The scam of Angioplasty
About 1 million Americans per year (and many millions outside the US) are getting angioplasty these days. Stents are inserted into a patient with constricted arteries. This practice violates the basic common sense of plumbing. If a tube is clogged-you don't go around putting another piece of foreign material in the tube to reinforce it! Most of angioplasty is probably very harmful to people who get it. The docs do it to make money, that's all.
The correct treatment is to give blood thinners and anti-cholesterol medicines to decrease chances of cholesterol and clot formation.
Physically inserting stuff doesn't do anything. If no other medication like blood thinner or anti-cholesterol medicine is administered, the artery will clog somewhere else, duh! The real treatment, which is not invasive (of administering these drugs) is combined with the very lucrative and harmful treatment of angioplasty, where a foreign object is inserted in the poor man's heart. The numbers speak for themselves; if 1 million are getting it a year, and assuming most people who get these are above 50 (a population of about 100 million in the US), about 1% is getting angioplasty per year! In 10 years, about 10% of the population is walking around with Johnson and Johnson, Medtronic or Boston Scientific Stents...you can see that this can't be right!
These private drug companies with their mercenary researchers will cook up data to prove how stents help (please consult your house plumber, he should be able to see the bullshit thru this). The docs and AMA fool the FDA (which is really more docs, nothing else) to approve all these strange procedures. The hapless patient pays in money, and is left with a foreign object in a critical part of his body. I rest my case.
From a physics/engineering perspective-if you clean a tube right, you would not need any reinforcement. Here they are doing the cleaning of the artery badly-and trying to fix a bad job by putting inserts. The original job of cleaning the artery well, so no scar tissue, etc. is generated, needs to be perfected; they are focusing on fixing something which was not done right at the first place-the cleaning of the artery. Obviously the drug and stent companies like it that way-the procedure is obviously more elaborate, and you can justifiably charge a suffering patient more. In other words-stents (reinforcements) are being put because the original cleaning job of the artery is not being done well. If they have to take out the cholesterol deposits in arteries-they have to focus on doing that so well that it leaves no collateral damage, at the least. I say at the least because I am not convinced that it is necessary to clean these "blocked" arteries. There is massive redundancy built in into the human or any animal's body. If some parts fail-other parts will take over to provide or compensate for the functions. People function well with just one kidney, one arm and just one lung. On the arterial system-there is massive amounts of redundancy and collaterals built in for humans and all animals. Here is an example for the pancreas. As you can see-an elabroate tubing system like arteries is bound to have many combinations to supply blood; and even if some block or go bad, others will most probably take over the functioning. This is the reason that even people with huge cholesterol deposits in arteries never get a heart attack. The medics will never tell you about these cases-and will keep harping on the ones where they did see the deposits and there was a heart-attack. Even if there are a few cases where people have high cholesterol, and have high deposits (as seen via imagery) of cholesterol in arteries, who never get heart attacks-it is enough to disprove logically the assertion that high cholesterol increases risks of heart attacks. I know of several such people personally. Brain strokes (where flow of blood is impeded to a part of the brain because of clots etc) for that reason recover with time-the built in redundancy keeps the patients alive while the main artery (or vein) which supplies (or takes away) blood from the affected part recovers simultaneously. Everybody is familiar with how our feet go numb after some time in one position-after changing the position, blood flow resumes normally and all gets back to normal in a few minutes.
My good friend Vijay Agarwal, who has a lot of data of heart surgery patients and angioplasties (many of his family members have heart problems, according to medics) confirms this view. Blocked arteries are a common thing in people, especially old people, but they do not result in problems of pain or heart attacks for them. They are the "false positives" in scans for blockages. However, medics ignore these large number of false positives in their tests. A study of Bayes theorem and conditional probabilities, with the issue of false positives, is what they lack, or deliberately hide, because it suits their theories that blockages cause pain and heart attacks, and removing them will reduce pain and reduce chances of heart attacks. A good primer on Bayes theorem and false positives here.
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