3 Review(s)

The epidemic called Coronary Artery Disease and Heart Attack (CAD-n-HA) is matched by an epidemic of genuine and marked anxiety-making, phobia, diagnoses, investigations, and most of all drugs, devices, and procedures. The verbiage on CAD-n-HA, through Modern Medicine (MM) is next only to that on the Big C, called Cancer. The authors may be accused of pessimism, therapeutic nihilism and anti scientism. There is no such attempt here. What needs to be appreciated is that a dispassionate, non-anthropocentric (not-man-centred) approach to the problems of blood vessel disease can allow the lay and the learned to separate the wheat from the chaff. Irvine Page, eminent American authority on high blood pressure and “highly regarded editor” of the journal Modern Medicine, provided a catch phrase on a title to one of his editorials: Past Is Prologue. He stressed the fact that unless we were ready to look backwards in a detached fashion, we would be incapable of looking forwards creatively.In the book, the reader will find concepts and data that help making up one’s own view vis-à-vis blood vessel disease. Like cancer, blood vessel disease is a phenomenon that treats the doctor and the patient alike. Both can be or are either as learned or as lay for the problem has yet remained inscrutable. It is time to evolve a co-operative, sharing spirit between the learned doctors and the lay patients to the advantage of both.The data available or the problem has reached a mass critical enough to empower a lay person to leap into such a venture and a physician to question all the answers they have hitherto accepted as right.