend on the doctor, but are they saying with the statin drugs, are they saying you need to exercise, and here's how giving you some examples of how you can live a better lifestyle.
It depends a lot on the doctor's own philosophy and his own lifestyle, I mean, how do I convince somebody to do all this exercise if I'm not doing it, how do I convince somebody to eat like this if I'm not doing it?
So the doctor has to be an example of what he has, spouses, you have to show that this works for me, and it can work for you, and a lot of the system that's out there does not permit it. A doctor has set 10 minutes to spend with a patient, Well, how are you gonna tell them how to eat plus examined them, plus plus plus given their medications and whatever in seven to 10 minutes. You can't do it. So you have to have the time for it, and you have to have the commitment from the patient, and these are difficult combinations to get, so we talked a little bit about how they work and you really need to see the commitment from all of your patients and I would suppose that goes for anything, so if they're on the medical side, if they're taking the statin drugs, but again, marrying that with the lifestyle that goes hand and hand on both ends, so on your side with the chelation therapy and all of the therapies that you're offering, they also have to exercise and then start to eat healthy, but I think what you're also saying is that you're offering them, you're saying, so stay with me because I'm gonna help you with the vitamins and the minerals, and I'm gonna set you up not to fail I'm gonna set you up on the right path for success... Yeah, they're gonna feel better. You put somebody on some of these drugs, you're seeing numbers about our blood pressure comes down and black sugar comes down, they don't really feel better, they're not gonna feel better until they can make the lifestyle changes and we'll make that happen. Yeah, drugs generally make you feel worse every time you see these commercials, and then there's all these things like, Oh, and by the way, here are all the side effects, and that's just incredible to me that people still know that these can be the side effects and it's almost as you say, they're often times so much worse or just... It's insane.
You talked a little bit about the screening test, are there any other kind of test that people should be aware of, besides that it was the calcium score, are there any other kind of tests that people can get to check their heart... For heart disease.
Oh yes, well, echocardiogram is a very nice test, that's an ultrasound machine that looks at your heart and visualize the valves in the heart wall and how the muscle is functioning, and it's very informative and it's not invasive, it's so it's completely safe and it gives you a lot of information, so I order them, and cardiologists do them on everybody, it's a very nice test to get, 'cause it tells you as the heart well, thickened, which would indicate the blood pressure has been having that effect, you don't want it to be that thick, is the heart enlarged, which can go along with congestive heart, flour problems in, when you're treating somebody and you do serial studies, you can see improvements, the heart wall may get thinner again, the size of the heart may come down instead of getting larger, being a smaller Heart is a better thing, so you can see a lot of things going on without having to do all of these invasive studies, the core, or one of the most important things in cardiology these days are still getting cardiac catheterization and putting stents in and doing bypass surgery, which is effective. And they're not effective for everybody, but again, we see patients who've had those things done and what the first thing we do, get them on lifestyle, you know, because it's gonna make these things work better, you know that bypass surgery is gonna work for a while, and then it's not gonna work anymore and stands are gonna work for a while, probably, maybe not. And then they're not gonna work anymore. And the literature out there that shows that putting extension people will relieve their chest pain, but it's not gonna make them live any longer...
I wanna live longer. Change how you live. You'll have longer. Great advice.
People, you talked a little bit about this too, getting off of medications in that process, how long... This is a piece of information that I think is really important. How long does that process take to getting off of the statin drugs, and what does that process... How does that make people feel and should they be guided along, what is that... What does that process?
Well, the person can start to feel better depending on how far they've been off the track within several weeks, two or three weeks, they'll start to feel different.
Everybody is so different. It's hard to say there are some people I would not take off statin drugs, they have too much history and too many problems, and I would maintain them on them, but I may not put them on the highest dose, they're coming in on a 80 milligram of hattori statin, we gonna get them down to 40 or 20 or 10, knowing that the side effects are commensurate with the dosage, so the lower the dose to less, there is a chance there is problems from it, so we don't know, we stop medications or eliminate medications, but we oftentimes can reduce the dosage, and that's a really good point as well.
This has been fascinating information, and so thank you so very much for your time, Dr. Austin, but we look forward to having you on again. And in the meantime, please check out Dr. Satan's website, it is a progressive Med dot com, and you can learn more about his passion for alternative medicine and the other great things here involved with... And I know, I think you said you're writing a book as well. When can we find out more about the books?
We have to finish it, we have to get some illustrations and some organization and stuff, I need some help on that, but to be continued to be continued... Perfect.
Check the website, we look forward to your next visit.
Thank you.
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