How do you heal a damaged heart?
There are more answers than ever to that question. And that’s a very good thing, because heart disease kills 733,000 people a year in the U.S.–more than cancer, strokes and AIDS combined.
Treatments range from major changes in diet and lifestyle to multibypass surgeries and heart transplants. In the coming decade, the constellation of care promises to grow larger still.
All of which makes figuring out what treatment is right for you that much more daunting–for patient and physician.
“There’s a saying that if you have 10 cardiologists in a room,” says Dr. David Perloff, an invasive cardiologist at Broward General Medical Center in Ft. Lauderdale, “you usually get 11 different opinions.”
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Of course, there’s one way to avoid needing any of those opinions.
“The best way to get out of all difficult situations is not to get into them in the first place,” says Dr. Paul Kurlansky of Miami Heart Research Institute.
In other words, if you’re in your 20s or 30s, it’s not too early to begin taking to heart the health of the body’s most important muscle.
Because no matter what you’ve heard, a cure for heart disease isn’t as simple as spending a few hours in an operating room. A few hours can’t reverse what decades have wrought.
“We’re not curing this disease in any way, shape or form with many of the procedures we’re doing,” says Dr. Barry Katzen, medical director of Miami Cardiac & Vascular Institute. “Instead, we’re addressing a problem and keeping people alive.”
Next Halloween, if you really want to scare Marjorie Eaton, just show up dressed like a mushroom. “They terrify me,” she confides.
But she’s learning to like lots of other things that used to give her the culinary creeps. It’s a case of having to–or going hungry. Eaton, 41, is among the latest inductees in the diet-and-lifestyle boot camp that is the province of California fitness guru Dr. Dean Ornish, a system that eschews meat, chicken and fish.
This, though, isn’t some flash-in-the-sauteeing-pan diet. Instead, at a handful of medical centers across the U.S.–among them, Broward General–Ornish has sought to prove the validity of his system, hewing to the kind of rigorous research standards usually reserved to prove medical cures.
That’s because Ornish views his regimen as a method for reversing heart disease every bit as credible as techniques performed in the operating room, and infinitely more enduring. His findings–the most notable is that severely blocked coronary arteries began clearing in 82 percent of patients within a year–have won the imprimatur of staid medical magazines, including The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Eaton, who lives in Plantation, Fla., knows too well the devastation of heart disease. Her father had quadruple-bypass surgery. A cousin died at age 38, victim of a heart condition. Her own cholesterol level was perilously high.
“What’s more important to me? To be healthy or to be able to eat chicken?” says Eaton, who has the high-stress job of helping make sure the computers run correctly for development giant Arvida. “The end result is what’s most important to me–to live long enough to be a grandma.”
Which explains her willingness one recent evening to dine on barbecue tempeh, a member of the soybean family. This, for a woman raised in the finest tradition of meat and potatoes.
“Replacing it with something that’s hard to pronounce, with something that I don’t know where it came from, is a scary transition,” Eaton says.
It’s a transition that’s too demanding for some people. Even the manager of the Wellness Center at Broward General concedes he couldn’t be faithful to the strict diet and stress-busting requirements of the Ornish system, with significant chunks of time devoted every day to yoga and other relaxation techniques. That’s a conclusion shared by some experts who have studied the Ornish method.
Price can be a hindrance, too: Three months on the Ornish plan costs $3,000, a charge that more often than not leaves patients digging deep in their pockets. Insurance plans that will pay tens of thousands of dollars for heart bypass surgery won’t pay for a diet and lifestyle system. (One noteworthy exception: Humana, which does pay.)
So last year, the hospital started something that could be fairly described as Ornish Lite, a less restrictive, more affordable (it’s $650 for three months) system. It’s called Take Heart, and it has proven popular.