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Book Review~The 30-Day Heart Tune-Up

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It’s good to re-fuel with a fresh dose of motivation and guidance, and with that in mind I want to tell you about Steven Masley, MD’s “The 30-Day Heart Tune-Up”. I talked about it in an earlier post and linked to it on the Fix It! Plan Book Review The 30-Day Heart Tune-UpBooks & Links page, and (ta-da!) I’ve just finished reading it cover to cover.

Masley sums up the book’s purpose quite nicely in the very beginning: “What is the 30-Day Heart Tune-up? It’s all about shrinking arterial plaque, improving circulation, and strengthening your heart-beat.”

An important message I got from this book is that medicine may help us live longer, but it doesn’t stop the underlying cause of elevated blood pressure or cholesterol that leads to being prescribed medication in the first place.  So if we rely on medications alone, our bodies will very likely still be forming deadly arterial plaque. Continue reading Book Review~The 30-Day Heart Tune-Up

Nuclear Stress Test

Bill Goes Nuclear

It’s time to go beyond lab work and see how Bill  is doing with the lifestyle changes we put in place two years ago.  So here we are at the nuclear stress test lab, preparing for a followup with Dr. Crandall.

Nuclear Stress Test MonitorNuclear Stress Test… sounds kind of ominous, doesn’t it?  It goes by a number of different names but this one’s called nuclear myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI), and it will be done to assess the health of his heart as well as blood flow to the heart. After injecting a radioactive liquid called a tracer into his bloodstream, a series of heart pictures (32 in Bill’s case) will be taken with a special camera before and then again after exercise while his vessels are dilated to assess blood flow. As Bill’s nurse explained, “blockages don’t dilate.”  In his book, The Simple Heart Cure, Dr. Crandall writes, “the heart lights up like a lantern wherever there’s good blood profusion.  If an area of the heart remains dark, we know that blood isn’t flowing as it should.” Continue reading Nuclear Stress Test