Eric Bohlman said:"Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com" <[email hidden]> wrote in
news:[email hidden]:
Quoted message said:Though I agree with your general point of view, presumably it doesn't
apply to EDTA and coronary disease. How in th devil are you going to
know it worked? Have two serial angiograms? Serial spiral CTs?
The testimonials always say that the patients *felt* better after the
chelation. To that, I would reply that five of the most boring days of my
life were spent in the CCU waiting to be sufficiently anticoagulated to
undergo catheterization, which revealed that my circumflex artery was 90%
blocked. I *felt* perfectly fine, except for a slightly annoying sensation
in my chest that only occurred on the first day (and was the reason I was
there, after convincing myself that it needed to be looked into, in the
first place). In the preceding days/months/years I was completely
asymptomatic despite the fact that the blockage obviously wasn't anything
terribly new.
COMMENT:
Of course. Coronary disease, unless you're having an actual MI, is a
chronic disease like emphysema or any other. You have good days and bad
ones, and there's no rhyme or reason. Placebo effect is huge, and just
random deviations in heart pain are huge, for no particular reason. And
as for treatment, people feel better no matter what nasty thing you do
to them. In fact, in non blinded studies, the worse the treatment is,
the better people seem to feel later.
All of this drove the early heart surgeons and stenters nuts, and there
are famous trials of several heart procedures which involved actual
sham surgeries, where they cut the patients open and then sewed them up
again, sometimes doing the surgical procedure in between or not,
according to randomization. There was one treatment called "Poudrage"
from the French for "powdering," in which irritant talc was sprinkled
on the heart to try to stimulate new vessel growth.
http://www.puc-mrm.com/bypass.html. It finally had to be killed by a
double blind experiment. As did internal mammary ligation, which was
supposed to benefit cardiac circulation. That was a killed finally by a
double-blind surgery trial in 1959:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=13657350
And so on. Why don't I trust the testamonials for EDTA? Because I know
too much history.
SBH
