Word: ornish
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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More research of this kind could go a long way toward sorting out the usefulness of alternative medicine. But as heart disease researcher Dean Ornish knows from experience, funding for such research is extremely difficult to come by. Despite impeccable credentials from Harvard and Baylor University, Ornish was at first unable to get grants from the government or the American Heart Association for his work using diet and relaxation to treat cardiac patients. "They said it was impossible to reverse heart disease. They said you need to use drugs, because you can't motivate people to change their ways over...
...separate controlled studies, Dr. David Blankenhorn of the University of Southern California and Dr. Greg Brown at the University of Washington have shown that the buildup of arterial plaque can be reversed by a combination of drugs and a low-fat diet. A third study, by Dr. Dean Ornish of the University of California at San Francisco, has generated even more remarkable results. In his book, Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease, published by < Random House this month, Ornish describes how changes in life-style alone, like reducing stress as well as fat, can effectively reverse heart...
While these results convinced both Blankenhorn and Brown that reduced cholesterol was the major contributor to the reversal, Ornish has his doubts. "If lowering cholesterol were the primary factor in causing reversal of heart disease," he notes in his book, "most of the patients in the studies by Dr. Blankenhorn and Dr. Brown who were taking cholesterol-lowering drugs should have shown reversal, since almost all of these patients had substantial decreases in blood-cholesterol levels. Yet only a minority showed reversal...
...Ornish believes these studies, unlike his, did not deal with other factors that he believes contribute greatly to cardiovascular disease: stress and an individual's "sense of isolation." His trial was small, involving only 41 San Francisco Bay area men with heart disease. The 19 participants in his control group were to follow their doctors' recommendations; for the 22 others in the experimental group, however, he ordered a strict, exacting regimen...
After just one year of the study, blockages in the arteries of two-thirds of the control group had worsened. But 18 of the 22 in Ornish's experimental group had an increase in blood flow to the heart and a regression of blockages, on average, from...