COMMENT- THE SECOND HISTORY

Case History: RC, (Male – upper middle age) My first heart attack must have occurred when I was on holiday staying in France in 1987. I kept getting this severe pain in the upper back. Thought I’d slipped a disc. But I would wake up in the night with it and any exertion like packing up the car made it worse. I discussed with my wife whether the coffee and French pastries might be contributing to the pain and I stopped them and through cutting out tea, coffee and pastries I did improve but not much.

On my return to England I had to go to the bank -I wanted a business loan so I had to have a medical checkup. The doctor there discovered I had high blood pressure, 190/90 but apart from that he said I was fine. I decided to cut out fats and transform my diet and my blood pressure dropped to 130/70 and has stayed there ever since.

But I still had angina. I decided to have a checkup with a cardiologist associated with a leading London hospital. In October 1988 I had a treadmill test and was told ‘there is nothing you can do really’. I asked about diet and was told ‘eat what you like’. I was mad about this because I knew diet had helped me before. He [the specialist] also told me I didn’t need to exercise – a warm bath was all I needed.

I began to have more problems. I spoke to a friend who worked in another London hospital, she arranged for me to see the Professor of Cardiology there. That was June 1989. He diagnosed a 90 per cent blockage in my coronary arteries and suggested angioplasty. I went in on Wednesday, was done on Thursday, came out Saturday with drug treatment.

In the following year, I was carrying a bag of waste to the dustbin when I felt queer. I went to my GP who confirmed I was having a heart attack and must be conducted urgently to hospital. It had to be the original London hospital in my area. Once there, a doctor looked at me and said I could go home: ‘you look perfectly all right to me’. My wife refused. If she had not been so adamant I would not be here now because I had a severe heart attack that night.

It was a horrendous experience. I was put in a room with three other patients on life support machines, two of which died, one had his family screaming around him. There they were, screaming and shouting right next to the intensive care unit for heart patients.

My attack started at 9.00 p.m. and I was in agony. They tried to find the registrar. At midnight they got hold of him and he gave me a streptokinase injection and immediately the pain started to ease. Apparently that dissolves blood clots.

The next day the original consultant cardiologist turned  up. He said, ‘that shot we gave you cost 750. We only had two in the hospital and you got one.’

I later found out that up in Scotland doctors carry this around normally. I was truly shocked that a major hospital in London only had two shots.

After three sleepless nights, following transferral to a general ward through which ambulance crews were trundling people all night with doors crashing, and the TV on all night, I started another heart attack. I insisted my wife help move me out and I did move to a second hospital.     They gave me another balloon angioplasty at 3.00 a.m. As I was being wheeled out of the theatre the surgeon said, ‘It was a great success.’

Great success? I thought. I am still lying here in such terrible pain I can’t move and you tell me that?

After I was discharged on three drugs, I felt better for about two months. Then I started to feel unwell again, so unwell I was spending two to three days in bed each week.

One day my wife said, ‘Get out of bed, you are fading away. I won’t let this happen. We have heard about this treatment [chelation] and you are having it.’

In April ’91 I went to see Wayne [Dr Perry]. It was the best day’s work I ever did. I had a Doppler. One carotid artery [leading to the head] was 70 per cent blocked. On one artery they couldn’t get a reading because there was too much disturbance.

After 20 treatments I felt great. I had bought a complete kitchen which I was going to fit, but I delayed when I started feeling ill. After the treatment my wife said you couldn’t knock me down. I laid the ceramic tiled floor, my wife mixed the cement. I was so fit I dug the garden over. The difference was unbelievable. My carotid blockage was reduced by 30 per cent.

Through all this I kept my GP informed. He was in accord with my trying the treatment. When I later had a checkup with the senior cardiologist at the hospital (he has some post in Europe too), I asked him about chelation to see what he’d say and he said, ‘Don’t touch it, it doesn’t work.’

I have now had 30 treatments and, after meeting a patient in the clinic who was having the treatment on the National Health [a pioneering step], I asked my doctor to write to the heart specialist to see if I could have it too. When I next saw him I knew he’d received the letter but he had six senior doctors around him and he never raised it and neither did I, to spare his feelings.

He did tell me I was down for a triple bypass and I asked him what protection it gave me from further heart attacks. ‘Oh it won’t stop you from having another heart attack,’ he said. ‘How reassuring,’ I thought. ‘Here I am about to have another heart operation and I’m told it mightn’t work.’

It reminded me of a remark I’d heard in the arterial clinic. Three farmers had come in from Kenya. They did have a chelation clinic in Kenya, but local medicos got it closed down. One very fit man had gone to his doctor and the doctor had said, ‘Why don’t you have a bypass?’ ‘Do I need it?’ he had asked. ‘No,’ the doctor said, ‘but it would give you another ten years of life.’ He said he then decided to hot foot it to the UK to have chelation therapy instead.

RC is now fit and active. His wife and he both follow a carefully controlled diet low in fat, meat and dairy foods and high in fibre and fresh fruit and vegetable content. His wife once followed a diet consisting entirely of grapes for a month. She had so much energy she used to spring out of bed singing in the mornings, to such an extent her husband begged her to ‘tone it down’.

What seems disturbing about this case history is the picture it paints about lack of peace and quiet in intensive care in a leading London teaching hospital. As RC says: ‘How do they expect patients to get better if they can’t sleep for noise and commotion?’ Also disrupting to patient welfare were the battles RC and his wife had to fight on his account to get the treatment he wanted at the very time when he should have been surrendering to recovery.

The general criticism of chelation therapy – it doesn’t work was again in evidence.

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Cardio & Blood/ Cholesterol