American Heart Month

When I was a freshman in college, I got a call from my parents. My dad was having open heart surgery, and I was to fly home. It wasn’t stated as such but that was just in case something bad happened.

He had a double bypass. He the surgery made him weak for an extended period of time, he had to change his diet, and he had to get more exercise. He had a path that he walked every day for the rest of his life. He had to give up regular cheeses, which he loved, for non-fat cheese. He had to give up chocolate that he also loved.

Twenty years later, despite his rigid following the guidelines, he had to have a quadruple bypass with a valve replacement. He was never the same after the first surgery and lost several days memories from the second.

He passed ten years later with a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Heart disease didn’t take my father’s life but I’m sure it contributed to the decline in his health. Even though the body has multiple parts, it is a single system. In western medicine we tend to treat one part of the system without always recognizing the effect on the entire system.

What is Heart Disease

Heart disease is a general term for several different afflictions to the heart and circulatory system. Some of those include:

Angina
Arrhythmia
Atherosclerosis
Cardiac arrest
Cardiovascular disease
Congenital heart disease
Coronary artery disease
Endocarditis
Heart failure
Heart murmur
Heart Palpitations
Heart valve disease
Hypertension
Peripheral artery disease
Stroke

What are the Numbers

According to the CDC, in the United States:

Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men, women, and people of most racial and ethnic groups.
One person dies every 33 seconds from cardiovascular disease.
In 2022, 702,880 people died from heart disease. That’s the equivalent of 1 in every 5 deaths.
Heart disease cost about $252.2 billion from 2019 to 2020.2This includes the cost of health care services, medicines, and lost productivity due to death.

https://www.cdc.gov/heart-disease/data-research/facts-stats/index.html