Prevention: Reducing Your Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke
Here’s a good video from Dr. Grossman on the risk factors for heart and artery disease, the advice is pretty much the same I’ve heard from therapists, doctors, and cardiologists — the advice is pretty easy to follow, and I recommend it to all of my friends.
I got lucky - I got doctors who followed up on my symptoms with tests and good analysis, your doctors or you might not be as persistent so please follow up and find out for sure if you have the risk factors and out of whack numbers.
I recommend a self selected cardio scan if you have the risk factors even though Dr. Grossman recommends against it, they are not that expensive anymore. My scan was high enough that my cardiologist followed up with an EKG stress test. Then came more dye tests, then a catheter.
From the catheter test I went direct to bypass surgery the next day because it was so bad. They would not let me leave the hospital, although I had been in that shape and in danger of a massive heart attack every day for at least the previous two years just judging from my symptoms. Between a high threshold for pain, a mistaken perception that I was supposed to feel a lot more pain as I grew old, and a bad diagnosis of acid reflux the symptoms had all gone relatively unaddressed during that time.
PZ Meyers also just had a similar experience recently which he’s now recovering from, however he got lucky and just got by with catheter fixes (angio plasty or stents)