So do you have heart disease of any kind? So a conventional medical history would ask you of angina, heartburn, shortness of breath, fatigue, our patients come in complaining of fatigue like it’s number one complaint nowadays, and we think of the adrenal glands or the kidneys, think of the heart, that late afternoon fatigue is often the heart — reduced circulation in the body causes a lot of fatigue, palpitation, tachycardia, weakness, dizziness, nausea, sweating. Now what we ask, what we ask additionally is did you have a lot of tonsil focal? Did you have a lot of tonsil infections as a child? Did you have a lot of ear infections? Did you get a lot of antibiotics for that, how many rounds, do you have any idea? Did you have a lot of sinus infections as a child? Is this a new slide too? Good, okay.

Do you have gum disease, right, dental cavities, abscesses, root canals, extractions, who pulled your wisdom teeth, the conventional dentist? It’s always the same thing, there’s very few people that extract correctly. So we have to ask all of these questions, and I just – these are two new slides, I just have to throw in my information on cholesterol. It just saddens me so much when I see all of us, especially senior citizens just getting beat up by the side effects of statin drugs, it’s outrageous. So this is a very good website, benefits of high cholesterol, you go to the WestonAPrice.org and you google benefits of high cholesterol, and you’ll see excellent peer-reviewed journal articles, in this particular article talking about the scientific basis of the fact that cholesterol really doesn’t cause heart disease. Trans fats do, toxic fats, rancid fat, sugar those things cause heart disease. We will be talking about that next.

So some facts about cholesterol, 75% of people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol, 75% older patients with lower cholesterol have risk of death than those with high cholesterol. Countries with higher average cholesterol like Switzerland and Spain have less heart disease. So there’s just tons of facts on cholesterol and how important it is to the system. I had a patient come in recently going to a Kaiser doctor, her doctor wants to get her cholesterol down to 120. Yeah, AIDS patients, 150, 140, they keep lowering this cholesterol, it’s the most insane and [person you’re close think], I have never seen in my life. It’s amazing.

Okay, some research on statin drugs and again I think Sally Fallon has done a very good job of compiling a lot of research statistics on statin drugs and cholesterol. So again go to the Weston A. Price.org website and just google statin drugs. This is the thing, when they first got the board together to figure out who to recommend statin drugs to, they couldn’t figure it out for women because women even at 200, 250 more than that, there was no evidence that that caused heart disease, but nevertheless I think they first set at 200 and again gone down to 180, now they’re down to 170 but a healthy woman, there’s no evidence that taking statins reduces your risk of heart attack and death.

Lancet, respected British Journal 2007, men or women over 69 years old with high cholesterol, there’s no proof that taking statins reduces your risk of heart attack and death, same article. And here’s an article where two statin drugs Zocor and Zetia, aggressive treatment with them, they did lower cholesterol, but it led to more plaque build-up. What does cholesterol do in our body? It goes to the artery, it’s there to heal that infection, that inflammation, right? So it led to more plaque buildup in the arteries and no fewer heart attacks. New England Journal of Medicine. So I just wanted to say that any of you that are on statin drugs I really wish you do some research and consider or reconsider taking that medication, that’s some serious side effects, including death.

Okay, how many do blood pressure in your office, how many take blood pressure? Quite a few. Okay, so what can we do for the physical exam? Blood pressure is an excellent test. I don’t find – I find that blood pressure machines give a lot of false positives. So those can be a bit of a problem. So if you are going to buy a blood pressure machine, I’d caution you to go with a lot of money, buy a really good quality one because the cheaper ones usually give too higher reading. So blood pressure is a good measurement, the pulse is also a very good measurement. Now we’re supposed to take our stethoscope and diagnose the heart sounds. When you’re in school you get a tape and you get this information on all these particular sounds you’re going to hear. When you hear — when you listen with your stethoscope on the chest, I just want to say it’s very difficult to diagnose heart sounds. Even cardiologists are challenged by this and they confirm these heart sounds by echocardiogram studies and ECGs. So you can take your stethoscope and listen but don’t worry about doing it just right because it’s difficult, we leave that for the cardiologists, the people that, doctors that listen all the time.

Now, left ventricular hypertrophy, this is a very common complication from rheumatic fever from strep bacteria with resulting mitral and aortic valve disease, okay. So here we have the left ventricle, and we have the mitral valve right between the left atrium and left ventricle that brings the oxygenated blood from the lungs into the left atrium, goes through that mitral valve, goes into the left ventricle and then that left ventricle has to push out all that oxygenated blood through the aortic valve into the whole rest of the body. So our left ventricle is a huge – has a huge workload. It’s our main pumping chamber and as you can see what can happen just like Hans Selye said about the adrenal glands in the 1950s, that brilliant doctor and scientist, the adrenal glands with a lot of stress, what do they do? They hypertrophy too. Glands areas get bigger under stress, well, so does this muscle, so does this left ventricle area.

So why not everybody put your hand on your heart, and remember the seventh rib comes out here where the xiphoid is, so the heart ends at the fifth rib. One third of it is to the right of the sternum, two thirds of it is to the left of the sternum and it’s about two fists – size of two fists, small person, those person’s fists, big person, those persons, bigger heart. So if you’re feeling, you should be feeling a beat, that is the left ventricle. It’s the most anterior to the chest wall. So you’re feeling that apex area, that apical area of the left ventricle. Now, if it’s forced and strong, you well could have left ventricular hypertrophy, it is not an uncommon finding.

Here’s another picture of the thickening of the myocardium of the left ventricle. Very common in hypertension, of course you increase the peripheral pressure the body’s got to get stronger just like building up your biceps in the gym to push out force more blood, so you get the blood circulating throughout the body. It occurs naturally in athletes, we will talk about that in a minute. I am not sure how natural that is and it’s diagnosed with an echocardiogram.

Another picture left, left ventricular hypertrophy, blood is unable to flow freely from the left ventricle to the aorta as we said during aortic stenosis and remember most people have some kind of mitral valve impairment too by definition, and it can cause arrhythmia, ischemic heart disease, not enough blood getting to the tissues, congestive heart failure and death. And often see the left ventricle is the first sign and after a while it can lead to right heart failure. So this is first to fail and it’s the strong pumping chamber and then this is second to fail, the right ventricle. So if we catch the left ventricle first, we’re catching it earlier.

Now there is a test in autonomic nervous system labs called the sustained grip test, and it’s used as an alternative stress test to reveal cardiac abnormalities. And they say that it’s necessary since cardiovascular function in many patients with clinical heart disease is within normal range. I think we see this a lot in our practice, I can pick up a heart issue, some kind of distress in the heart and yet a patient can go out and get a normal ECG and normal echo and yet I see heart issues and they eventually will show up unless I treat that.

So, challenging the left ventricle, so in 1967 this Dr. Donald figured out how to do that and he demonstrated that if you have a sustained isometric contraction of the flexor muscles of the forearm, in other words, those little teeth you have in front of you, if you squeeze that real hard for a sustained period of time and it resulted in a marked increase in blood pressure, you increase the peripheral blood pressure, you increase the stress on your left ventricle. That’s no problem if you don’t have a left ventricle problem hypertrophy but if you do, it results in a positive test. They’ve been doing this for over 30 years in autonomic nervous system labs.

Again another picture the heart, the heart has to pump harder to get that blood out from the left ventricle through the aorta to the whole rest of the body. You can also do it with a Valsalva maneuver, right? We know some of these parasympathetic nervous system stresses we can do in our offices. So it’s considered, it’s a very well respected test. It’s considered very simple, very easy, very safe. And it’s a valuable intervention for the evaluation of this left ventricular function. Very well praised in the literature as a good test to do.

Professional athletes, they did a study with professional athletes, male professional basketball players 42 of them, 33i – this is a new slide, sorry, added a few — 33 had left ventricular hypertrophy and an enlargement and 16 had bilateral hypertrophy both sides. Now this is called physiological hypertrophy because at their basal state, at their resting state these guys were okay. I don’t know if I agree with that. What’s the typical age of death of a professional male professional sports player, a male professional sports player? What’s the typical age of death? Yes, Mike, you get a prize, 67. That’s young, right? Lot of us are in that range. What’s the typical age of death of a professional football player? Lower, of course, lot of fractures and concussions, 58, professional football player male, they all are male, still aren’t they? No women yeah, 58 years old. So I don’t know it’s interesting that they consider professional athletes, this is okay and again in our offices we have tools and techniques to figure out just how physiological just how normal this is.

I think a lot of people are doing their exercise completely wrong. So that’s a whole other subject we will have to talk about at cocktail hour, but I think there’s a lot of mistakes with exercise. Okay, well of course, professional football players are also billionaires and millionaires and get a lot of glories, so there is that aspect, I understand that but I would hope that all of them got holistic health after their — during their years and after their years of being in sports. So also this is a very good test if you had a heart attack and you’re supposedly recovering, an uncomplicated recovery, if it’s positive that can indicate yes, now there’s still a problem. Again you have to correlate these with other findings, blood-pressure, pulse, symptoms, history etc. but they use this test a lot, left ventricular function in patients to see if they’re really doing well after myocardial infraction.

So for biological dentists, the sustained grip test is an excellent screening test along with the pulse, along with the blood-pressure to determine any heart impairment so that the transient bacteremia that may be mild from dental procedures to make sure that it won’t worsen an existing problem. Of course, we’re already aware that patient has gingivitis or periodontitis, we’re already aware of the chronic dental focal infections, some of you even take a tonsil focal infection history and have an awareness that they have a chronic tonsil focal infection. So we are aware of the state of that patient’s health. So adding this sustained grip test to our screening is very easy to do.

So, what else can reveal underlying cardiovascular disease? Energetic testing such as kinesiology, we all have been able to therapy localize the heart and see issues, electro-dermal screening reveals that. My technique matrix reflex testing, very sensitive, I’m aware of any kind of heart issues coming up. We all know that a therapy localization, a positive TL, and those of us that do kinesiology is a lower galvanic skin resistance point like if I had – if a patient has a chronic ulcer there’s going to be a lowered galvanic skin resistance over this area because of the high sympathetic activity, think of high sympathetic activity, high [sooth riferous] activity, lot of sweating, sweaty area less resistant, right. So it’s a positive TL over that positive TL — over that stomach or over that heart area.

So Dr. Arvind Kaur, a great scientist, worked with osteopathic colleges for years, did amazing research on proving the efficacy of therapy localization actually. So he used a dorm armature, which is just a fancy skin resistance machine and he found that if that tested positive over the sternum, over the medial scapula and T1 through T4 that consistently correlated with heart disease in all his subjects he studied. In one subject he had been studying this subject for months and months but then for three weeks this subject’s T1 through T4 were observed for testing positive before that subject had a heart attack. And we also worry not only about the viscerosomatic relationship, but what about the somatovisceral relationship? As practitioners and doctors and especially as dentists, what do we – we’re honked over a lot, it’s really a problem.

So this kind of stress in the upper thoracic area, you know is going to have a problem to the heart. They’re going to reflex back and forth through these nerve pathways here. So they used to say dentists primarily die of heart attacks. I was trying to find that on the Internet, I couldn’t find it. I did read about dentists were used to say that they committed suicide more than anybody else but that was an urban myth. So I don’t know what the normal death is but it is a consideration because you know how much fine work you do, how much hunch over you are and again how prone you are to toxic chemicals and toxic metals, the Jeep Brothers, we’re not even talking about mercury yet, right, but the Jeep Brothers wrote a book about mercury toxicity, mercury amalgam, dental fillings and heart disease and then [Sam Jeep] later wrote a book — another book on heart disease and mercury. So mercury is a whole other issue in regard to intoxication of the heart.

So autonomic lab test, or expensive echocardiograms, ECGs going to a cardiologists, these are all very complicated. Now of course and expensive for the patient. Now of course if you have a patient that’s definitely indicating significant heart disease you want to refer them to a cardiologist and get all that information but for the bulk, for the most part, what we need is some kind of easy screening tool we can do in our office. So we can do a variation of the isometric handgrip test in our office using a ball or a dynamometer and then observing if a strong indicator muscle weakens and responds.

Okay. So does anybody have a dental focal infection here, tonsil focal infection here, anybody a strong athlete? Who wants to – none of those clean, who wants to come up? Russ, come on up, I remember Russ, years ago you had a big bicycle accident, didn’t you? You’re a big bicyclist, right? I thought so. Okay. So stand here, and I am so used to taking off watches but I guess I don’t know. I don’t have to do that. Let’s have you go ahead and take off the watch. Okay. Take the phone out. Take the pager, take the – okay. All right. So let’s have hand and get away from the electricity little bit, no, it’s not going to make that big a difference with just a gross muscle test. But okay, so, we have this patient hold his arm up, hold tight. And he’s got a strong indicator muscle, you can also do the supraspinatus muscle to get his elbow real straight, 30° out from the body, hold tight, can check both sides, straight up. Just a general indicator muscle or a more specific muscle and he’s super strong.

Okay. So then you want to take your little ball that Don and Toby got for me and have that patient squeeze it for 15 seconds. Now in your note it says 10 seconds, and the reason it because I don’t have a watch, I don’t like electricity on my body when I’m working in the office and I don’t have a Rolex which works. So my watches have been broken for years. So what I do is I count, I usually count, 1, 2, 3, I count to 10, and well I just got a stopwatch for this conference and realize I am counting so slowly, it’s actually 15 seconds. So I have been doing this test for years, but it’s 15 seconds. Okay. So let’s have the patient hold it in their dominant hand, okay. So when I say go, Russ is going to squeeze that moderately hard, not terribly hard but not weak, usually man around 20 pounds of pressure, okay. So Russ, go ahead and squeeze. Now stop. Okay. Wait a minute, sorry.

Okay, now squeeze, okay, moderate hard, moderate hard and stop. Now quickly you want to retest the muscle, hold tight and he goes into weakness. Okay, he’s not holding any more quickly, hold tight and he goes into weakness. You only have 3 to 4 seconds to quickly retest because now after that hold up, hold tight. And he’s absolutely strong again, right, because this is a dynamic test on the surface, he’s fine but underneath that when he bikes, he bikes 26 miles, I don’t know probably you don’t have any dental focal infections, holistic dentist specializes in cavitation surgery but definitely could be one of those physiological hypertrophy issues with the left ventricle and it’s something that we want to take into mind too because I’m not sure if that’s a good idea to go weak with any particular test.