World Heart Day could be very profitably used to inculcate heart-healthy habits in the populace rather than screen a few and treat them at their asymptomatic stage without any benefit to them

“What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things”— Margaret Mead
 

Thanks to this annual thamasha of the World Heart Day, another one of those clandestine business tricks, to get more business for the pharmaceutical lobby, more than 14,000 hapless, unsuspecting victims have been converted into patients in one establishment alone according to the newspapers.  Any human being who goes for a check-up becomes a patient; s/he rarely ever, if ever, becomes normal human being again! Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and the like are backed by the greeting card and hospitality lobbies, the human organ-based days are lucrative business for the hospital lobbies. They organise marathon running on those days. The gullible public joins in the fond hope of helping a good cause. It is, of course, a good cause to fill the coffers of those hospitals which would have earlier advertised reduced charges for check-ups on that day.
 

Disease mongering has many faces these days what with plethora of hospitals and laboratories vying with each other to get as many bakras as possible. This, however, is not a new development; let us not give credit to the new managers of today. When drugs for lowering the blood pressure first started coming to the market they introduced nice mini mobile clinics, WELL MAN CLINICS, in Germany with a cute nurse inside and a blood pressure apparatus. These were parked outside churches on Sundays and outside shopping malls on weekdays for a FREE check-up! Thus started the bonanza of blood pressure drug sales.

What is cholesterol?

It is not a disease. It is one of the thousands of chemicals inside the human system. This white, odorless and tasteless powder is the life line of humans. Every human cell, of which we have between 50-100 trillion in all, has its walls made up of cholesterol. The cell wall is needed for good health. A weak cell wall is a good invitation for cancer! We need to regenerate billions of body cells daily.
 

90% of your blood cholesterol is manufactured in your own liver for your good. I do not think that the body produces anything that is bad for it. Only 10% of it comes from the food that we eat. The only way people bring down the cholesterol levels in the laboratory reports is by blocking the liver enzymes manufacturing cholesterol which, in turn, blocks many other vital body functions!

Cholesterol phobia, created by this kind of marketing strategy, is one of the common causes of hypochondriasis and miserable life for the informed common person. One has only to see it to believe it.

What is NORMAL cholesterol level?

How I wish I knew! We only know the average cholesterol for any population by epidemiological studies. This average is used as normal level synonymously to confuse the public and sell drugs. In the human system we do not know the normals but know the averages. That apart the average level for one population is not the same for another population. For some mysterious reasons, the averages keep going down as years pass by, thereby increasing the drug sales! In addition, cholesterol, like any other body parameter, keeps changing from second to second, so called, healthy CHAOS. If two readings are taken a few minutes apart two different levels are obtained! Studies have shown that if the same sample of blood is analysed in twenty laboratories simultaneously twenty different levels will be shown!
 

A recent French nursing home study of the old elderly beyond 90 years of age did reveal that those ladies had their cholesterol levels far beyond the average, way up in the 600s! Maybe for living long one has to have high cholesterol levels to be able to replace dead cells by new ones daily.

What do the cholesterol lowering drugs do?

We doctors tell patients that elevated cholesterol is a risk factor for killer vascular diseases. There is no irrefutable evidence to prove that. The largest and the longest risk factor interventional trial in the world, the MRFIT study, did show that these drugs might lower the risk factor without lowering the risk of death. These drugs, starting from the first drug cholestyramine to the present day expensive statins have all been shown to have INCREASED total deaths at the end of the day. The last mentioned one has many dangerous side effects like diabetes, cancer, suicide, accidents, muscle damage, liver damage and kidney failure, in addition.
 

Professor Philippe Even, director of the prestigious Necker Institute, and Bernard Debré, a doctor and Member of Parliament, were appointed by French president Nicholas Sarkozy to study the medical care in that country. They recommended to the government that more than half of the drugs used there are superfluous and hazardous (worth 10 billion euros). Apart from that saving they also opined that this reduction will reduce drug induced deaths in that country by 20,000 annually. Among those that they alleged were “completely useless” were statins, widely taken to lower cholesterol. The blacklisted 58 drugs (they said were dangerous) included anti-inflammatories and drugs prescribed for cardiovascular conditions, diabetes, osteoporosis, contraception, muscular cramps and nicotine addiction.

Collateral industrial benefits of World Heart Day

Routine screening of the apparently healthy could be most dangerous, according to an article in the prestigious British Medical Journal. The so called normal levels statistically increase false positive reports to the extent of 5%-25% for every parameter. If we could check, say, twenty five parameters in one sitting (free) we get to label 125 people as patients out of every 100 screened!!

Does that make good business sense? Some of them, like borderline technical alterations in the ECG, could generate more money by collateral tests like TMT and coronary angiogram, all for no extra effort on the part of the establishment. The bakra is already caught in the screening thamasha.

Conclusion

World Heart Day could be very profitably used to inculcate heart healthy habits in the populace at large rather than screen a few and treat them at their asymptomatic stage without any benefit to them. This message could then be propagated to the younger generations who have to change their mode of living to avoid precocious diseases. Fortunately, the advice is very easy to follow—balanced moderate intake of food, regular physical exertion, avoidance of junk food, alcohol and tobacco, to work hard loving what one does and to develop universal compassion—for good health. Unfortunately, this sane advice will fall on deaf ears as it does not generate revenue for the sponsors and might even harm the junk food and sedentary habit encouraging businesses. What is anti-business is pro-people and what is anti-people is pro-business. In the monetary world the business wins the race and human misery remains a statistic. Love all to live well.

“Gee, there is something wrong with just about everything, isn't there, Dad?”—“Beaver” (Theodore Cleaver)

(Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Science of Healing Outcomes, Chairman of the State Health Society's Expert Committee, Govt of Bihar, Patna. He is former Vice Chancellor of Manipal University at Mangalore and former professor for Cardiology of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, University of London. Prof Dr Hegde can be contacted at [email protected].)