Standard Stroke and Heart Attack Treatment Causes Strokes. (We're Supposed to Be Surprised.)

by Heidi Stevenson

15 March 2010

A new study has found that giving a blood thinning agent to treat heart attack and stroke patients taking warfarin causes intracerebral hemorrhages—another term for a bleeding stroke. For some reason, doctors are expressing surprise that people taking one blood-thinning agent are at increased risk of a bleeding stroke when another is added.

It's well known that abnormal bleeding is a concern with blood-thinning drugs, yet the obvious risk of adding another blood thinning agent was somehow missed by modern medicine. For some reason, strokes resulting from doubling up on blood thinning drugs is a "surprising finding", according to Medscape. Who are these guys trying to fool—other than themselves?

Since 1994, a primary treatment for heart attacks and clot-caused strokes has been the administration of tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), which helps dissolve blood clots. It works, but potential risks have been ignored, even in the face of routine treatment with warfarin.

The study, published in the Archives of Neurology, a journal of the American Medical Association, reported that nearly ten times as many patients taking warfarin suffered bleeding strokes when given tPA.

The obvious potential of excess bleeding in patients taking warfarin is well known, and they are generally warned to look for signs of it, such as abnormal bruising. How could doctors have missed such an obvious risk in using tPA to treat people who are already taking warfarin?

Before now, doctors have relied on what Shyam Prabhakaran, MD, the study's lead investigator, terms "a lack of prior evidence" to routinely use tPA on heart attack and embolic (clot caused) stroke patients. In other words, they have refused to look at the possibility of risk until now.

The only way they could have been unaware of the risks associated with adding one blood thinning agent on top of another is by willfully choosing not to see the obvious.

An Ounce of Prevention

Does this mean that people need to simply give up if they find themselves at risk of cardiovascular disease—stroke or heart attack? Or even if they've had one? As always, there are alternatives to Big Pharma's poisons and modern medicine's extreme treatments. Certainly, before submitting to obviously risky methods, it's better to try natural approaches. The old stand bys of good diet, exercise, and stress reduction are always in order.

There's also a natural enzyme that can help eliminate abnormal blood clotting and effectively thin the blood, nattokinase, which can be found as a supplement or in the food from which it's derived, miso soup.

Capsules of nattokinase are often successfully taken by airplane passengers at risk of developing deep vein thrombosis, circulation-stopping blood clots in the legs. Chronic disease patients, such as people with arachnoiditis, who have an excess of PAI-1 (plasminogen activator inhibitor) often find that taking nattokinase will ease their symptoms. For more information on nattokinase and miso soup, where it's found naturally, read the sister to this article, Prevent Heart Disease With Nattokinase or Miso Soup.

It's obvious that continuing to use extreme treatments to treat existing disease is modern medicine's goal. Rather than focusing on natural methods to produce and maintain health, thus preventing heart attacks and strokes, people are told they must take harsh chemicals, in spite of known adverse effects. Statins are pushed on people in excellent health, in spite of known risks like headaches, nausea, heartburn, abdominal pain, dizziness, and upper respiratory infection—and these are just the common effects. Also being risked are liver disease, tremors, arthritis, depression, cataracts, epidermal necrolysis, pancreatitis, and nerve damage. People in good health are urged to take drugs that can cause this kind of damage, in spite of there being no good studies demonstrating that they lengthen lives.

As long as modern medicine approaches health as something that can be purchased by ingesting poisons, it's unsurprising that obvious effects of treatments, like giving tPA to patients taking warfarin, can be so easily ignored.

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