Over the Counter Natural Cures (10 page)

Most people over forty-five are at risk for this same calamitous scenario. If Plavix isn't on the menu, a host of other cardiovascular drugs—like aspirin, warfarin, and a slew of hypertension meds—are. Better think twice about using any of these meds outside an emergency situation.

THE BIGGEST CAUSE OF PREMATURE HEART ATTACK OR STROKE

It's no wonder people take cardiovascular drugs. Premature heart attack and stroke are very scary. Both are considered “silent killers” because they seem to creep up on us out of nowhere. One minute you are enjoying a stroll in the park, and the next you feel as if an elephant just stepped on you. Clutching your chest and violently gasping for air, you suffer the eventual outcome of heart disease: a heart attack. The guilty party is blood clots.

Thanks to the emergency use of cardiovascular drugs, more people are staying alive longer after the terrifying event. But the rates of premature heart attack and stroke keep escalating. More and more people are being diagnosed with poor cardiovascular health every year. Naturally, we'll do almost anything to avoid it, even if that means swallowing cardiovascular drugs daily. And the marketing scoundrels at Big Pharma know this.

The drug industry leverages our fear to force-feed us cardiovascular drugs. Catch phrases like, “You're no match for a deadly blood clot” and “Hypertension runs in your family” are often used to line us up at the pharmaceutical trough. But with a little understanding of cardiovascular function, anyone can see that this isn't always the best way to go.

Blood clots are the result of a chemical cascade by which blood is instantly converted from a liquid to a solid. Clot formation is simply the conversion of a blood compound known as fibrinogen into fibrin. In areas of damage or inflammation, this gives rise to a scaffolding-like structure that halts blood flow. When we bleed, the elastic fibrin molecules gather and thicken near a wound. This eventually turns into a scab. The entire process is mandatory for healing.

The molecule that controls this lifesaving process is known as thromboxane. It not only heals but also saves us from bleeding to death. Like Glen Canyon Dam holds in the waters of Lake Powell, thromboxane is essential for keeping our blood where it belongs—within the 100,000 miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries. But if thromboxane elicits the formation of a clot within narrowed, inflamed arteries, the once-harmless clot becomes a death sentence.

The root cause of blood clots is inflammation, an age-old immunological defense mechanism that serves as Nature's Band-Aid. But when
artery butchers persist in your blood, inflammation goes haywire. Clot-forming thromboxane increases within the blood, and what should be temporary for healing becomes long term and deadly.

Like the initial tremor that triggers an earthquake, overly aggressive inflammation causes plaque to rupture. The rupturing triggers the formation of a rogue blood clot in the spaghetti-sized coronary arteries. If these arteries are inflamed with heart disease, blood changes from free flowing and viscous to solid and suffocating. Rogue clots, usually capable of passing through a healthy artery, become caught within inflamed arteries and arrest blood flow.

If an artery is blocked in the heart, a heart attack is the result. And if a blockage occurs in the brain, a stroke is the result. Big Pharma uses an arsenal of drugs to prevent this from happening. But the medicines are often more risky than the rogue blood clots. To protect quality of life, you'll want to know about their risks and alternatives.

DRUG ARSENAL TO WATCH OUT FOR

Most people spend a lot of time fantasizing about all the fun they'll have when they retire. But the daydreams never include the ugly reality: in a blind attempt to avoid inflammation gone haywire, you can blow most of your retirement money on cardiovascular drugs.

According to a recent report by CNN Money, “The retirement health tab can run between $64,000 and $122,000 for a sixty-five-year-old man whose former employer pays his insurance premiums, and between $86,000 and $140,000 for a woman of the same age. For retirees who don't have access to an employer-offered plan, the costs—mostly for prescription drugs—run even higher.”
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Aspirin, Plavix, and Coumadin (warfarin) are among the top drugs used. If not these, hypertension meds such as Toprol (metoprolol succinate) or Coreg (carvedilol) are standing
by to sucker you into the financial drug trap. Is it worth it? Let's look at these drugs in more detail.

BIG RISK OF BIG CLOT-BUSTING DRUGS

The biggest threat from the clot-busting drugs is that they last too damn long in the blood. While they might stop rogue blood clots in their tracks, these drugs are not easily metabolized. This causes them to hang around in the bloodstream longer than they should, preventing our body from forming lifesaving blood clots when needed. It's a classic case of the treatment being worse than the illness.

Long-lasting clot busters cause blood to become so thin that it can “melt” the cardiovascular system. Blood seeps through the structural layers that hold veins, arteries, and capillaries together. First bruising results and then hemorrhaging (rupture of blood vessels in the brain and ulcers).

Consider aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid). It busts clots by preventing the formation of thromboxane. It also causes people to drop dead faster than nonaspirin users, even at low doses. Whether users are taking 75 milligrams or more, “no conventionally used prophylactic aspirin regimen seems free of the risk of peptic ulcer complications,” according to the
British Medical Journal
.
⁶¹

Hemorrhaging isn't the only risk with aspirin. It also depletes the body of lifesaving nutrients like folic acid, iron, potassium, sodium, and vitamin C. Symptoms associated with such depletion include: anemia, birth defects, elevated homocysteine (a risk factor for heart disease), headache, depression, fatigue, hair loss, insomnia, diarrhea, shortness of breath, pale skin, and immune suppression. Doctors still insist that aspirin protects us from heart attack and stroke. Evidence proves otherwise.

Studies consistently prove that men aged fifty-five to seventy-four
and with no history of heart disease who use aspirin show no benefit over those who do not use it. Both the treated and nontreated groups suffer from heart attack and stroke at the same rates. The Women's Health Study, a ten-year randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study conducted among 40,000 healthy women age forty-five and older, also showed that aspirin failed to decrease the rates of heart attack and stroke. Users did not benefit from an increase in lifespan and experienced only negative side effects.
⁶²

Type 2 diabetics, who are four times more likely to suffer from heart attack and stroke, don't benefit from aspirin use either. Writing for the
British Medical Journal
, researchers concluded that “doctors should not
routinely give aspirin to people with diabetes to help guard against a heart attack or stroke.”
⁶³

Plavix and Coumadin show the same risky trends.
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Plavix works to stifle the conversion of fibrin to fibrinogen, too. Blood becomes ultrathin. Since our body can't break down Plavix efficiently, blood remains too thin for too long and eventually oozes out of our veins, arteries, and capillaries. This gruesome side effect is first seen as bruising and then something known medically as TTP, or thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura. That's nothing more than a fancy name for internal bleeding—death in slow motion. Emergency medicine can't save you from TTP.

Startled by the TTP findings, the FDA took “stern” action in 2005. Just kidding—officials took a little bit of action with a ho-hum warning to the public. They approved revisions to safety labeling, which eventually warned users that TTP could set in within two weeks. But hey, at least you're not going to suffer from a deadly blood clot, right? Wrong. This risk isn't offset by any astounding benefits.

According to the
New York Times
, Plavix offers no reduced risk of heart attack among those who have no history of cardiovascular disease.
And those who do have a history receive a measly 1 percent risk reduction.
⁶⁵
Measuring its side effects further, the
Times
stated that “Patients taking Plavix, a popular and expensive antistroke drug, experience more than 12 times as many ulcers as patients who take aspirin plus a heart-burn pill.” Still though, doctors seem to be prescribing the drug like crazy. Dangerous and ineffective Plavix has raked in up to $6 billion in sales annually.

Blood-thinning Coumadin is hardly an alternative. It got a black box warning in 1996, which is an official statement required by the FDA that magnifies drugs' real and present danger. To me, a black box warning means that illicit drugs—like crack cocaine—are probably safer options.

Vioxx (rofecoxib) didn't even have a black box warning. Yet, according to FDA estimates, it killed more than 30,000 people during its four-year reign. (To compare, crack cocaine kills fewer than a hundred people per year.)

In the Coumadin warning, the FDA stated that “patients may be more susceptible to the risk of hemorrhaging if they are sixty-five and older, or if they have a history of gastrointestinal bleeding, hypertension, or heart disease.” This means that everyone taking the drug is at risk, since it's only approved for and prescribed to those with heart disease.

In its early days, Coumadin made for great rat poison, literally. I wish I could say that I was using some creative analogy here. I'm not. Coumadin is tasteless and therefore easily disguised in food. Rats would eat it and die shortly thereafter from hemorrhaging, which meant no more pesky critters running around your house.

Recognizing Coumadin's astounding and fast-acting clot-busting properties, the pharmaceutical industry soon began promoting it as a cardiovascular drug. It was reasoned that the relatively small human dose would not cause hemorrhaging. But the FDA black box warning
now proves otherwise. Coumadin warnings are nothing more than a sad reminder that we need the FDA to tell us that rat poison doesn't make for good medicine.

DRUGS THAT MAKE YOU FAT FAST

If doctors are not prescribing clot-busting drugs, they offer hypertension meds. This use is rationalized with the idea that this class of drugs will help stiff arteries loosen to make room for safe clot passage. Hypertension medications are among the top ten drugs prescribed in the U.S.; they ensnare millions into the prescription-drug financial trap and worsen health.

First are the beta-blockers known commercially as Toprol-XL, Lopressor (metoprolol tartrate), Tenormin (atenolol), and Coreg. Like Miracle-Gro on plants, beta-blockers are fat fertilizer for the human body. A family of receptors known as “beta-receptors” activates your fat metabolism. Like a lock that has been broken, the hypertension drugs jam beta-receptors and prevent them from responding to fat-burning molecules (the keys to the lock)—and you become eligible for The Fat Gain Hall of Fame. Your body stores fat and uses carbohydrates (sugar) as fuel. Type 2 diabetes can follow. Patients who follow doctor's orders and swallow beta-blockers have a 28 percent greater risk of suffering from type 2 diabetes due to extreme fat gain. Diabetes can eliminate a whopping eleven to twenty years from your lifespan.
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The hypertension meds known as calcium channel blockers—such as Adalat and Procardia (both nifedipine), and Norvasc (amlodipine besylate)—aren't any safer. By blocking calcium from entering the heart, they place users at greater risk of dying from heart failure. While taking these drugs may make your blood pressure “numbers” look good, your heart is slowly weakening.

Cancer is also a possibility with the calcium channel blockers. In 1996, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) warned, “Postmenopausal women who took calcium channel blockers had twice the risk of developing breast cancer than other women.” No diet, supplement, or lifestyle can save you from the deadly side effects of blood-pressure meds.

There is still one more class of cardiovascular drugs that is heavily used. It's the ACE inhibitors. I won't bore you with the fact that this stands for angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor. Nor will I use biochemistry jargon to teach that they arrest the production of artery-constricting hormones in the kidneys, thereby releasing tension on the artery walls.

If you guessed that these drugs don't break the nasty trend of being worse than the illness, you'd be right. If you are taking ACE inhibitors, you can develop a persistent dry cough. Sometimes the cough is so severe that it can interfere with your ability to talk. Weakness, rash, and fever are also known side effects.

Are you angry? Is your blood pressure skyrocketing? Do you really need blood-pressure meds to ward it off? Let's find out.

DO WE REALLY NEED BLOOD PRESSURE MEDS?

High blood pressure—as defined by the drug industry and medical doctors—is not an instant death sentence. The goal of maintaining blood pressure levels at or near 140/80 (or more recently, 115/75) is based on drug company hype, not science. These numbers are designed to sell drugs by converting healthy people into patients.

Rising blood pressure is a normal process of aging and does not require drug intervention—even when it reaches 140/80. The exception would be rising blood pressure resulting from kidney disease. Otherwise, small increases in blood pressure are a completely normal part of the aging process. Medical literature shows that as we age, blood pressure
rises slightly—probably to accommodate an increased need for oxygen and nutrients.

For instance, smokers usually carry a higher blood pressure. They are naturally getting less oxygen. The body responds to lowered oxygen intake by increasing blood pressure to deliver oxygen faster. Aging can trigger the same type of response.

Due to a number of hormonal factors, we don't distribute oxygen or nutrients as efficiently as we age. The best way to compensate for this is with increased blood pressure. The kidneys regulate this with a complex hormonal system that monitors our cardiovascular needs. It works great. And the slight, age-related increase in blood pressure does not put us at risk of early death. In fact it aids survival.