Mr Bombastic wrote:
Arteries are blood vessels that carry blood rich in oxygen throughout your body. They go to your brain as well as to the tips of your toes. Healthy arteries have smooth inner walls and blood flows through them easily. Some people, however, develop clogged arteries. Clogged arteries result from a buildup of a substance called plaque on the inner walls of the arteries. Arterial plaque can reduce blood flow or, in some instances, block it altogether.
Clogged arteries greatly increase the likelihood of heart attack, stroke, and even death. Because of these dangers, it is important to be aware, no matter how old you are, of the causes of artery plaque and treatment strategies to prevent serious consequences.
What causes arterial plaque?
Plaque that accumulates on the inner walls of your arteries is made from various substances that circulate in your blood. These include calcium, fat, cholesterol, cellular waste, and fibrin, a material involved in blood clotting. In response to plaque buildup, cells in your artery walls multiply and secrete additional substances that can worsen the state of clogged arteries.
As plaque deposits grow, a condition called atherosclerosis results. This condition causes the arteries to narrow and harden.
Although experts don’t know for sure what starts atherosclerosis, the process seems to stem from damage to the lining of the arterial wall. This damage, which enables the deposition of plaque, may result from:
High ''bad'' cholesterol and low ''good'' cholesterol. High levels of ''bad'' cholesterol, or low-density lipoprotein (LDL), are major contributors to arterial plaque formation. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Everyone also has ''good'' cholesterol, or high-density lipoprotein (HDL), circulating in the blood. HDL is believed to remove some of the bad cholesterol from plaque in clogged arteries and t***sport it back to the liver, where it is eliminated.
High blood pressure . Having high blood pressure increases the rate at which arterial plaque builds up. It also hastens the hardening of clogged arteries.
Cigarette smoke. Cigarette smoke seems to increase the rate of atherosclerosis in the arteries of the heart, legs, and the aorta -- the largest artery in the body.
Diabetes, or elevated circulating blood sugar, is also a major culprit. Even people who have elevated sugars not yet at the level of diabetes, such as seen in metabolic syndrome, also have increased risk of plaque formation.
Other risk factors include family history, stress, sedentary lifestyle and obesity. Knowing your family history is critical.
Plaque often starts to develop during the childhood or teenage years. Then clogged arteries develop in middle age or later.
Do you disagree with any of this?
Now, back to my previous post. I mentioned that a certain vitamin or mineral deficiency can increase the risk of damage, to the blood vessels and arteries, leading to plaque buildup. If one gets the proper amount of this mineral or vitamin, it improves the health of blood vessels and arteries, and reduces the chance of plaque buildup. Do you disagree?
Arteries are blood vessels that carry blood rich i... (
show quote)
What you describe in the first part of this ms. Is what you will find, more or less being taught at this time. I will not go into the “details”.. In many cases they are true, up to a point, and I have already discussed the important parts such as the development of atherosclerosis (“athero” pertains to arteries, and in “sclerosis” simply means hardening (relating mainly to boney infiltration in soft tissue and originally relating to calcium deposits).
The disagreement, if such you would call it , is in how it is presented, and the conclusions supposedly drawn relating to that presentation. I’ll jump around a bit to explain my thinking better.
First note that like all these explanations there are the weasel words, such as “believed to...”, “causes not very well understood” etc. that you will always find in these “scientific statements and conclusions”, which gives them an out when they later describe changes in their ongoing “scientific discoveries". Also note the use of “good” cholesterol and “bad”. These, what I call weasel words help to hide the facts that they don’t actually know and are giving you something to allow you to assume that they do know, and or want you to know what they do..
To illustrate, let me use an example from my college days, when they were pushing how bad cholesterol (they didn’t yet decide that some was ‘good” and other “bad”was and causing strokes and heart attacks. You were told that butter, eggs, red meat, etc. should be avoided, in fact anything containing cholesterol. I asked the professor “if cholesterol really caused these things .how come that Eskimos, and Watusi, both groups known to practically live on cholesterol were known to have almost no cases of heart attack or stroke.?” ...His answer which I heard many times in answer to questions I asked was, “Well, there are some things modern science doesn’t understand.”
Btw, hope you are eating butter, eggs, red meat, with relish, now that they have been taken off the proscribed list.
I remember, and you might, of the wonderful T.V. specials they put on to help sell the cholesterol ideas. In several I saw the carefully photographed blockage in an artery. The film was made by a Scandinavian photographer who became famous for developing the techniques and taking the first in Utero pictures of a developing fetus.
The film of the arterial blockage by a huge cholesterol plaque was really fantastic and very “educational”. It started as a tiny camera lense attached to a long metal arm, moved slowly down the length of an artery, with many cholesterol plaques on the walls of the artery, attached like balls of cotton batting, and finally, with dramatic music accompanying it reached the massive blockage at the end of the artery......Later in an article in one of the journals I used to subscribe to, there was an explanation of how this dramatic film had been prepared.
Since they could not find a section of cadaveric artery showing the dangerous cholesterol plaque, the photographer had taken a piece of pig gut, glued in some cotton batten segments and plugged the end with more cotton, shined lights on the outside of the pig gut as well as his internal lense light and using a lathe to slowly push the lense down the inside of the pig gut, shot the film they wanted.
Another example of what I call Bull, is the current BS about “v***ses” (I prefer the word “virii”, but for Joe public it is easier to call octopii , octopuses; let’s not make it hard for him, he’s just a human animal.)
There is a lot of BS about virii, and almost all of it bull. I won’t take the time to go into it other than to give one simple example. You are taught about k**led v***ses, live v***ses, and the harm they are supposed to cause. When I was in college the text we used on virii, had at the very introduction the following. “There is great controversy as to whether v***ses are alive or not. They do not display any of the signs of life. They can not move, they do not ingest food, they do not expel waste. Some claim that they are simply DNA or RNA molecules with a protein capsule. They are too small to be seen by even the strongest microscope, and require th use of an electron microscope and displayed on a screen.” And in those days all you actually saw in pictures of them, were black dots.
Now over the years, periodically I have seen “new” photos of virii, some seeming to look like spirochetes, others oval, and amazingly some displaying COLOR. But realize that they still need to be viewed with an electron microscope....Which can not display color.
This kind of fraud goes on all the time.
The individual doctors are not the problem. Organized Political medicine and their advertising agencies are the ones brainwashing the people. And just like the recent political coverage by the “news” media, you get what they want you to get. Believe. the bull at your own risk.
Btw it takes years in practice before your intellegint doctor overcomes his early training and realizes that what he is doing, other than emergency care and temporary symptom relief is in many cases worse than useless. When that point is reached, if the doctor has enough assets to allow retirement, he retires. Those without such a cushion will have to continue to practice as the State Board dictates, hating what he is doing, untill in his late 60s or early 70s he passes away. This is why the sons and daughters of doctors usually eschew the profession.