010 - Heart Attacks on Golf Courses: Why 2,000 Golfers Collapse Each Year And How To Lower Your Risk

Legendary golfer Arnold Palmer, trailblazer Mickey Wright, just 2 of the many extraordinary PGA players who have died from complications due to heart disease. Last year alone, there were more than 2,000 documented cases of heart attacks on the golf courses right here in the United States. And some are lucky and survive, like Chi-Chi Rodriguez, but most do not. Welcome to Clear Cardio's Prevention is Power podcast, where we bring you expert insights real-life experiences, and cutting-edge strategies to keep your heart healthy and your life strong. I'm your host, J.D. Enright, and today we've got an exciting lineup for you. Joining us is a true legend in the world of professional golf, David Frost, a PGA champion whose career spans decades of excellence on the green. He'll share how fitness, endurance, and heart health play a vital role in peak performance. And alongside him, we have renowned cardiologist, Dr. John Osborne, an expert in cardiovascular health and prevention. He's here to break down the science, debunk the myths, and give us real-world tips on keeping our hearts in championship shape. From the fairways to the forefront of medical innovation, today's conversation is all about prevention, performance, and power. Because when it comes to heart health, prevention is power. So grab your headphones, Sit back and get ready to be inspired, and let's dive in. Hey guys, how you doing today?

Fantastic.

Wonderful. So great to have you here on the Power is Prevention podcast with Clear Cardio. And so, Dr. Osborne, it's great to see you again. We've done a number of these in the past, and today we have a special guest, PGA champion Mr. David Frost. How are you today?

Hi, gentlemen. Very nice to be here with you. I'm very well, thank you.

Yeah, and we actually have a really exciting thing like we've done with Anthony Tolliver, the NBA player. Today we're gonna be showing David his results of his, of his testing this morning with Clear Cardio at our Carrollton location.

Hot off the press. And hot off the press for the audience note, he does not know what we found.

Nor do we.

So we're gonna have, we're gonna have the live reveal. Yeah. This will be the live reveal.

And I actually think we're waiting for the results to come in.

We literally are waiting for them to come off the cloud.

Yes.

So they will be as hot off the press as they possibly can.

Yeah. So you guys who are watching will actually Real time be seeing what we're seeing. So are you a little nervous about that, David?

Talk about having pressure putts. I think this is about the pressure putt, the biggest pressure putt I might have had so far.

Fair enough. Yeah, I didn't even think about it in golf terms. Right, exactly.

Normally I have a routine in golf, so the routine takes away the pressure. You know, so you follow your routine and you do away with the pressure of it by sticking to your routine. So I don't have a routine right here I can perform, so I'm on the edge.

Very good. So you came in this morning to our clinic at Clear Cardio in Carrollton. And how was that experience? Can you give the viewers a little bit of a—

Well, I can't tell you, this is about the most perfect timing we could have had. A year ago, I lost my best friend to a heart attack. And then about a month and a half ago, I follow, we follow a group on our, on our tour and Fred Funk had been in Puerto Vallarta for a stem cell transplant or a couple of injections. And they found, they said, let's just do a little, what do you call it?

CT scan.

CT scan. And they found out that he had a blockage. So right there and then they put a stent in, and he said he didn't even feel any different before it. He didn't feel like he had a shorter breath or anything like that. And all of a sudden there he left with a stent, and luckily he had a warning, so to speak.

Most people don't. Yeah.

So I kept thinking, how can I do this similar thing that he's been doing, that he did? Last week I was in Tucson, Arizona playing a tournament, and I said to him, you know, where do you do it? Because I don't know anything about— didn't know anything about this. And then 2 days later, Jeb Stuart sent me this message that you were interested in perhaps working with some of the golfers on their condition. And here I show up in Dallas. I actually changed my plan by not staying in Phoenix for a week and to come visit my kids in Dallas, and otherwise I wouldn't have been here. So it happened so sudden.

Yeah.

And I'm really relieved and appreciate The fact that something like this came my way.

Yeah, it's very serendipitous. And this isn't the first time we've heard someone say that. It's very strange how we've just come into play when people need us.

No coincidences.

Yeah, being in the right time and the right place at the right time.

Yeah, I don't believe in coincidence either.

Yeah, right.

It's meant to be.

You were meant to be.

Yeah, yeah. So I just got a text while we were having this conversation and the results are in.

Okay.

For your thing. So I'm not going to, I'm not gonna show you, I'm not gonna say anything. I'm gonna let Dr. Osborne work his magic. Uh, we're gonna take a quick break here, get things locked up onto the screen. We'll show you some pictures and some video of you in the stu— in the, in our clinic in Carrollton. Um, and then Dr. Osborne will talk you through.

We'll do the big reveal.

We'll do the big reveal.

Okay.

All right. I wanna point out, right, of that, well, I've done probably close to 20,000 of these. Over the last 25 years. I will point out every single one of my patients where we started breathing with a pulse has finished breathing with a pulse. So no matter what we find, it's fine.

Right? Don't panic.

Obviously, I'm going to hope it looks perfect and yahoo, and you sleep better and I sleep better. But if we find something, guess what? It's still going to be fine.

Better than not knowing it.

Absolutely. Because we have incredible tools to stop And reverse plaque, right? Pretty much most all heart disease out there, and I'm including strokes as well, but heart disease, strokes, those kind of things are really at this point in our history are pretty much completely eliminatable.

Wonderful. So hang in there.

I'm excited.

All right. We'll be right back. Give us a second to get things tuned up. Cheers. Okay. Welcome back everyone here. So we are all set up. We've got results for David Frost, the legendary PGA champion. And with Dr. Osborne and myself, J.D. Enright, chairman and CEO of Clear And as you know, we're doing the big reveal. David came in this morning and met with the Clear Cardio team, went through the Clear Cardio program, which is all of the things that we do to look under the hood, as you would say, Dr. Osborne. So it's great, great to have you here, David. And so what we're going to do first is if we're going to look at the screen right behind you, we're going to look at a little bit of what, what you did this morning. So this is actually you here. Let's give it a second here to boot up. But this is a video of you actually in our CT scanner, the Cardio CT angiogram, very specialized machine. There's only about 4 or so in the country, which there's a lot of reasons why that's so special, but we won't go into that on this podcast. But there you are there, and that's us actually looking inside and under the hood, right, Dr. Osborne? Yep.

So we call this the donut of destiny.

Yes, the donut of destiny.

The donut of destiny.

Yeah, so there you are, and you can see on the lower portion of the screen, That's inside your guts. That's inside of you. We're looking at your cardiovascular system. What else are we looking at, Dr. Osborne?

Well, the CT here, this is the control room. And if you look down here, you can see we're actually acquiring the images. It takes about 1 second to acquire all that data. It's multi-gigabytes worth of data. And then all that data is flowing into the console in the control room.

Okay.

So that's the magic behind the scenes.

And there you are, David. Look at you walking in, getting comfortable.

I'm on the tee.

You're on the tee. You're getting ready to tee off.

There's the tee box. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it wasn't a difficult situation? Did you feel comfortable at all times?

No, no claustrophobic— yeah, claustrophobia. Because normally when you do the CT scan, MRI, you're in the big tunnel, right? And this was open on both ends, so you don't feel claustrophobic and there's no panic, nothing.

In fact, the hole in the middle, we call that the bore, Right? This machine, it's a very special machine, the first install of this machine in North America, has the biggest hole, has the biggest bore. So in other words, so that people don't feel closed in or claustrophobic.

Yeah, and no, it was like riding a bike.

You didn't even have to take your shoes off.

Correct.

Yeah, there you go.

I have no metal in my body, therefore they didn't feel they needed to—

Well, this is not Magnetic Resonance, so it doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah, you could have, you could wear necklaces and bracelets.

He said if you had metal in your body to put on a gown.

Oh, is that what it is?

Okay.

He said since I didn't have metal, there's no need for a gown.

Look at you looking down the board like, hello, there I am.

There he is from the other side.

There's David Frost, legendary PGA player hanging out.

And that's just about how long it takes to do the study, by the way, too. So, and then this is just kind of what we get. There's some 3-dimensional images and such. Yeah. So.

Of your actual heart there. Pretty amazing stuff.

But now we're going to take a deep dive. Okay. So we're really going to—

I was friends with Christian Barnard, the man who transplanted the first heart.

Yeah.

I knew him and he must be turning over in his grave to be—

yeah.

With this kind of technology, with joy to know that something like this is out there and it's preventable.

Exactly.

And, you know, as I say to my surgical colleagues, I'm just here to put you out of business.

Exactly.

Right.

Yeah.

There you go. All right, so let's go ahead and switch over to the actual results. Are you ready for that, David?

I am.

All right, and I understand your wife is joining us via the phone. Where is she calling in from?

She's on the phone. I called her. I said, why don't you get on this call? Because I'm gonna have to explain this to you.

Yeah.

And she's in Cape Town right now attending to her mother who's just gone through a second session of chemo.

I see.

Okay. Would have been a better reason for her not to be there.

Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. But she's going to be here with us Virtually at least, and go through the process with you. It's great to have you on the call with us. We'll go ahead and get things set up. So let me— give us one second, guys, and we'll be right back. Okay, welcome back. We're all set. So you wanna take a look at the screen here? It's all— you're the driver's seat here, Dr. Osborne. So here we go. David, you ready?

All right. So I'm ready. Let me just kind of walk you through what we're looking at. Okay? So I'm gonna turn you into a junior cardiologist. Okay?

Okay.

So in reality, we've taken these very high-resolution, 3-dimensional pictures Our main purpose, of course, look at the blood vessels of the heart, right? See if there's any plaque. But also remember, we get everything else inside your chest. We can look at your lungs, your esophagus, your aorta. I'll show you your spleen, your liver, your stomach, your diaphragm, your spine. We can measure bone density. So we get lots of other free data. Okay. I'm going to start with the blood vessels in the heart and the coronaries, and then I'll walk you through the other free data here as well.

Okay.

Okay, so down here in this view, this is your heart. These are the blood vessels of the heart. I've removed everything except— there we go, my excellent assistant.

Yes, sir.

I've removed everything except the blood vessels of the heart. So there's this blood vessel here is called the right coronary artery going to the right side of the heart. There's a vessel goes down the front part of the heart and another one goes to the left side of the heart. We're gonna look at these one at a time. So what we can do is I click on that vessel, it'll turn yellow over in this window. That is the same window, but now with the magic of this technology, we've taken that vessel. Imagine I fly— I took that vessel, put it all on the same plane, sliced you right through the middle of that vessel. Now we're peering on the inside of that vessel.

So just for the record, everybody who's watching from, you know, remotely, this is your body. This is your body. What you're looking at is your entire cardiovascular system, all of your arteries. What you're looking at is you. This is not a mockup of you. This is actually you. And you're going to see—

This is what's going on.

This is what's going on. This is you.

Also, to remember, and this was one of the big breakthroughs with cardiac CT using our donuts of destiny, is that when we create these 3-dimensional high-resolution images, We see everything. Plaque, this stuff that can cause heart attacks and can rupture and ruin our day and our life, always starts in the wall of the vessel. Okay, think of it as a donut. It starts in the wall of the donut, and early on it'll grow outward. So if you think of the channel, the hole through which the blood flows, that is not disrupted. not impinged upon, not narrowed until you have lots of plaque in the wall of the vessel. And then much later in the process of the condition, it can then begin to grow inward. And that's when we have symptoms.

Can you point to that?

We will not have symptoms, chest pain, flunk a stress test till the hole itself, the donut hole is already 70% blocked.

Can you point to that, John? So where does the plaque build up?

So there's the channel.

Right.

And then what we can do with this is I'm going to fly right here. So now we're taking that vessel. We can also straighten you out. So there's the same vessel just straightened out with the magic of computers. And where this red line is gives us a cross-section of that vessel right at that point right here. We can then put all this data together and use this to fly in a virtual way Up and down any one of the blood vessels of the heart.

So what's remarkable, and it's only possible with this technology.

What the AI does is the yellow line is the channel, that's the lumen. The stuff outside that channel is plaque in the, in the donut itself. In the wall of the artery. There's the donut hole, there's the donut. And you can see there's some stuff out here again in the wall.

That's inside.

Inside the wall.

Yes, inside the inside.

So the plaque doesn't build up. I always thought, for those of us who are not Dr. Osborne, that plaque built up on the inside of the artery, like it started clogging it in, and that's what closed you up.

Kind of like rust.

Like rust, like inside of a pipe, you know? But that's not what happens. Like the cholesterol, which basically sticks to the arterial wall, then gets absorbed into the artery, into the artery wall itself, right? Not on the outside, on the inside, but goes into the artery wall and then Creates like a blister on the outside.

Yeah, you call it a pimple.

Like a pimple on the outside, yeah. And it's that fills up with that nasty low-density, like, soft plaque, and then that's what bursts, can burst into the artery and cause the clot, and that's what kills you 90% of the time.

Right, well stated, well stated.

Yes, thank you. From a layman's term, I just like it without using all of the technical jargon.

You've had an excellent teacher.

Thank you very much.

Yeah.

So it's important for people to see that it actually builds up outside. So you put a heart cath in, you don't see anything.

Right, right. So in the old days, we did heart cath angiograms. All I could see was the donut hole. You could have extensive plaque, plus we couldn't see what kinds of plaque, where that becomes important. We'll focus on that in a moment. But none of that you could see.

But how does this compare, this compared to what is out there today? You say this is only 4 machines like this?

Well, in the US there's 4 of these machines.

But how do you detect this if it's out there but people aren't seeing it?

You come to Dallas and we put you in the machine. We look under the hood. So what I'll show you here, cutting right through the vessel right here, here we're looking at the cross-section of that vessel. We're looking down the barrel of the gun, so to speak. There's the channel, the lumen, And see this white, bright white stuff? That is calcified plaque, or hard plaque as we call it, out in the wall of the vessel. So the good news is, if you look at the vessel here, you can see some lumpy, bumpy stuff, but there's no blockages, right? We don't need stents, we don't need surgery, we don't need anything like that to fix any blockages, okay? But we definitely have some plaque here, okay? So to use my— On the outside? Yeah, mostly in the wall of the vessel.

In the wall?

Exactly.

Inside?

Yeah. In the donut hole, right? Not in the donut, rather. I'm sorry.

Yes.

In the donut and going outward.

Yeah.

Not really any significant blockage.

Which will eventually go to the outside.

It could, right?

Can.

Yeah, it can. We're not gonna let it.

So, so if you had a heart cath, for example, like Fred Funk had, if you had a heart catheterization, they'd say you're fine.

Yeah. No, I've seen people have, you know, here with the imaging, the AI, the ability to see the entire vessel donut hole, it, it always looks pretty impressive. Okay. However, if we did a heart cath on you like we used to do, and we've been doing these since the '50s, we still do a couple million a year in the US. What I'm showing you here, you couldn't see.

Explain this to me. I said to Fred Funk, so I thought you actually had a heart attack and that's why you got the stent.

Right.

And he said, no, I was in Puerto Vallarta and trying to get my stem cells. And, and they said, let's just do a CT scan.

Right.

And then the CT scan said. I have a blockage.

Right.

I wasn't even short of breath.

Sure.

So what, what could have happened in the next 2 weeks if he didn't have that CT scan?

Oh, he could have had a heart attack.

He could have had a heart attack.

Right, absolutely.

And he wasn't even short of breath.

Right.

Yeah, usually there's no symptoms.

So there was a major, major warning.

Yeah.

Not warning, a lucky break he had.

Yeah, but here's, here's what's even more important. He was lucky enough to have that done. He was lucky enough to actually have a stent put in because they evidently, with whatever they saw in that CT scanner, said that they had a blockage, that he had a blockage that was requiring a stent. However, what that didn't do, none of what he just did tells him if he has plaque and what type of plaque he has around his arteries. So he needs to come see us immediately. Because just because he put a stent in that one blockage, that's just treating a symptom, and it's not the cause. And the cause is the plaque building up in the arterial wall, which you can't see through a heart cath.

And they don't have these pictures.

They don't, they don't.

No.

They don't.

Nor the AI that we're fortunate to have, which we haven't even gotten to the AI yet. But yeah, so let's just say we saw some blockage here. You see that vessel do an hourglass, right? So we put the stent in here, okay, where that blockage is. I'm talking theoretically in Fred's case. Well, that's great. We've opened up the vessel. All of those other plaques—

Are still there.

Are still there. And unless we target them, treat them, they're going to grow up to be a plaque just like the one we put the stent in. Right. In the old days, right, people would come in, they'd have a heart attack, they'd get a stent, then they come back for more stents, then they come back for surgery. What that evidence was that we were fixing the mechanical blockages, but we were not treating the disease. We have tools today that cause the root cause, right? The blockage is just the complication of a disease that's been there for decades.

It's just a symptom. It's just a symptom of what's going on.

You got that oil leak, and unless you fix the leak, it's going to—

Precisely.

It's just like putting more oil into the car.

You just keep adding oil. You forget that The, the oil plug in the bank of the bottom of the crankcase.

Yeah.

You don't, you don't treat the leak.

Right.

It's stupid.

Yeah. Silly.

We treat everything. We do disease detection and we do the treatment.

Right. And the nice thing is with this, you know, this is 100%. In other words, I like to say we do a stress test. They say it looks fine. Again, you could have blockages up to 70%.

And doesn't show up in the stress test.

Right. And it gets worse. 25 to 40% of people with blockages more than 70%, the stuff that gets stents and such, the stress test will still appear normal. So that's a false negative. That's really scary. Okay.

Well, there's also false positives.

And you could have false positives, right? You could have— your stress test looks abnormal, looks funky, as I like to say. In the old days, we take those poor people to the cath lab, then they get the $20,000 heart cath, catheters up the groin or in the wrist now, and, oh, you're fine. Pictures look funny, but your blood vessels are fine. And even then, all I can tell you is I can see the donut hole. I can't see what's happening in the donut, right?

So it's all basically a waste of time.

So I actually, a little bit more of my testimony, if you will, because CT was so good, right? And I'm talking CT machines even 20 years ago were quite good. Although quite good means the Apple iPhone 1 version 20 years ago was a 64-slice machine. This is a 640-slice machine, right? Apple 1, Apple iPhone, iPhone 16. But even back then, this was so good versus what we had then. I used to cath people. I used to put— do heart catheterizations. In 2005, when I got our first 64-slice iPhone 1 version, it was so good I didn't need to cath people anymore. I've not cathed anybody for 20 years.

Okay.

My colleagues, Rinse, lather, and repeat. So anyway, so importantly, you can see lumpy, bumpy stuff. I'm gonna turn on this little color here. This color— now we're looking at the AI. You can see some colors here, maybe a little hard on the screen, but you can see there's some colors that show up. Like here, this is a calcified plaque. Okay, this is a hard plaque.

Blue.

Blue. The yellow plaques you see are what we call lipid-rich or soft plaque or cholesterol-rich plaques. All plaques start out as cholesterol-rich lipid plaques, just like lava. This is my analogy. And over time, the lava will turn into the calcified plaques. The yellow plaques, the soft plaques, are the active growing plaques. These are the ones that can rupture, ruin your life, ruin your day. That's the dangerous stuff.

And grow inward.

Yep. Well, these are growing outward. See how they actually grow outward and they're all growing outward, right?

Yeah. But for them to rupture.

Yeah. Well, then they grow inward. So when they rupture, that's really a blood clot. So no severe narrowing. I feel fine. No symptoms, whatever. That ruptures within seconds to minutes. You form a blood clot and then you're on your way to a heart attack. So the plaque— Or a stroke. Or a stroke, right? Same exact concept. That vessel here, your carotids, same process, same disease. So the cool thing is when we treat the disease, the root cause, as you mentioned, we're actually treating plaque from the top of your head to the bottom of your toes. It's not just the heart. It's not just the blood vessels of the heart.

You're treating plaque, period.

We're treating plaque all over your body.

And how does that— what's that process?

Well, this is where it gets personalized. We'll talk a little bit about kind of those strategies, but this is where it gets more personalized for you and what's—

So just in general, what are options when it comes to that?

Yeah, it's the big, big things, right? If you use tobacco, you can't, right? That is just not compatible with a normal lifespan. If you have blood sugar problems or diabetes or prediabetes, really important because that gives you really sticky vessels, right? Think of a vessel between Velcro to Teflon. Normally, they're like Teflon. If you end up with Velcro vessels, not good. Cholesterol is going to stick. Diabetes gives you sticky vessels. Okay, so we got to take care of that. High blood pressure, right? Extraordinarily common. Needs to also be very well treated. Not well treated, you go from Teflon to Velcro. Okay, and then central to all this, because the stuff that we're actually seeing in the vessel walls, the yellow stuff, the lava is cholesterol. So we really got to target that cholesterol and really get that cholesterol down. It is the cholesterol that is the fertilizer to this process.

All cholesterol?

All cholesterol.

Not—

it's the fertilizer for heart attacks and—

Yeah, for plaque. Plaque. It is the fertilizer of plaque, right?

Okay.

So we turn off the faucet. Okay. So that's, you know, has to be individualized.

Those are the 4 sort of scenarios.

Yeah, that'd be the 4 big major things. There's a lot of other details.

Diet, exercise, alcohol abuse.

Lifestyle.

Lifestyle, things like that.

So all of those things contribute. So we here at Clear Cardio, we take a very holistic approach. We treat, like, as Dr. mentioned, from your toes to your tip of your head. We look at it, we got to stop that plaque from killing you, giving you a heart attack or stroke. And there's a number of ways of doing that, one of which is— well, I'm sorry, make sure you do have Velcro.

We're going to work on getting you back to Teflon.

Exactly.

And we're going to turn off the faucet, turn off that fertilizer.

Got it.

So this is the right coronary artery going to the back part of the heart. There's some of the cross-sections through that vessel. You can see the blue here is a calcified plaque. I can fly up and down that vessel.

So does calcified mean it's good or bad?

So calcified is old plaque. So lava is the yellow stuff. That's the active growing plaque, the plaque that can rupture, pop like a pimple.

Dangerous stuff.

It will mature over time and ultimately it'll become calcified. That's a hard plaque. That is the cinder cone. That is the extinct volcano.

So it's stabilized.

It's stabilized.

It can't give you a heart attack.

I don't sweat the calcified stuff. That's old stuff. It's no longer active.

Okay.

The yellow stuff, right? So if we look at this cross-section, see that yellow stuff there? Again, all in the wall, right? Not causing any blockage. Yes, but it's there. But it's there, right? But this is something we can target and stop. And in fact, We'll get to this in a moment, but when we do these scans, and this is where the AI really shines, we'll get an incredibly precise, accurate number of exactly how much plaque you have, how much hard plaque, how much soft plaque, how much lava, how much cinder cone. And we'll know that as of the 15th, the Ides of March. Oh, actually tomorrow is the Ides of March. The 14th of March. Today, down the road, we'll do all these things. We'll work on getting you back to making sure you have clean Teflon. We'll turn off the faucets, right? The Velcros, the vessels are like Teflon. And then we can put you back in the machine and see not only are the numbers better, but is the plaque better? We could never do that before.

So how, how much time is needed?

Usually we give people about a year. A year, because it's a slow process. What we're seeing here started 30, 40 years ago, right? It's a slow glacial process. We don't have symptoms— chest pain, angina— till it's been there decades, right?

But it's why it's so dangerous.

But in the past, we never looked under the hood. We just waited till the machine broke, right?

Gotcha.

We did no preventative maintenance. So just to show you a concept there, importantly, no, no blockages. And again, on heart cath, I've seen people have, as you can see, AI and the pictures are showing us the plaque, but I've had people have this much plaque and have a heart cath and say, looks fine. So be very careful of a heart cath. It just doesn't have the sensitivity to be able to show us the kind of data, the detail of what the true picture is. Yeah.

And correct me if I'm wrong, Dr. Osborne, I recall you mentioning that Even with a heart catheterization, where they're going in there with a camera and they're doing the whole thing, unless you have a 70% blockage or better, there's nothing they can do.

Yeah, so anything less than 70%, they're gonna go, you're not quite ready for a stent. Let us let you ripen up and come back in a few years. I'm being facetious, right?

No, no, but again, so my point being is, okay, so that's one thing. So heart caths don't tell you what kind of plaque it is, where the plaque is, and they only can do something if you have 70% blockage or more. And oftentimes they don't see anything and they're just like, you're fine. But yet all these people are dropping dead of heart attacks. Why is that? Well, you had mentioned to me previously is that most heart attacks, fatal heart attacks, or heart attacks and strokes combined, happen when it's much less restrictive. They're in their 20s and 30% blockages, right? Is that correct? Yeah.

So, The plaques that tend to rupture because of the yellow plaque, the lava, are not 70, 80, 90% that would be enough to cause you to have symptoms or flunk a stress test, right?

Okay.

The plaques that rupture are the 20, 30, 40, 50% that do not obstruct blood flow. You would have no symptoms, but yet you would feel fine. But yet those are the ones that rupture. So that's how you can go from, I feel fine, had a normal stress test last week, The plaque ruptures seconds to minutes later. You've got a blood clot blocking that vessel. You're on your way to a heart attack, and hopefully it's just a heart attack and we get you to the hospital.

Yeah, because in time. Yeah.

The other limb of that is half the time you just die.

Like your friend who was riding the bicycle.

He had plaque rupture and that's what happened.

Okay. So no doctor can explain that to me. Well, it's just a heart attack.

Now you know. It's plaque rupture. Plaque rupture.

You know, it's amazing the science behind all this, the knowledge, the literature. is enormous, right? We've known this for a long, long time.

Okay.

We've had cardiac CT for a while too. Of course, now we layer AI on top of that. So this stuff is known, right? Which, to be honest, as knowing all this as a cardiologist, kind of makes you upset, right? Because all of these events, whether fatal or non-fatal, you go, had we just gotten you in the machine, we would've known. We would've adjusted your trajectory. I like to say, take care of the plaque, stop the plaque, reverse the plaque, which we can do. And heart disease as we know it, as we think of it, stents, balloons, bypass surgery, heart attacks, catastrophic acute events coming out of seemingly out of nowhere is done.

Yeah.

You remember the conversation I had with you, like the life cycle I went through after going to all those years, going to the best clinics ever, right?

The physicals.

Physicals and all this stuff, and they're saying you're basically— Thousands of dollars. Hundreds of thousands of dollars plus, all for nothing. And then I meet with Dr. Osborne a couple years ago, and we sit down, and I'm like, why isn't this the standard of care? I got upset, I got angry, because this needs to be— I've had friends who died of heart attacks, like suddenly, left their children behind, worked 30, 40 years of their life building wealth and struggling and putting their kids through school, only to retire and die. Like, what's that all about? Right.

Well, you explained to me the cancer versus heart attack.

Yeah.

And just explain that to Colleen because her mother's—

Yeah.

So we were talking kind of difference cancer and all that because of this concept of plaque rupture, right? These yellow plaques that suddenly can rupture, right? Pop like a pimple, break off, flake off, whatever way you want to think of it. That is how people end up with, I feel fine, had a normal stress test last week, And now I'm having a heart attack because these plaques can rupture. When they rupture, they literally within seconds to minutes form a blood clot. And it's the blood clot that, that blocks off that channel.

Right.

And that's how you end up— if you're lucky, you just start having symptoms, chest pain, you get to the hospital, we put a stent in. Right. That's the lucky half of people. The unlucky half of people, the heart becomes electrically unstable and You go into fatal heart rhythms and you die.

And heart attack versus cancer.

My point earlier was with, again, I wanna eliminate cancer too, but that's not my domain. But with cancer, you're generally gonna know you have it, right? Even if it's terminal, you know you got it, you got some time. There is really no such thing as sudden cancer death, but there darn straight is sudden cardiac death that occurs a couple thousand times a day in the US. Right. No idea. No warning. Done. That's it. Right. And we all know people like that. And that's for sure. It's got to stop.

So let's continue. This is great.

Yeah.

So that's one of the vessels, the right coronary artery. This is the other vessel called the left main LAD. And now that your eye is trained, you'll be able to see all this. So again, you can see plaque in the wall.

Yeah, that's a lot.

You can see this calcified plaque here, right? Older plaque, right? It's been there a longer time. And then all the yellow stuff is the lipid-rich plaque. This is the active plaque. This is the lava. Okay. Importantly, I mean, as far as mechanical interventions, stents, balloons, surgeries, We don't need any of that. What we need to do is to get you on a strategy. And this is kind of, again, where it needs to be personalized to you that can stop the plaque and reverse it, right? The big things, target the cholesterol, any blood sugar, diabetes, prediabetes, we target that blood pressure, we target cholesterol, diabetes. Obviously you don't smoke, so fortunately we don't have to discuss that, but we can literally stop and reverse these plaques.

So we want to turn all those yellows—

Yep, we can convert the yellows into blue, and blue is fine. It's old plaque, it's a Purple Heart, it's not going anywhere, it's not active, it's not the kind that ruptures. So that's the left main LAD, and although I don't like the term, we call that the widowmaker, but again, not my favorite term. And then the other last vessel, major vessel of the heart, is called the left circumflex. This is a vessel that goes off To the left side of the heart. And again, you can see, again, no blockages. This is what I saw in the cath lab 30 years ago. You got lumpy bumpy, right? This is the lumpy bumpy. But here we can see it really what's happening. You can see that you can break it up into the different kinds of plaque, which is very important. The yellow is the active plaque. That is the lava. And I don't see much blue calcified plaque here. Okay. Yeah, I mean, a little bit.

Yeah.

Okay. Let— I'm now going to switch over to the AI part where we do very precise quantification, and that's really another fantastic role of the AI. So what we've done here now is there's those 3 vessels I was showing you. I can show you as well because it also does a beautiful analysis here of what we call stenosis. So stenosis is blockage, right? And I can show you by using the AI, here's all the different vessels of the heart. Okay? They're all lined up here on the bottom. This is the right coronary artery here. This is the left main LED, and then this is the left circumflex over here. So the important message is there's some lumpy, bumpy stuff here, but nothing exceeding 70% like Fred had, right? They saw that it's tight, you get a stent.

So when we're looking at this, when it says 45, what is— explain to David what that 45 means.

Yeah. There's your donut hole. So about at that level, I'll show you what it looks like on that particular vessel visually. But at that level, about 45% of the hole is occupied by plaque.

So you do have some blockages, right?

So but we will not have symptoms, chest pain, angina, flunk a stress test, have any awareness until it's at least 70%.

I got you.

Okay. So it's here.

But to be able to treat it is a massive bonus.

Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.

It's the treatable.

And then a little bit of lumpy bumpy, I'll call it over here. I can click on that vessel. This is going to show us directly that vessel right now where it sees that narrowing. And here's all the measurements. So this is in the LAD. Okay, so there's the tight spot according to the computer, right there. This is the reference segment, right? So we take the uninvolved area, and we just do the math, and that's about a 45%. I think, I, I will say, I think the computer tends to overcall the degree of blockage a little bit versus what I would do by eye, but that's okay, 'cause I'd rather the computer calls it more than I see.

By what percentage does that grow over the years?

You know, that's all dependent upon how you treat it. You, you, right?

It's you.

You.

How you add to it.

If you smoke.

How you diet.

If you smoke or use tobacco, it's gonna grow that much faster and quicker.

You control it.

If you have high cholesterol, if that's not treated, That's going to grow faster.

Genetics plays a role.

Genetics play a role. You know, there's a whole bunch of other factors, but the big 4: tobacco, blood pressure, diabetes, prediabetes, cholesterol. Again, there's a number of other factors, but those— those— the age. Now, I'm going to focus on the fact— the things I can fix.

Okay.

Right.

Age is a massive risk factor.

But you can't change it yet.

But I can't yet fix it.

Not yet.

We're working on it.

Not yet. We'll get there.

As we eliminate heart attacks, then we'll start working on it.

Exactly. Fair enough.

But anyway, this is just how we do the measurements and that's how it comes up with the calculations. Exactly. Now I'm gonna tell you something shocking. A lot of people, a lot of people in the audience don't know this. A lot of docs don't know this. Okay? I showed you the stenosis, the narrowing, cuz people always worry about that. Stents, blockages, narrowings. Okay? However, What better predicts heart attacks, heart attacks, deaths, all of those things is not the blockages. It's not the narrowings. It's the total plaque volume. Because that's telling me how much plaque do I have in all vessels of the heart. So this is the total plaque volume. So I know this doesn't mean anything to you. In a moment, I'll show that to you. But we come up with 891.3. The tool is very, very sensitive and accurate. 891.3 cubic millimeters of plaque in all of the different vessels summed together. It will then break that down into how much is calcified plaque. That's the extinct volcano, the cinder cone. So there it is, 891. This is breaking it down into the calcified plaque volume, 145. This is the cinder cone, the extinct volcano. This is the lava. Okay? 745. So to think, to put it in one sense, you can say probably about, what, 75, 80% of the plaque is the lava, the active plaque.

The dangerous stuff.

The dangerous stuff, frankly, the growing active stuff, the stuff that can rupture. And about 20%-ish or so is going to be the hard calcified plaque.

And you want to flip those 2 numbers.

We want to get this down. This will go up, but this is fine, right? This is no longer growing or active, right? We want to get the lava to turn into the extinct volcano.

So that's important. That's an important point because when I went through this process and I came out on the other side where we got all that really dangerous stuff taken care of, this is what Dr. Osborne did in my treatments because I had That nasty stuff. I even had some red stuff in there, which is woof. But I saw what traditionally would freak people out is my calcium score went through the roof. I'm like, whoa, wait, it went up. It went up. Well, wait, isn't that a sign of that I have more disease and less disease? And the reality is why calcium scores don't really mean much. They're an indicator, but that's it. It doesn't tell you much is because it was converting Dr. Osborne and my sticking to my guns and eating better and doing better things and taking the medications that I'm supposed to take, converted that soft, dangerous plaque into calcified plaque. And it's that calcified plaque that is, is stable. And so that's really what changed for me. Right.

Yeah.

And in fact, we actually did a scan about 18 months after the first one. Right. Doing all the right stuff. Diet, exercise, working out, cold plunges, medications, all the right stuff. Right. All the stuff that, that has an impact upon plaque. And we, I believe, as I recall, in that 18 months, we saw the lipid-rich plaque, the lava, fall by about 32%.

Yeah. Pretty significant.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's 18 months, remember? This plaque had been growing there a long, long time. In the span of 18 months, we're able to get it, the lava, the lipid-rich plaque down by 32%.

Yeah.

So it's big. It works. So it works big. It definitely works.

Yeah.

Okay.

So total plaque volume, hard plaque, Soft plaque. By the way, this compare button, we don't have anything to compare, but down the road we could put you back in the machine.

Oh yeah.

And literally compare every plaque, the whole vessel, the whole heart, hard plaque, soft plaque, and give a complete readout of where we are in the future. Right. And we can show you not only are the numbers better and blood pressure, cholesterol, whatever we're doing, working on, but is the plaque actually better? We could never do that before.

So let's pause right there for a minute. David, what are your thoughts thus far about what you've seen so far? And there's more to come, but so far, just want to take a pause and get some feedback.

And Colleen, please, we'd love to hear your comments and questions too.

Did you have any questions?

No, no, it's fascinating.

Very good. How about you, David? How are you feeling?

Fascinating.

I've had this high cholesterol issue, but I'm not happy with the way they treat cholesterol, so I didn't want to go that route. So I'm excited to try something else rather than the— what do you call it—

the pills they gave me. Well, there's different types of medications, and Dr. Osborne, he's the expert on this.

So I'm excited to try What will fix that?

I'm your medical barista.

Okay.

Yeah, I must say, every single blood test I've ever had, they've told me my cholesterol is extremely high. Now, I'm not a big person. I've been very thin my whole life, yet I've got— you know, you always think, oh, if you have high cholesterol, you must be this big, you must be overweight.

And she has low blood pressure.

That's great.

Yeah, I have very, very low blood pressure, but I definitely have cholesterol. But like David says, cholesterol medication is not good for you because your brain needs certain fats. And if you take cholesterol medicine, I believe it basically, you know, takes away all of that. So it's not good for you.

I'm glad you brought that up because that's actually a pretty big myth.

Well, Professor Tim Noakes in Cape Town, who I mentioned to you yesterday, he's totally anti-cholesterol statin medicine.

Yeah.

So Dr. Osborne is probably one of the world's experts in this space as a lipidologist. And so let Dr. Osborne, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah. So Colleen, you raise a really great question that we could spend a whole afternoon talking about this. And because not only am I cardiologist and an imaging cardiologist, But I'm also a board-certified lipidologist. So this is kind of what I do and this is my passion.

Yeah.

I will mention a couple of things. One is that, yes, every cell in our body needs cholesterol. It has to have it, right? We make hormones from cholesterol— testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, cortisol— all of those. They're made from a backbone of cholesterol. So absolutely need cholesterol. However, every cell in our body has all the biochemical machinery To make as much cholesterol as that cell needs. Right.

So, yeah.

Okay.

That makes sense.

Right. And also, too, and even a lot of docs, even a lot of professionals, even a lot of cardiologists don't know this. The what we call the lipid pool right in your brain. And yes, the brain is mostly fat. Right. It's, it's easily 25% fat. Me, I'm probably up to 40, 50. But, but it's mostly it's Fat is a very, very important part of this. The lipid pool in the brain, in the central nervous system, is entirely 100% different and separated from lipids that we study in the rest of the body. They have nothing to do with whatsoever.

So what you're saying is these cholesterol tablets that this person told me that was not good for you because it basically takes the fats that you need in your brain away. It's not true.

No, absolutely not true. Yeah. And I, you know, I hate to sort of criticize, rumble, you know, get into a rumble about this. But if you actually look at the science and the lipid data and all that, this goes back decades. It's completely untrue. Now, if you tell somebody, okay, here's the facts, your brain is mostly fat cholesterol, these drugs lower cholesterol, right? You're going to leap to the conclusion and everyone would Well, that's got to be bad. However, they don't tell you when we actually look at cholesterol metabolism in the brain. And I'll give you an interesting little insight into that. So LDL cholesterol, the bad cholesterol, the cholesterol that statins lower, has a half-life like a drug, right? You could measure how long that LDL sticks in your— around in your circulating in your blood, right? Has a half-life of about 3 to 5 days. So when your liver makes the LDL, it circulates for 3 to 5 days and then it gets reabsorbed.

Okay.

So 3 to 5 days. The half-life of LDL, of lipid cholesterol in the brain is 5 years.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, so the lipid pool, lipid metabolism and all that in the brain is completely separate from the LDL that we're talking about in the bloodstream. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

The, the other thing, and I'll mention to you, Colleen, I think this is really important for both of you, for everybody, is that remember cholesterol is the critical, essential, mandatory factor that ends up in the blood vessels, right? It's the yellow stuff.

Yeah.

It's the lava, right?

Yeah.

That, but that means that cholesterol has been floating around in your vessels, arteries and veins, gets stuck to the wall of the vessel and then incorporated into the vessel. Right? So one can have high cholesterol in your bloodstream, yet have vessels like— and we'll get back to this concept we talked about before— have a vessel like Teflon, and you don't have plaque. Okay?

That's interesting.

It works the other way too. I can show you people whose cholesterol numbers look perfect on no drugs who can have extensive plaque. In the heart and, and, and lots of other vessels too, because they have vessels like Velcro. So if you have super sticky vessels, even though your measured cholesterol in the blood is not that high, it's gonna stick like crazy. So you do not know what your vessels look like until we look under the hood.

Which is why what we do is so important, right? There's no better way, or there is no, there is no way to do what we do.

Autopsy.

Except for an autopsy, which is too late. That's too late.

It's too late. Yeah, right. But most people say no to that. I agree.

So when I opened up this podcast, I talked about busting myths and talking about the facts and looking under the hood with Dr. Osborne. And that's what we do here at Clear Cardio. We're not afraid to go directly to the science and the facts and not just jump to assumptions. And we do not shy away from controversial conversations in any field or any vertical. And so I, when I co-founded this company with Dr. Osborne, specifically around this technology, I had people telling me that we don't take medications, cholesterol and so on. And I'm like, okay, so I have— there's no cure then. So there's no cure, right? So if genetics play a major role, like you mentioned, you have high cholesterol, but yet you're young, thin, not overweight. You're thinking, you know, most cholesterol—

Professional athlete.

Yeah, right. But, you know, talking about his wife, right?

So, so just a couple of weeks ago, and this happens all the time, A couple, they're married, they're the same age, 54, 56, and 57. They've been married a while, right? Same exposure, diet, all of that, right? Neither smoke. She had really high cholesterol. His cholesterol was really high as well, right? Both. I mean, you look at both those cholesterols and go, you need to get on drugs.

They were married for like 30 years or something like that. So they've lived the same lifestyle.

Yeah. So they both— we scanned both of them, right? In her husband, and their LDL cholesterol is only 30 points apart. They're both very high. In her husband, his cal— his score, his total, his total plaque score was about 650. So high, right? Her, with her cholesterol just a, a smidgen lower than his, both very high cholesterol. Her plaque score was 20.

Ooh.

Right? So cholesterol is mandatory, necessary, central. It is the stuff that gets in there. However, I can't tell you from your cholesterol level what the position is. It's getting deposited. And the only way to know that is with this technology.

Is to look at you, right? Not you as a statistic. Maybe it could be you because other people do this.

So there's lots of people on drugs to lower cholesterol who do not have plaque, only they do not know they're having plaque. We're fixing a number, not a disease. There are people who look fine as far as their cholesterol goes, going, I did a stress test, looks great, my cholesterol looks fine, I'm done, who unbeknownst to anybody have lots of plaque and you just don't know. And I will tell you, this technology for me as a cardiologist, I will admit, is very humbling, right? I've been doing this nearly 30 years. medications, diet, exercise, cholesterol, whatever. And I'd say, okay, yeah, you're gonna plaque and you won't. I'm gonna tell you, this is a very humbling tool because I do not know until we see the pictures, right?

Yeah.

Because I've been fooled a lot.

Proven wrong.

Yeah. And so I don't really trust my spidey sense anymore. You get in the machine. That's the only answer, right? Other than that, it's guesswork hypothesis. Could be maybe And I don't like to deal with maybes. I like to deal with certainties.

So for those— for Dr. Osborne, so those of us who had— because I've been on a statin for about a year and a half now, and it's actually reversed, significantly reversed my soft plaque and taken me further and further away from high-risk heart attack and stroke. And I feel fantastic. I tolerate them well, but it's designed for my physiology. But, you know, one of the things you talked— you spoke to me about was like my cholesterol right now is about 50, like my LDL and whatever. It's like somewhere around 50, less than 50-ish. And you told me that there has been a number of studies out there that show people whose natural cholesterol levels through diet and just genetics or whatever that are in that space have significantly lower instances of heart attacks and stroke. Is that correct?

Yeah. And the other thing about cholesterol, so we're sort of myth-busting today on cholesterol. Is that, again, I cannot tell if you have plaque based on your cholesterol levels. Right. Number 2 is one's cholesterol level. Right. Is very minimally impacted by diet and exercise. One's cholesterol level, the levels we measure in your bloodstream, is mostly dictated by your ancestors. It is mostly genetic.

Right.

And so I always like to think of this analogy or call it this, use this analogy of hair color, right? You come to me, say, Dr. Osborne, I'm not blonde, but I want to be blonde. I say, well, were your parents blonde? No, they weren't. Okay, well, genetically, you got some challenges becoming blonde, but you persevere and you say, well, I'm not blonde, but I want to be blonde. Dr. Osborne, please tell me what diet and exercise I can do to become blonde. Now, no one has ever been able to respond to me. What is the diet and exercise you can do to become blonde? Because to the best of my knowledge, it's impossible. If you're not blonde and you want to be blonde, it's going to be in a bottle. And that's just how it works, right? It's not saying anything about you're a bad person or you're not working hard enough or you're not eating right or whatever. You just chose the wrong ancestors, right? But the cool thing is. Your ancestors may have had lots of strokes and heart attacks, and I can't change your DNA, but I can certainly change your cholesterol. And the other thing too is, yeah, we now, as of 2025, we have multiple different tools that work with multiple different people, multiple different mechanisms to lower cholesterol. Up until about 10, 15 years ago, I had one drug. Now we have multiple drugs and multiple different tools. So we can, and With the tools we have available, I can lower your cholesterol with some of these tools, particularly in combination, by 80, 90% in 2 weeks.

So, okay, if you are told to take this particular drug to lower your cholesterol, how do they know? If you say there's more than one tool, how do they know which one to subscribe?

Well, so we know, that's a great question. So we know drug X at dose Y will give on average I'll make up numbers a little bit. 52% reduction.

Okay.

By itself. If I take that drug at that dose and add another drug to that, that works in a complementary fashion as well, that combination gives us 70%. And you can— we've got lots of different tools and drugs and classes. I always like to think of it as a Chinese menu, you know, column A, column B. We can mix and match. So in reality, I can say, okay, your cholesterol's here. Yeah, we got plaque. That's the first step, right? First step shouldn't be measure your cholesterol or stress test or anything. It should be, do you have plaque?

Do you have plaque?

You get the machine.

Are you at risk?

That's the first question, right? Because I also come across some people say, I don't care what you find. If you find plaque, I am not gonna take any drugs. I say, okay, first step, let's just see if you have plaque. Maybe you don't. You look like you could, but maybe you don't. Let's just put you in the machine. Then we'll figure out the plan for you going forward.

We've actually had patients come in. Say that exact same thing. We take them through the process and they see, wow, I'm at a serious risk of heart attack or stroke. I've got lots of lipid-rich soft plaque. And they change their mind pretty fast because they go—

Yeah.

And then, and a lot of the reasons why they don't want to take certain medications or certain steps towards changing their lifestyle and all these things is because, one, they don't know, first of all, whether or not, and they can't see it firsthand. And secondly, There's a lot of bad information and misdirection, either deliberately or by accident, or myths out there, like the myth that we just busted right now about cholesterol.

Well, and here you go, the proof is in the pudding.

It's right there.

You're guessing here.

Right.

Yeah.

People that have allergies, you guess what subscription you can take. Is it Advil? Is it Celebrax?

Claritin or whatever.

Claritin. And then unless you do your test, you don't know what you're allergic to.

Precisely.

So here you have proof in the pudding.

And to make this the point, how that is kind of silly how we used to do things, right? I'd go, well, geez, your cholesterol looks high. Here's a drug. Well, do I have disease? Do I have plaque? I don't know.

Right?

Right.

Imagine I said, I'll change the scenario up for you. Say, David, you look like you could have cancer. I'm going to give you some chemotherapy. And you go, you're insane.

Crazy. Yeah.

Right. I am, I'm gonna be out the door before you can even see me. Yeah.

Right. Treating you for something you do have instead of treating you for something you never have.

Why should we do that for heart disease?

Or high cholesterol.

Yeah.

Right. Or, right.

So here you have a, an 800, would you say, would you consider that on the scale of Dr. Ornish? Yeah.

So let me, let me show you. I'll, let me show you something that puts this in perspective. Yeah. So here is all of the data I showed you. Rubber hits the road. All in one page.

Yeah.

Whoops, sorry. All in one page. Sorry. So all in one page. And so there's the total we looked at. There's the different numbers in each of the 3 vessels. Okay. So kind of roughly evenly distributed. And then we get into the different kinds of plaque again across each vessels. Now, this is the blue calcified extinct volcano. Okay. That's the minority. Okay. Most of the plaque is the non-calcified plaque, lipid-rich plaque, soft plaque, all synonyms across the 3 vessels. There's the total, but there also is a 3rd kind of plaque. Okay, this is called low-density non-calcified plaque. This is really bad plaque. Okay, this ruptures. This loves to rupture. Okay, there's a little bit of it, and usually people don't have a lot of it. You had some, but you definitely have a little bit of it. If this is the lava, this is the superheated hot lava.

Okay?

But the good news is this is the stuff, if we go after these factors that we discussed, you know, pretty commonly, even within a year, we can make this go away. We'll see this come down, usually quite substantially. Now this will go up, but I don't care about that.

Right.

Because this is the no longer active plaque. Over here, we now can stage people just like our oncology colleagues, our cancer colleagues, right? So 0, of course, would be 0. Stage 1 would be mild. So that's up to 250 cubic millimeters. Okay. Stage 2 would be 250 to 750. Stage 3 is above 750. Okay.

I was stage 2.

He's stage 2. We'll find about a third of the patients that we scan are actually stage 3, and they have no symptoms, no idea. that they have this disease. Okay, it is what it is. However, the important thing is we have a great baseline and we are gonna hop all over this. We're gonna throw the appropriate kitchen sink at it. And the other thing about these stages is this both dictates what tools we should use and also when we need to look again. So if you're stage 1, we look in 3 years. Stage 2, 2 years. Which is what we did with JD. Stage 3, we got to make sure that plaque is rapidly changing and converting this into this. So a year is usually what we recommend.

So having seen a lot of these in the last year and a half, 2 years, and being a patient of Dr. Osborne's, having seen my own, that's, that's significant and it needs to be addressed and immediately. And so, which is what Dr. Osborne does, right? We don't just, you know, there's companies out there that they'll do a scan or they'll show you something and they'll say this, whatever, and then they don't— and then you walk away, right?

We close the loop.

We're probably one of the only ones in the world that actually has both the capabilities, the technology to look under the hood, but then go on to solve the problem, to fix it, the disease treatment. And that's what we're recommending we do with you. Effective immediately.

The good news is we're gonna have you back on the, on our podcast in a year.

Okay.

Yes. Yes. Okay.

Because we're gonna make sure you don't have heart attack.

We've calendared this in already. Scan on the podcast. I'm excited.

I'm excited for a year from now already.

Yeah. Yeah. But until we start getting that, that soft plaque converted to cholesterol, you're in that window of risk.

Okay.

Right. So we, there, you've got a big window of risk here. So we've gotta narrow that window of risk.

And, and I'll tell you, I'm gonna get into the weeds a little bit, right? Because I think, A lot of people think of heart disease, blockages, plaques, narrowings, all that. Yeah, of course it can occur. And I will tell you, remember this plaque that I'm showing you today probably started 40 years ago.

Okay.

Right. This is not new.

In my body.

Yeah.

In your body, in your heart. It's slowly progressed, right? Silently, right? Silent killer. We just happen to find it today.

Okay.

That's fine. We're going to take the appropriate motions and, uh, and not wait another 40 years.

No.

Okay. So we think of this disease a lot of times like a blockage, an anatomical structural issue. Yes, we could stop the plaque. We can reverse the plaque as we were talking about. The good news is we can reverse it. That's a, that's a slower process. That's months to years. Right. Took a long, long time to get to this point. Yes, we can reverse it. That's also a slow process. Months to years. The great news is What's also occurring, particularly as we target cholesterol and turn off the faucet, get that cholesterol down with whatever tools would be that you and I will come up with and cocktail that we come up with. And I got lots of cocktails. When we lower that cholesterol, turn off the faucet, something else occurs much, much earlier than the months to years process of anatomic structural plaque reversal. When we lower the cholesterol, We actually affect a characteristic change or a functional change, a physiologic change. Remember that plaque rupture? So that the likelihood that these plaques rupture, which is really the end, the final common pathway of having a heart attack or stroke, right? The sudden acute out of the blue, we're having a heart attack or stroke with that plaque rupture process. When we lower cholesterol, We can rapidly convert these plaques, the lipid-rich plaques, and all of these plaques, and particularly this low-density non-calcified plaque, literally within days to weeks after we begin our cocktails. We can convert those plaques, not even anatomically yet, structurally, but physiologically, functionally, from unstable plaques that want to rupture to stable plaques that don't, that occurs in days to weeks.

So it's like a stabilization process.

Yeah.

So you can't even see it, but it's happening. So it's lowering the likelihood that these soft plaques, these dangerous plaques—

Even though the narrowing may not be the change, we're changing the function of the plaques, the physiology of the plaques. And that occurs in days to weeks.

Yeah. So that's remarkable. Yeah, it really is.

Yeah.

I'm excited. I'm excited.

So the long and the short of it is, and so thank you for joining us today. I'm sure it's not what you wanted to see, but it is what it is. Um, and I was glad, I'm so glad you were able to dial your wife into the call, into the podcast here. And, uh, but any last comments you'd like to make on the process?

And no, I'm just excited to take the rest of the journey with you.

Very good. And what would you recommend? How would you recommend this to anyone of your colleagues or friends, family?

Oh, I got 110 things going through my mind. I will I'm going to call my buddy Rocco Mediate, who has his own podcast to thousands of golfers.

Yeah.

And I'd like him to come and do the test that I did today.

Yeah.

Well, and it's amazing, right? I can't tell you in my career how many people it starts with. I was out on the golf course, right? And I mean, you've heard that.

Yes.

I'm the doc on the other side of this. You're the golfer. But I can't tell you how many golfers say, oh yeah, I was out with my buddy, or I was on the golf course or doing that, right? Felt fine and then—

Oh, I know people that have heart attacks and they're physically incredibly fit and people can't explain it.

Never trust how well someone looks on the outside because the inside could be very different.

Well, thanks again for coming. Thanks for your wife for joining us on the call.

Colleen, any questions, comments?

Uh, no, I pretty much— I just had one question though. Can you, can you See blood clots with this?

Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, with this technology, and I'm gonna say this, and I've said this for years, it is the virtual autopsy. So if you're concerned about something, and we don't see it, it's not here. And if it is here, we will see it. Now with the AI, we can do all this fantastic quantification, comparisons, staging, things we just couldn't even do a few years ago. But yeah, I mean, Again, if I could see it under your autopsy, I can see it with, with our CT.

Okay.

Wow.

Yeah. Because the reason I'm asking this is I was in hospital with my mom last night and they said that they needed to test her to see if there's a blood clot in her lung.

Sure. Right.

And she had to get this color fluid injected into her arteries for them to see that. So, um, I don't know if—

Yeah. So, so we also use CT, this, this, Same machine. If we're concerned about a blood clot in the lungs or pulmonary embolism, same machine. Yeah, really the same process. We put an IV in.

I did today.

Yeah. So if the question is, do I have a blood clot in the lungs? It's also the same machine.

Okay.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

So what's the name of this machine?

So this machine is called an Atlas. Atlas 960 is the machine. And as I said, very excited. We were the first install of this machine in North America.

We need to get one in South Africa then too.

Agreed.

Great guys. Well, listen, I know we're a little outta time here, but we had a great, this has been a fantastic conversation. Dr. Osborne, any last comments on the—

You know, I'm always gonna say you never know till we gotta look under the hood. Please, if you have concern for you, someone in your family, anybody you love, if you don't like 'em, don't tell us about us. Don't tell about us. But if, you know, heart disease is still by far the largest killer. And we're at the tipping point for dramatically changing, reducing, stopping what we have seen as heart disease in the past. In the future, there will not be— there will not be— people will have plaque, but we'll put 'em in the machine, we'll treat it, we'll find out it, we'll take care of it. The things that we think of as heart disease, like a heart attack or stents or balloons or surgery, or your buddy getting the stent, will never ever occur cuz we'll never let people get that far down the road.

And that's a great—

All the parts are here.

That's a great way to stop there. So thank you for that very much. Gentlemen, another fantastic podcast. For those of you who stuck in there, I know this has been a long one, but a very valuable and informative one. Thanks for hanging in there. If you have any questions or want to come in like David Frost and have us look under the hood to make sure that you're not at risk for a heart attack or stroke, or if you are, that we can then treat you and reverse that risk, then give us a call. Check us out at declarecardio.com. Hit the like button here if you enjoyed the content. And remember, you know, here at Clear Cardio, prevention is power. So join us again on our next episode of Prevention is Power podcast with Dr. John Osborne, myself, J.D. Enright, CEO of Clear Cardio. Until next time, cheers, guys. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.