http://www.naturalnews.com/023472.html

It is something to think about!

My favorite latest book is "Our Daily Meds" by Melody Peterson. She's a journalist from the NYtimes and has spent 8 years investigating drugs and how the medicines we take are based on marketing versus solid science. It will make you more aware of your need to be vigilant when it comes to taking medicine. The sad thing is that even doctors are fooled by these huge marketing schemes.

I think the Tim Russert story represents much of what she talks about in her book.

I wish I new how to personally filter out all the bad studies and hype when it comes to drugs and medical test. I was watching a progam on a university channel the other night and the professor was stating that most people will never challenge their doctor and that is a failure, created by docs, within our medical system. The patient is the last "check and balance" in this complex system and a safe environment needs to be established in which they can challenge their doc without feeling guilty about it. Risk vs benefit is never really assessed in my opinion.

Thanks for the post....M

I got this article in my email the other day re: this subject. This article seems a little basic and I don't know if the science is completely sound, but I do know from experience that many doctors don't fully understand vitamin supplementation and for me personally it has be of help. I suspect many doctors don't really want to know more and this would not be in our best interest.

Here is the article...which talks about the B vitamins , magnesium, testing, etc.


By Dr. Douglass

You won't hear me say this often about anyone in mainstream media, but Tim Russert, NBC newsman and anchor of Meet the Press, was someone I respected. I took great joy in watching politicians squirm under his tough questioning. So, like most Americans, I was sad to hear the tragic news of his sudden death. After all, Russert was just 58 years old — relatively young by today's standards.

According to his doctors, he had diabetes, heart disease, and he was overweight. Yet without fail, every time I hear a news story or read an article on his death, the commentators express their surprise that something like this could happen to someone who was on blood pressure pills and cholesterol drugs, who exercised routinely (in fact, he worked out on the treadmill the morning he died), and who was on a diet. He'd even recently passed a stress test.

I wish I could say I was shocked by this news. Unfortunately, stories like this one only highlight what I've been telling you all along: Blood pressure doesn't cause heart disease, high cholesterol drugs aren't cure-alls, and exercise can do more harm than good. In short, none of the steps Russert's doctors told him to take to address his health concerns were doing a darn bit of good.

Instead, if someone had told him to focus on keeping his homocysteine levels low and his magnesium levels high, we might not be having this conversation in the first place. Homocysteine makes cholesterol stick to your artery walls and can also contribute the hardening of your arteries. It's simple to control your cholesterol levels by loading up on B vitamins, like B6, B12 and folate.

Magnesium also has vital heart-healthy benefits.

Keep reading…

"Statins don't protect against heart attacks. And [Russert] didn't know that the lack of one nutrient could have cost him his life," said acclaimed neurosurgeon Dr. Russell Blaylock. "The number-one cause of sudden cardiac death is magnesium deficiency. Cardiac patients and those with diabetes have the lowest magnesium levels of all."

I've written to you before about the many benefits of magnesium. This mineral prevents blood clots, dilates blood vessels, and can also stop the development of dangerous heart irregularities. It's why I've been such a long-time advocate of increasing magnesium intake for its heart-health benefits – not to mention what it does for your bones and bodily tissues. I've even used magnesium in emergency medicine to help limit brain damage in stroke victims. And yet more than half of Americans have a magnesium deficiency.

"People who are deficient in magnesium are most likely to have sudden cardiac arrest, and when they do arrest, they are harder to resuscitate," Blaylock says. "Many simply can't be resuscitated."

Dr. Samuel Belkin, surgeon in chief of New York's Montefiore Medical Center, did a good job of summing up just why the death of the beloved newsman has so shaken both Americans in general and doctors in particular: "It makes us all feel mortal, and it also highlights the natural history of this silent killer and our limited ability to catch this killer before it strikes."

Fighting on in the battle against heart disease,

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.

http://www.douglassreport.com/

Tim Russert also was under huge stress...

That TV show had to be a challenge. So elevated cortisol may be a factor.

Diabetics lose magnesium and inositol in the urine. Doctors ignore this scientific fact completely.

And the homocysteine (and C-reactive protein) is damaging to blood vessels.

The article I put up is worrisome because using a statin drug in a patient who does NOT have elevated cholesterol is just nuts IMO. Using them at all is not a good idea IMO.
I am going to research that protein effect and the heart. But we now know that statins damage mitochondria in cells, and therefore may damage the heart in several ways. There is a paper out there that shows statins + diabetic drugs damage mito functions worse than statins alone.

But I agree...the magnesium connection is important. And especially when exercising. I also wonder if the invasive chemicals they use during the stress test actually inflame the blood vessels somehow? Just about every test today has negative effects... they perforate bowels commonly with the scopes and lasers, the radiation from repeated mammograms is implicated in breast cancer, many dyes used in various procedures actually cause disease, etc. So they should look at that stress test too.