Sailing after a heart attack

wernerhickey · Joined: 13 Jun 2015 Posts: 76

Would that include this "If you feel physically fit I would go now." - personally, I would get the all clear from the/a doctor (the OP has only a stock answer). You need more than feeling physically fit - you need "data" and doctor buy-in because feeling physically fit can be very misleading with heart conditions. Get plenty of advice

U2U2U2 · Posted: Tue Jul 09, 2019 8:30 am Post subject:

isobars · Joined: 12 Dec 1999 Posts: 20935

Werner and Del get it. Not only do I not give medical advice -- not even in cancer forums where you'll find many thousands of my posts -- but I have consistently emphasized one strong piece of advice hundreds of times, in several ways, in WSing threads here and in other bulletin boards:
Do Your Own Damned Homework.

The vast majority of advice attributed to me in this and thousands of other threads is pure fabrication. However, when I challenge the fabricators, their response is uniform:

isobars · Joined: 12 Dec 1999 Posts: 20935

U2U2U2 · Posted: Tue Jul 09, 2019 8:08 pm Post subject:

My take on the question, is that the answers would be far reaching . Since it’s not medical forum, what can one expect ?My take would be the same if I asked how to take the transmission out of my car, which of those who did reply would know something, nothing and several that would expound on that they removed 1000s .
Given 5 doctors the chart and medical history of a patient, one could very well receive 3.5 different answers, the other 1.5 would say I only install transmissions , not remove.

J64TWB · Joined: 24 Dec 2013 Posts: 1685

Isobars, for one who never gives advice, sounds like you’re forcing a ton down our throats. My uncle had quad bypass, 25 years later and 10,000 cigarettes he’s as chipper as ever.

swchandler · Joined: 08 Nov 1993 Posts: 10588

I wonder if isobars has anything more to say.

DanWeiss · Joined: 24 Jun 2008 Posts: 2296 Location: Connecticut, USA

I showed isobar's observations (not advice!) to a top cardiologist who happens to be a neighbor. She laughed and noted his response, while skimming the surface of one recovery protocol among a huge list, is evidence why cardiologists spend at least eight years (more likely ten) after college in medical school, residency and a fellowship.

Lay experience is just that. Individual, personal and not able to be connected to the treatment plan for any other person.

That said, the person seeking comments wants to humanize an experience that often feels terrifying and even mortifying. I certainly can relate to those emotions after my spine surgery. All I wanted was to hear that I'd be ok, the ungodly pain would soon end and I'd be on the water in 6-8 months. Would doing dishes threaten my recovery? What about lifting more than I was directed, or not eating in a way to maximize the "take" of my bone grafts?

My neurologist stated it best. He can advise, but my ongoing experience will direct the course of recovery. I suspect the same applies to rich. Best wishes in recovery!

dvCali · Joined: 23 Aug 2007 Posts: 1314

isobars · Joined: 12 Dec 1999 Posts: 20935

Well, I HAVE had (and thus researched) four unrelated cancers.

I've been asked repeatedly to write a book on prostate cancer/PC. (I'd guess that >10,000 posts on it would fill a few such books.)

My world-renowned urological oncology professor/medical school dept head/surgeon told me I know more about treating PC than the vast majority of general physicians and many oncologists. He also told me the UW/SCCA/Fred Hutch national cancer center tumor board said they had learned some new things about PC treatment from my correspondence with them.

I've caught MANY oncologists and cardiologists grossly misinformed, decades behind the knowledge curve, and/or just plain lying to get my business. The Mayo Clinic, that same tumor board, and my regional hospital oncology clinic director all prescribed and insisted that I undergo a specific PC treatment that would have crippled me for life immediately or killed me in 2.5 years because the federal government Standard of Care mandates it. Of course, they all admitted it would kill me only after I confronted them with the data they all knew about. ALL TWO CARDIOLOGISTS WANTED TO KNOW WAS WHAT MY LDL LEVEL IS, as though that has any connection with heart disease. And most of these clowns want me on a statin despite hundreds of studies proving them not only useless but harmful in most cases. (I'll snip a few ... thousand ... pages here.)

If I had blindly accepted these specialists' urgent recommendations, I'd have been completely crippled and/or dead years ago, with NO BENEFIT, according to literally reams of research data and many of the physicians who conduct the research.

My niece, a physician, laughed at my claim that 75% (proven) to 100% (strongly suggested by the data) of chemotherapy patients get chemo brain. My data came from the country's (free world's?) leading authorities on chemo brain, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Clinic, which employs more than half of the nation's chemo brain specialists.(Your own medical oncologist will tell you the rate is 5%, despite the published data showing that virtually no one can still hold a professional job after chemotherapy! MRIs clearly show after just one day that our first chemo infusion isolates our prefrontal cortex from the rest of our brain, devastating our executive function (Google the term).

Again, I'm omitting literally reams of evidence, and base my comments on that, not on my own experience. I've studied multiple books just on the differences between anecdotal and statistical evidence, and have studied nutrition, exercise physiology, and medical treatment side effects literally thousands of times more than physicians normally get in their decade in medical school. The medicinal depth of their knowledge obviously far exceeds mine or most laymens', but its specificity and their impartiality leaves a lot to be desired (or depended on).

The vast majority of oncologists say treating my PC with high testosterone will kill me quickly. Tell that to the Harvard medical oncology prodigy whose published PC success records beat the success rate of the nation's surgical, medical, and radiation oncologists. Am I following his prescriptions blindly? Hell, no. Some of his patients, including me, have rejected and/or tweaked several of his prescriptions, and are still outliving many Standard of Care hawks' dire predictions by up to thousands of percent.

If Dan's cardiologist believes that LDL is our best measure of heart health or prognosis (it's not even correlated with, let alone causal, of heart attacks, and there are many kinds of LDL), she's part of the problem that originates from ONE (proven) lying charlatan named Ancel Keys whose falsified BS has driven the deadly, diabetes-inducing food pyramid for decades. Base our diets on sugar (grains, pasta, fruit, potatoes), my ass! Besides, SURELY his cardiologist favors the gold standard heart performance predictor/analyzer, the stress echocardiogram, over LDL? (I've had a couple of those, leading my cardiologist to say I will almost certainly die of something else long before my heart give out. He credits that largely to my lifelong HIIT activities and more recent escalation to SMIT.)