A chapter I contributed to a book on the side effects of drugs and medication.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “Heart disease and cancer continued to be the leading and second leading causes of death, together accounting for over half of all deaths.”
Now, that is quite a statement to make in lieu of all the heart medications and cancer treatments that are on the market. And what a market that is! But before we go into the insidiousness of these medications and treatments, not to mention the covert marketing of these, let’s look at some more statistics.
Statistics of the Top Killers
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services goes on to state that in 2002, in the United States, 28.5% of all deaths are due to heart disease and 22.8% due to malignant neoplasm, (which is cancer). This accounts for 51.3% of all deaths. You might then say that there is still 48.7% for death caused by other causes. Take another look at the statistics and you will see that the next one in line is cerebrovascular diseases (diseases of or relating to the blood vessels that supply the brain, otherwise known as strokes), which accounts for 6.7%. The rest comes to even lesser percentages.
Doesn't this make you wonder if, somehow, heart disease and cancer is being created within the human species? Do animals suffer the same percentages of heart disease and cancer? We will answer these questions later in this chapter.
In the UK, statistics state “diseases of the heart and circulatory system (cardiovascular disease or CVD) are the main cause of death in the UK: accounting for just under 238,000 deaths in 2002. More than one in three people (39%) die from CVD.” You can see that the U.S. is not the only country to have this problem. Well, what underlies this problem called heart disease and cancer? Let’s take a look at what the heart diseases are first and cover cancer and its horror story later in the chapter.
Types of Heart Diseases
Heart disease can be divided into four types. The first is coronary artery disease. This is where the arteries become clogged and narrowed with fatty deposits (plaque), reducing blood flow to the heart muscle and causing chest pain (angina).
The second is heart rhythm problems, which is primarily an electrical conduction problem. It is an electrical impulse that causes the heart to beat in the first place and, when this is disrupted, you get such physical difficulties such as palpitations, dizziness or weakness, and fainting. This is because there is not enough blood being moved through the body.
Heart valve disease is the third disease and is the condition of a valve leaking in the heart causing a heart murmur. The heart has several valves that prevent the blood from moving backwards in the tubes within the heart and when the valve becomes faulty through disease, the blood slips back through the valve the wrong way.
Lastly, but not the least important, is heart failure. The heart just stops beating. There are three causes for heart failure. One is the well-known and feared heart attack in which the coronary arteries, through which the blood flows to the heart, are suddenly blocked by a ruptured plaque sac. The next cause is high blood pressure, which causes the heart to enlarge, and puts added stress to the heart muscle. Lastly, the heart muscle may become diseased itself causing the heart to become enlarged and inefficient.
There are various ways of treating these heart diseases, from using drugs to surgery. And then there are natural drug-free ways to prevent heart disease in the first place and to correct a faulty heart. Let’s take a look at the various drugs that are currently used to treat heart diseases and leave the more natural treatments to the last.
An example of nonfiction used for advertising
INTRODUCTION
What a lot of growers don’t know is costing them. You may be growing a high-value crop right now and what you don’t know could be leaving a whole lot of money on the table. What you don’t know about pH could be costing you more than you think just because no-one has fully explained the relationship between pH and getting bigger yields.
Let’s look at what pH is before we discuss the three basic areas where pH makes a difference when it comes to growing plants.
WHAT IS pH?
The letters pH stand for the potential hydrogen that a compound has. It has to do with a balancing act between the hydrogen ions which carry a positive charge and the hydroxide ions which carry a negative charge. This determines whether your nutrients or growing medium is acidic (has more hydrogen ions) and the pH goes down or basic/alkaline (has more hydroxide ions) and the pH goes up. PH is measured on a scale from 0 – 14 where 7.0 is neutral. Therefore if the pH is higher than 7, it’s considered to be acidic; lower than 7 and it is basic or alkaline.