For This Heart Attack Survivor, ClearCardio Changed EVERYTHING
A 67-year-old heart attack survivor avoided open-heart surgery using Dr. John Osborne's ClearCardio program, which treats plaque volume with medications like rosuvastatin and Nexilizet instead of stents. Dr. Osborne argues that a sibling's cardiovascular event is a stronger genetic risk factor than parental history, and that total plaque volume, not blockages, predicts mortality.
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But let's say that you had open— that I had open-heart surgery. I don't think I would be capable after that surgery to do what I'm doing right now. I think that would have been an impediment to my health, and I think I would have had a decline instead of an escalation in the way that I feel.
Usually I'll say, you're not going to die anytime soon, and it won't be of heart disease, period.
Yeah, right.
Not on my watch.
It really— you had mentioned to me it's something about siblings being more alike.
Well, right. So, you know, on a genetic basis, right? So having a parent with heart disease certainly increases your risk, right? Makes sense.
Yeah.
Having 2 really increases it. However, and this is important, genetically, the greatest risk that you will have a cardiovascular event is not mom or dad. It's a sibling.
Mm-hmm.
So if you're in a family and one of your siblings Has a stroke, a heart attack, gets stents or balloons or bypass surgery, that is, has plaque.
Yeah.
That is the greatest, highest genetic risk factor because you are more like your siblings genetically than you are mom or dad. You're only half like dad, half like mom, but you are most genetically like your siblings.
So it makes perfect sense.
If you have a sibling who has had an event, please call 911.
Yeah, exactly. Call us. Yeah.
www. ClearCardio.com right now.
Yeah, exactly.
Operators are standing by. No, I mean, it's— but it's really fascinating. Obviously, mom and dad, right, certainly puts you at high risk. But if you have a sibling, you better really watch out.
Yeah. There's a percentage of folks that just, just in the fact of having a heart catheterization, never mind the stents, which I understand you have to have blood thinners for a year, which can— if you have cuts, bleeding issues. But, but just having a heart catheterization can actually cause heart attacks. Strokes.
Is that right?
Absolutely. Oh yeah. So there you have it. So you've had two of those, right? And so, you know, you luckily didn't you didn't have any major complications, right? So so you were fortunate. But so so you know you're you're thinking about these surgeries and you're going I don't want those types of like long-term complications.
Right.
Especially how would you even have a cadaver? I don't even understand that. I mean, we don't have to go down that rabbit hole.
I'm just thinking the first I heard about that.
Don't you have rejection issues? Then you have to start taking medications.
Well, no. There They're chemically treated, so they're like—
Like they sterilize them or something?
Yeah, they're like leather, right?
Oh, okay, got it.
But the problem is we don't use them because they just don't work.
Fair enough.
I mean, they immediately just fail.
Well.
It's just, you don't go for it.
That's good to know.
Yeah.
That's good to know that I didn't go forward on that.
Yeah, don't worry, there's no zombie going into you right now. So, okay, so you hear all of this and you're thinking, okay, I've got some light at the end of the tunnel. Mm-hmm.
And it's not a train.
You survive, because a lot of people don't actually Come out on the other side. You were fortunate you didn't end up having all that surgeries and all those things.
Right. During my interview with Dr. Osborne, you know, we started going down a completely different track. You know, I felt comfortable. I was very comfortable with his knowledge. He— and again, nobody knows me better than me. And I knew that that course of open heart surgery and all of that that it entails was not the way I needed to go because I knew that I wasn't going to die in 3 months like they were telling me that I was.
Yeah.
So we started, we did some medicine changes. And by the way, the medicine, I'm 67 years old. I take rosuvastatin.
Oh wow, you look fantastic for 67.
Thank you.
I had no idea.
Yep.
Wow.
Rosuvastatin and a drug called Nexilizet.
Okay.
What are those drugs? And that compound has changed things dramatically. And that compound also does nothing to my psyche, you know, my abilities. It's just something that works within my body.
Okay, so well tolerated. What do these drugs do, these medications?
Yeah, so all of the medicines Ultimately lower LDL. If you want to be really sophisticated, ApoB. We'll have to talk about that one of these days. But they all lower LDL. It's not the blockages that get you. In fact, in the world of cardiology, and unfortunately you're a great illustration of this, but on the good side of things, in the world of cardiology, we have been ballooning and stenting and bypassing like crazy to the point where The sofas and the chairs in our waiting rooms are ripped and torn, and— right? I mean, right, thousands and hundreds of thousands, millions of people have gone through the cattle chute.
What a visual.
As we ballooned and stented and bypassed, and none of that made people live longer or prevented the event because we were treating the wrong aspect of the disease. It's not the blockages. What actually does predict mortality and heart attacks is actually total plaque volume.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
You treat the symptom. People historically, the symptoms have been treated and not the cause.
Precisely right. We're about, you know, we'll detect all of this stuff. And, and I'm not anti-stent. If you have bad symptoms that I can't fix with medications, then fine. I mean, it's, it's the new replacement of cardiology, right? I mean, no one should be limited. But with excellent medical therapy, we have great drugs that will treat angina, by the way. Very, very, very few people, and JD, as the layperson, could testify to this, of all of the people now, which are a lot, that we've treated in Clear Cardio, how many have needed balloons, stents, or bypass surgery?
Not a single one.
Exactly.
Not one.
Right? And not to say they don't have disease and plaque and Lots of diseases, but none of them have needed what we call revascularization, balloon stents and bypass surgery.
Hundreds and hundreds of patients.
Yeah, because we're really treating the root cause, not the symptoms. Now, if you have symptoms, we'll take care of that. But even with some of the medications we have, I actually call them oral stents because they work so well to relieve angina that you could take a couple pills that are generic And get the same result as a $50,000 piece of steel in your left anterior descending coronary artery.
Yeah.
Most people say, I'll take the pills.
Yeah.
And then blood thinners, risk of complications, heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure, infection, bleeding around the time of the procedure. And then if you stop the blood thinning medications that keep that stent open, if you do, and I've seen it happen, That stent could immediately clot off. The mortality rate is 45%.
Well, we have soft plaque in our heart. We want that soft plaque to become completely stagnant. We want it hardened. We don't want it moving. Calcified.
Yes.
So, and eliminate the soft plaque. That hard stuff is exactly where it needs to be, hard, not moving. And we take care of what is moving.
It's cured.
It's cured.
You're a builder, right? It's cured.
It's cured.
It's built.
All the bricks are on that wall.
Exactly. The other thing, another message, and unfortunately this happens again and again, so I'll caution the audience too. Somebody gets a calcium score, okay? It's a non-zero number, right? There's usually some degree of panic. Blah, blah, blah. Maybe get referred to cardiology or whatever. You know, things can happen. Get a stress test, which is kind of worthless, frankly, or whatever. So they, they get a calcium score, things happen, and then down the road, a year, 2, 3 years, whatever, down the road, they repeat the calcium score. That is the wrong answer, right? Once you have a positive calcium score, you got plaque. Done. Not risk, not could be, maybe, possibly. You got plaque. The next step should be cardiac CT with AI, basically, clearly, right? Because then we can understand how much hard plaque you have, soft plaque. And then there is value to repeating, as we did here, to show not only were the numbers good, all the numbers were in the green, if you will, the gauge in the green, But more importantly, and most importantly, we have the plaque on the run, right?
Mm-hmm.
If you repeat a calcium score, particularly if you do a great job, right, all the right tools, diet, exercise, medication, whatever, you will see the calcium score go up. And then people really panic cuz they're saying, I'm taking medications, I'm exercising, I lost 30 pounds, I did all the right stuff, I quit smoking, and my calcium scoring is go— is going up. Because the problem is you're looking at the wrong number.
Be aware of your actions because your actions become habit. And as long as you're aware of what you're doing—
I want to thank you. If you have any concerns at all, have any questions, feel free to comment. Click this like and subscribe button here on our YouTube channel. It helps us a lot get the word out. Reach out to us at clearcardio.com and schedule your session with Dr. Osborne and the Clear Cardio team. And let's look under the hood.
