Chelation for heart disease is not just quackery? Really???
How long will it take to figure out the far reaching issues with toxic metal poisoning and get it out of people with high blood pressure (and other problems) BEFORE they develop heart disease? Or will people first have to fail conventional treatment to qualify? I suppose I should be happy about this but it also makes me feel cynical at how difficult it is to get the most effective and simple things that really help people, done.
If a vaccine had that sort of provable success rate or even HALF that rate, there would be no more studies. Right to market it would go. - Dr. Suzanne Humpries.
Chelation Therapy - When Data Shakes a Cardiologist’s Beliefs By Gervasio Lamas, M.D.
As a practicing cardiologist, I sit with sick patients almost every day and advise them on what I think is the best course of treatment for them. In 1999, a shabby, slightly eccentric patient asked me if he should undergo an alternative medicine treatment called chelation, which aims to prevent heart disease by ridding the body of heavy metals.
As a traditional Harvard-trained cardiologist, I shared the beliefs of most in the medical field. I thought chelation was junk science - dangerous even - and that chelation practitioners were quacks making unsubstantiated promises to patients that they could not live up to. I shared my views with my patient and advised that he consider a more traditional option.
Little did I know that this brief conversation would begin a 15-year journey that would force me to reconsider my long-held bias and face factual evidence that proved I was wrong. I led a 10-year long National Institutes of Health-sponsored trial called TACT – Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy – which showed a reduction in the risk of heart complications by 26% in heart attack survivors and an astonishing 49% in diabetic heart attack survivors. Chelation therapy is now gaining the attention of experts in the medical field. And my data gave me the courage to put my own anti-chelation bias behind me.
(TACT) was the first double blind randomized trial designed to test the benefit of chelation therapy in patients with a prior heart attack, who were already receiving conventional treatment. In this study, patients were randomly assigned to the active treatment (chelation therapy) or to an inactive medication that looks identical to the active compound, and neither the investigators nor patients were aware of the actual treatment provided. Thus, this type of investigation is in principle not biased by patients or investigators. In TACT, 1708 heart attack survivors were randomized to receive placebo or chelation therapy.
In the last year and a half, our team has published the results in four major journals. The results are spectacular. And now, Mount Sinai Medical Center has become the first hospital in the United States to offer chelation therapy for heart patients. We know that more evidence is needed before chelation therapy can become a more standard method of treatment for patients with heart disease so the TACT 2 study will soon be underway.
Heart disease is the main cause of death in Americans, and diabetes contributes to the death of over 200,000 Americans annually. The potential human impact of this new treatment could be staggering.
Dr. Gervasio Lamas is Chairman of Medicine; Chief, Columbia University Division of Cardiology, Mount Sinai Medical Center. For more information about Mount Sinai Medical Center, visit www.msmc.com. Follow Dr. Lamas on Twitter @GLamasmd. Follow Mount Sinai on Twitter @MountSinaiMiami.
Established beliefs and rigid dogmas take time to dissolve and give way to new ideas. This is especially true of the allopathic medical-pharma complex and its resistance to accept let alone consider new scientific studies that do not confirm their agendas.
