Stint / Angina - Garlic

If you're one of many people suffering from angina -- chest pain related to exertion -- when you're exercising or even just walking, what's the best thing to do?

A. Have a stent placed in your artery, or...

B. Start taking a safe herbal remedy that's been used as a traditional medicine for centuries?

A lot of doctors would tell you that the first choice is the only way to go.

But guess what? Research is telling us that they couldn't be more wrong. And you do have another option!

Even though many patients have multiple stents inserted for that reason (one poor guy was found to have 67!), it turns out that even just one may be one too many.

Your doc will promise that getting a stent (or several of them) is such an easy-peasy procedure that you'll be back in action in the blink of an eye.

Only, that's not always the case.

To illustrate just how risky this surgery can actually be, look no further than the latest device approved by the FDA.

It's meant to stop the life-threatening bleeding that can occur if a doctor accidently punctures an artery.

Yikes!

When you get a stent, your doc threads a tube into your artery along with a contraption to prop it open. And yes, that tiny mesh object can poke a hole through your delicate vascular tissue. But don't count on this latest device to save you.

Out of the 80 patients whose arteries were punctured during the pre-approval process, two died while doctors were attempting to fix it.

Plus that, five more died after being "successfully sealed."

The FDA calls this arterial puncture wound a rare complication. But when a procedure is as overused as stenting is, plenty of people are going to be put in harm's way for no good reason at all. And apart from such risks, stenting is done a lot more often than it should be.

Last year, a big study out of the UK (which wasn't the first) found that being hustled into having a stent inserted won't do you a lick of good... unless you're having a heart attack!

But docs will race to put a stent in you even if all you're experiencing is stable angina (pain in the chest with exertion that goes away with rest).

Not only is stenting useless for chest pain, but it's also of no value when it comes to preventing heart problems.

And along with puncturing an artery, stenting can also trigger arrhythmia and excessive tissue growth where it's placed.

But there's a far safer approach to caring for your heart.

Four gold-standard studies have found that those taking 2,400 mg of aged garlic extract daily can slow arterial plaque formation by 80 percent.

It's even been shown to reduce plaque already in the arteries!

But if your doc is one who insists that a stent is the only way to go, that's when you need to get a second opinion... or even a third.

To Saying 'No' to Stents,

Melissa Young