During the winter season, we have all heard the stories of a neighbor, family member or friend that goes out to shovel snow and BOOM, heart attack! What really just happened? Read on, to see where leading experts are now evolving their thoughts to understand how heart attacks happen and what to do before they strike YOU. Also, what you can do to fend off this issue before it takes root in your body and wreaks havoc on one of your most vital organs.

All along the conventional “wisdom” has been to think that cholesterol and other forms of arterial plaques are the real reason behind both heart attack and stroke. According to Dr. Thomas Cowan, MD this theory has been disproven time after time but has yet to become fully accepted throughout expert communities worldwide.

Understanding how heart attacks truly happen has been a crucial and critical pursuit over the last five decades. The steadfast belief in the coronary artery theory has cost our nation billions of dollars in...

The children are back to school and flu season is right around the corner. Although your household may be a clean environment, the germs children are exposed to at school, daycare, and other public places are unavoidable. The average American child has six to 10 colds a year. In fact, children’s colds cause more doctor visits and missed school days than any other illness¹. Although most childhood infections happen only once, the protection due to antibody production lasts much longer than any potential protection stimulated by a vaccine. What’s interesting is that a mother can pass along antibodies through breastmilk to protect her infant when she was infected 30 years ago. However, a mother who avoided a certain childhood infections does not produce the antibodies that could be transferred to her child.

The immune system we are born with

Our innate immune system, the one we are born with, changes into an adaptive immune system after we are born and is exposed to...

Is yeast overgrowth contributing to a more important underlying illness? Candida, a normal part of your natural microflora, is the most common cause of fungal infections worldwide¹. Although it may be a contributing factor in some illnesses, it may be the cause of others. However, it almost always accompanies intestinal, immune, degenerative, or toxicity related illnesses. Recovery from Candida overgrowth requires a whole lifestyle healing approach and once it is diagnosed, the very first step is to detect the underlying cause. So the first question is, how is yeast overgrowth diagnosed?

The truth is, everybody has Candida in their bodies and it lives in your mucous membranes. Yeast overgrowth is something of a controversial illness, and many medical professionals have not yet recognized it. There are a few tests that are recognized to determine the levels of possible Candida overgrowth. The culture test is for skin and genital yeast infections where a small skin sample is cultured...

It’s the middle of summer now and prime time for backyard BBQ’s and pool parties. But be aware with the rain and heat comes ripe conditions for mosquito breeding. Fears of a Zika virus outbreak of epidemic proportions are being barraged upon us from the daily headlines. Are such fears really necessary here in the United States?

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would provide $622 million to fight Zika virus. Yet even by White House estimates, they claim this sum will fall well short of the necessary amount. Public health agencies and government experts have recommended $1.9 billion to fight this most recent public health emergency.

According to Chris Barker, Ph.D., a mosquito-borne virus expert from UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine: “I think the risk for Zika actually setting up transmission cycles that become established in the continental U.S. is near zero,” he recently told WebMD.¹

Even in specific U.S. regions that are...

High blood pressure is often referred to as the “Silent Killer”, because it virtually has no symptoms but is one of the greatest risk factors for stroke, heart attack and death. About one in three American adults have high blood pressure (hypertension), and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)⁶,⁸, high blood pressure is “the second greatest public health threat” in the United States.

Just What is Blood Pressure?

Blood pressure is the result of the heart muscle contracting, which produces the force needed to move blood through the arteries. ¹¹ Blood pressure is usually diagnosed based on consecutive elevated readings. Readings are given in fraction of systolic blood pressure over a diastolic blood pressure. The systolic pressure indicates the blood pressure when the heart contracts. Diastolic pressure is the pressure put on the heart/arteries between heartbeats.10 Normal blood pressure is considered to 120/80 mmHg...

The Lipid-Associated Sialic Acid (LASA) test is a specific blood marker that can allow the clinician and patient to gain invaluable knowledge in assessing overall states of health, specifically related to cancer cell presence or absence. The addition of this test on our male and female cancer panels have made huge strides in the ability to find the presence of leukemia and lymphoma.

When one reads the table included later in this article it will be easy to see that when testing leukemia patients 90% of them had elevated LASA tests and for Hodgkin’s lymphoma patients, 94% of those tested showed an elevated level too. This emerging test fills in a gaping hole where clinicians formerly had no laboratory options for assessing the potential for development, existence and monitor treatment efficacy of blood cancers.

Just like with many of the other tumor markers that we regularly check on patients, the numbers don’t serve as the be-all-end-all value but rather as a scoreboard...

For nearly two decades, the topic of cholesterol was rarely discussed. Now, cholesterol is the scapegoat for nearly every case dealing with heart disease. It’s plastered on billboards; it’s on commercials and on signs in your doctor’s offices. Each display piece is trying to persuade you for the need of medications to lower cholesterol and listing the consequences if it goes too high. But what if high cholesterol was really just your body’s attempt to heal and repair? Cholesterol is needed for fat digestion, the utilization of Vitamin D, hormone production, and repair and growth of every cell in the body. The notion that cholesterol is the cause of heart disease is very much engrained in most people’s minds.

Fortunately, it is a myth that is slowly being put to rest. Cholesterol is a vital component of every cell membrane on Earth. Lowering cholesterol too much actually increases mortality risk. People with low cholesterol do not fight off...