Not Your Typical Heart Disease Story

About some stuff cardiologists don't seem to want to know...

Jan 16, 2025

Let me start by stating that I have huge respect for many cardiologists. Thomas Levy, Stephen Sinatra and Malcolm Kendrick, all cardiologists, are three of my favorite authors. And I’ve followed cardiologist Peter McCullough’s Courageous Discourse from his very early days on Substack. With that said, a lot of folks are likely to view this post as the ultimate medical heresy - questioning the validity of the highest of the high priests in the Most Holy Church of Medical Mysticism.1

Please do me the courtesy of reading this entire post before putting me on trial for apostasy. The following is intended to be critical of the Church (healthcare system) and its doctrines (teachings) - not it’s priests (doctors) and worshipers (patients).

In this post, I will share a personal experience, which to me suggests that there exists a gap in cardiology training, where cardiologists tend to overlook an obvious cause of some (perhaps a majority of?) heart arrhythmias, and focus instead on symptom suppression.

Part of my motivation for sharing this story is because allopaths are often given “expert” status in our society, despite their often brutally barbaric disease treatments (oncologists would be the poster children for this issue) and some very shocking gaps in their knowledge. My story attests to the latter.

With that brief introduction, here we go. This is not your typical heart disease story - it might just blow your mind.

(Please forgive any minor technical inaccuracies. I make no pretense of knowing the fine grained details of precisely what my body was going through. The following is my informed layman’s interpretation of what happened.)

Cracked Teeth

A day or two before Christmas 2014, I lost the top part of one tooth. It wasn’t painful, so there was no need for an emergency trip to a dentist. Which was good, since a lot of dental offices were at that time on holiday schedules. By the time their schedules had returned to normal, I had decided that the broken tooth didn’t need treatment. I had adapted to the initially sharp edges, so I decided to just live with it. It’s important to note that at the same time that this happened, I noticed that EVERY SINGLE TOOTH IN MY MOUTH had cracks! That clearly wasn’t the case a few years earlier when I last saw a dentist. WHY and HOW had that happened?

I’ll return to this subject toward the end of this post, to show how it relates to my heart issues. It is an example of the lengths that your body will go to in order to assure your immediate survival, and of the amazing healing powers of the human body. No doctor can improve on that power: their role in health should be in assisting and complementing the body’s innate healing wisdom.

Severe Arrhythmia

My heart issue first came to my attention in September 2018, when my wife, dog and I had to abruptly leave a close friend whom we were visiting in Idaho. He was battling Stage IV colon cancer, but we had to make a mad dash across country with our teardrop camper to Central Florida, to be with my sister-in-law, who had just received her own Stage IV colon cancer diagnosis.

Along the way, we camped for the night in a small town in Nebraska, and we ate a late meal at a local Mexican restaurant. Later that night, I developed some very uncharacteristic heartburn. I informed my wife (a former nurse), to which she nonchalantly remarked, among other things, that “Heartburn is often the first sign of an impending heart attack.”

To which I thought to myself, “Thanks for that happy thought, honeybunch! As if the heartburn wasn’t enough to keep me wide awake!” But I am always appreciative when people don’t pussyfoot around, and just give it to me straight. I’m not a delicate flower. I won’t wilt if the sun gets too hot.

And forewarned is forearmed.

I managed to get to Florida two days later without having a heart attack, but I was having some very noticeably erratic, pounding heartbeats, and I developed an acute sensitivity to stress. I had to stop drinking coffee and alcohol, and I stopped eating chocolate: any of those would amp up my stress and my symptoms, and keep them amped up for hours afterward. Eventually it became too stressful to even drive in midday traffic, which few people would regard as a stressful environment. Anything that activated my sympathetic nervous system (SNS) - my subconscious fight or flight response - compounded my problems. My stress meter was pegged at the top of the scale - completely maxed out!

Even sleeping was difficult, as it was a huge challenge to find a position where my pounding, erratic heart would calm down. I can understand now why the most common time to die is at four in the morning.

Before long, I was able to get to a doc-in-the-box, where they gave me an EKG. It showed I was having pre-ventricular contractions (PVCs). That means that the heart would misfire and not completely fill the ventricle, and on the following beat it would be engorged with blood from the backlog developed on the previous beat. My heart would really have to bear down HARD in order to expel that extra volume of blood. The longer it did that, the harder it worked; and the more lactic acid that would build up as a result.

THAT was the source of my heartburn: literally, my heart muscle cells were burning in acid! If it happened long enough, it would threaten the calcium signalling of my heart; things could short out and my heart could stop, resulting in sudden cardiac arrest (first symptom: death). They told me I needed to see a cardiologist, ASAP.

Great. We had crappy Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) insurance, and we were out of network. My deductible, thanks to a recent change enacted by the Trump administration, was $17,000. That’s not a typo - Seventeen thousand dollars. And it hardly paid squat after the deductible was met. Whatever was coming, we were going to pay nearly all of it out of pocket!2

“Great,” I thought to myself, “let’s add a little something extra to my mountain of stress!”

That made it interesting to try to see a cardiologist, as the first half dozen flat out refused to see me, due to my sketchy insurance. If they took me on as a patient and I ran out of money, they’d be stuck having to continue to treat me, and none of them wanted another freeloading patient. So I was like a guy with massive clown feet looking for a dance partner. “Sorry, my dance card is full. But you are so thoughtful for asking!”

Eventually we did find a cardiologist, who was about my age, who took the time to have his office get signed up within our insurance network. That basically just meant that I wouldn’t be charged the “rack rate” for procedures (which is the most expensive rate) - I’d get a sizeable discount off of that, due to the insurance. It would still add up to a lot of money.

He and his intern were a bit perplexed by what I presented them with. The new EKG showed the same PVCs, but during the day things tended to calm down a lot, so there weren’t a lot of them and they weren’t the really scary kind. And unlike the typical heart patient, I was in pretty good physical shape, as just prior to visiting our friend in Idaho, I had been in Colorado, bicycling up 10,000+ foot mountain passes for fun.

After a 45 minute exam, the doc hemmed and hawed in trying to conclude what was causing my problem. At least three times he started to pronounce the likely diagnosis, only to stop in mid-sentence when he realized the flaw in his logic. In the end, he offered nothing, and decided to schedule me for a treadmill and Holter Monitor (to record EKGs overnight). The first available appointment was two months out, and I was thinking I wouldn’t last that long. When I asked if it was possible to get an earlier appointment, the glib reply was “The way to the head of the line is through the ER.” Translation: our healthcare system is designed to maximize profitability. Pay up or shut up.

The only really worthwhile part of the appointment was that the doc was gushing about these new tiny EKG devices that had started to hit the market. They recorded accurately, and correctly diagnosed particular rhythm disorders. I decided to buy one, thinking the next time I see him I can show him just how bad things would get at night.

The Missing Clue

Once the EKG device arrived, I sat up in my chair, pressed it to my chest and waited. Thankfully, it chanted rhythmically: “Bloop-bloop, bloop-bloop! Bloop-bloop, bloop-bloop!”

“Whew,” I thought to myself, “a nice, steady rhythm! What a relief!” I listened and smiled for a while, and then decided I wanted to see what was on the device’s tiny screen. So I craned my neck to take a look.

Things instantly went haywire! It pounded out erratically, “BLOOP…bloop, BLOOP, BLOOP…bloop…BLOOP, Bloop!” It seemed as though no two beats were the same anymore!

Rattled by that experience, I sat back up straight in my chair, but it was several minutes before things finally calmed back down.

My little gadget recorded a mess of PVCs from that event! But that was the clue I had been missing: there was something about the position of my neck that set things off. It was my neck position that was making it so hard to get settled down in bed at night.

I immediately consulted Dr. Google (back when he didn’t bury stuff that failed to conform to approved narratives). The top search result was a video on heart disease by chiropractor Dr. John Bergman of Long Beach, California. (Good luck finding that video today.)

“What?,” I thought to myself, “A chiropractor who thinks he knows something about heart disease? Since when?”

Despite my incredulity (and that of my wife), I decided to take a quick look, and am probably only alive today because I did. The video starts with Dr. Bergman saying (I’m paraphrasing from memory here):

“Hey, do you remember those old black and white movies, where there’s a happy, well dressed guy who is whistling while walking down the street, when all of a sudden he stops and yells ‘AArrghh!’, grabs his left arm and drops dead on the sidewalk? Well, that’s caused by a left hand curve of the upper thoracic spine, which interferes with the sympathetic nerve to the heart. If he had grabbed his right arm, it would have been his liver.”

X-ray of a patient with a left hand curve in their upper thoracic spine.

I thought to myself, “Huh? The cause of my problem was that simple? And the cardiologist was completely clueless? And he scheduled me for testing two months out, when this should have been caught in a single office visit?” What Total and COMPLETE Horseshit!!!

I called my sister-in-law’s chiropractor the next day (Friday), and got an appointment for Monday morning. He started treatment that first day. Within ten days I was out of trouble. By the end of three month’s treatment, I was as good as new: problem solved. If I now start to get an occasional PVC, there’s a simple exercise I do to bring my spine back into better alignment. Easy fix.

My wife, the nurse, didn’t think things were going to turn out that way. She understood the severity of my problem and the likely response by the doctors. She envisioned that I would become what is termed in the medical trade a “cardiac cripple.” They KNOW that the treatments that I’d be recommended are a gamble, and the odds are good that they’ll cause me to lose some amount of my quality of life.

They would likely first try ablation, which is literally the act of killing some of your heart nerves (I guess because Mother Nature unwisely gave us too many - isn’t it great that some really, really smart doctors figured that out?).

If your doctor says that ablation is the answer to your problem, I would encourage you to read The Haywire Heart (2023) by Chris Case, John Mandrola, MD (an electrophysiologist) and Lennard Zinn. In it, in relation to exceptionally fit elite athletes, they describe the risks associated with ablation, and the quality of the outcomes. If the procedure doesn’t outright kill you, as happens in a small percentage of cases, you are highly likely to have less capacity for exercise than when you started (there goes some quality of life). Sometimes a LOT less (there goes a lot more quality of life).

Still, if the arrhythmia stops and you are still alive, most patients will perceive that as a win. The doc will let you assume that he saved the day, and you’ll worship him or her as a result: the Cardiac Messiah has saved my life! If you knew there were better alternatives, you might think otherwise. The fact that they would also be a lot safer, faster and cheaper would just be an added cherry on top.

If I had been ablated, since it does not address the CAUSE of any arrhythmia, eventually I would have returned to the cardiologist for additional help. At that point, I’d likely be put on beta blockers for life, which would further diminish my quality of life, plus I’d get to find out what neat side effects they come with (including cardiac death). I’d be alive, but not living the life I wanted or expected. And that is what happens to a LOT of heart patients!

The Winsor Autopsies

Had Dr. John Bergman recently discovered something that nobody else had known previously? Was he some sort of medical savant? Hell, NO! It was figured out at least 100 years ago!

“At the University of Pennsylvania, [in 1921]3 Dr. Henry Winsor conducted an experiment based on chiropractors claim that by adjusting the vertebrae they can relieve stomach troubles, ulcers, menstrual cramps, thyroid conditions, kidney disease, constipation, HEART DISEASE, lung and other diseases. In this experiment he dissected both human and animal cadavers to see if there was any relationship between any diseased internal organs discovered on autopsy and the vertebrae and nerves that went to the organs. Dr. Winsor dissected 75 human and 72 cat cadavers. He found nearly 100% correlation between minor curvatures of the vertebrae and diseases of the internal organs.”4

In my mind, this knowledge is purposely excluded from medical curricula, because the profit from having a heart patient for the remainder of his or her life far exceeds the amount of money that I paid my chiropractor. The medical curricula is geared toward maximizing a physician’s income, not a patient’s outcome. You probably should read that last sentence enough times to firmly commit it to memory: it explains why our healthcare system is as sad as it currently is.

So, if you are a heart patient, what do you think now of the guy who thought killing part of your heart was such a great idea?

But wait, there’s more…

Sleep Apnea

Concurrent with my heart issues, my wife noticed that while I slept I would at times stop breathing. She informed me that I had sleep apnea, yet another potentially life-altering diagnosis. Anyone who wears a sleep apnea mask at night would love to find a way to escape that prison. Probably for 90% of those people, I suspect the answer resides in correcting misalignments of their spine, particularly the thoracic spine. Once my heart issues resolved, so did my sleep apnea. No extra effort, and no extra charge!

Seasonal Allergies

A side effect of correcting my spinal alignment was that my seasonal allergies, which I had experienced for 50 years, pretty much stopped. Also, no extra charge! It’s rare that I have any problems today. And when grass pollen is particularly bad, if I do get symptoms, they are easily manageable with a low dose of over-the-counter diphenhydramine (a common and inexpensive OTC antihistamine). I believe I had heard somewhere that the cause of seasonal allergies resides in the cervical spine, not the thoracic spine.

Cracked Teeth, Revisited

In 2020, I returned to the dentist. I had last seen her in 2017, when she documented my mouthful of cracked teeth (which completely baffled her), crowned a few of them and recommended several more crowns in the future. But after examining me on this visit, she declared that everything was fine, and none of my teeth needed to be crowned! My teeth were no longer cracked!

That seems like a real head-scratcher, doesn’t it? My teeth, which cracked “for no apparent reason,” had spontaneously healed themselves, “for no apparent reason!”

As I already said, I believe this is clear evidence of the amazing healing power of the human body. To put it in the words of D.D. Palmer, the founder of chiropractic:

“The Power that made the body, heals the body.”

Back in 2018, when I had an erratic heart rhythm and “heartburn,” what was happening was that my body was stealing the resources from my teeth (and likely elsewhere in my body) that it needed to keep my heart beating. It was taking nutrients from areas that could survive without them in the short term, and reallocating them to maintain those functions most critical to my immediate survival - keeping my heart beating. This is a classic example of Bruce Nathan Ames’ Triage Theory of Disease: The body always rations scarce nutrients by giving priority to functions necessary for your immediate survival. Everything else gets put on hold, until there are sufficient extra nutrients to be distributed to fulfill the other less critical needs. In his view, most chronic disease is caused by some combination of nutrient deficiencies or insufficiencies, plain and simple.

Atrial Fibrillation

According to Dr. John Bergman, atrial fibrillation can also be caused by a spinal alignment problem. In addition to the sympathetic nerve to the heart being irritated where it exits the spine, the heart’s parasympathetic nerve is irritated where it exits the cervical spine. The two problems in combination cause the flutter which is typical of atrial fibrillation.

Atrial Fibrillation can also be caused by an electrolyte imbalance. “Electrolyte imbalance” is code for a nutrient insufficiency, in this case one of the electrolytes: the minerals sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium, plus chloride (the negatively charged form of the mineral chlorine), phosphate (the mineral phosphorus, plus hydrogen and oxygen) and bicarbonate (the mineral carbon, plus hydrogen and oxygen). It’s worth noting that potassium is often over-abundant in today’s crops, due to the widespread use of chemical fertilizers composed of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (especially true for the main crops used in processed foods - corn and wheat). Conversely, magnesium deficiency is widespread, in part because there is erratic distribution around the planet: in some areas it is very common, while other places are virtual magnesium deserts. I won’t opine on how any of this relates to atrial fibrillation. But if you want to figure it out for yourself, those are your clues.5 A lot of atrial fibrillation not due to a nerve issue can be resolved with dietary changes that resolve nutrient deficiencies or insufficiencies.

Heart Failure

Around May 2023, my wife noticed that I had bilateral swelling in my feet. With the acute stress that my heart had been through, it was likely that I was in the beginning phase of heart failure. It looked as though I had an inadequate ejection fraction in my heart’s ventricle, which was impairing my blood’s ability to circulate. Thus it was pooling in my feet, causing them to swell.

By doing my own research, I dodged yet another bullet here, thanks to Dr. Stephen Sinatra’s book, The Sinatra Solution: Metabolic Cardiology (2015). He explains how when placed under extreme stress, the body will put some cells in a sort of hibernation, because there are insufficient resources to maintain all the cells.6 His book details the nutrients that are necessary to wake up dormant heart muscle cells from their prolonged slumber: Co-Q10, L-carnitine, and magnesium, plus D-ribose, a special sugar utilized by heart muscle cells. I took the supplements for a while and the bilateral swelling ended, so I presume that they were able to awaken my dormant heart muscle cells. My ability to regulate heat while pedaling a bicycle uphill improved fairly dramatically afterward, which is the clearest indication what my heart failure was behind me.

The Cause

By now, you might be wondering what caused the left hand curve in my thoracic spine, putting me at risk of sudden cardiac arrest?

Around 2005 or so, I had become interested in bicycle hill climbing. Despite never before having been a competitive athlete, I decided that I wanted to see if I could be the fastest 50-59 year old in the annual Bogus Basin Hill Climb, a race of 15 miles into the Boise Foothills north of Boise, Idaho.7

In August 2010, while descending on a training ride, a combination of unfortunate events led to my having to veer off of Bogus Basin Road. To avoid crashing into a concrete Jersey barrier and getting flung off a steep, rocky cliff to my likely death, or getting run over by oncoming traffic, I was trying to panic stop by skidding along the drainage ditch on one side of the road, when my front wheel hit deep sand. That stopped the wheel instantly, and the bike and I immediately pivoted over the front axle, and I landed very hard, flat on the left side of my back. Luckily there were no sharp rocks where I landed, or things would have been very ugly. And a lot more painful.

It totally rang my bell, knocked the wind out of me and destroyed a new $200 bicycle helmet. I shook it off, and after a few minutes continued home. But I was 5 miles down the road before the cobwebs fully cleared.

I never did see a doctor. When my mother saw the massive contusion she was mortified - it was a very nasty, deep and very colorful bruise. But it never really caused any pain, though afterward I did end up having some backache whenever I would ride 30 or more miles, caused by my back being out of line. I was clueless then that it was due to the accident, but I did eventually figure that out (like I usually do with most things).

The author, at age 53, “towing” a small pack of younger cyclists up Bogus Basin Road. Simon, the guy on my left in white, was 30 years my junior!

Recommendation

Based upon my personal experience, I believe that anyone with a heart arrhythmia or sleep apnea should be referred first to a corrective chiropractor for evaluation (the fact that insurance will usually not cover such an evaluation is criminal). When it can be verified that such problems are caused by structural deviations of the spine, the vast majority of times they can be corrected, avoiding invasive surgery and/or drugs-for-life. If a person’s arrhythmia is acute, which might suggest that any delay in finding a solution could be problematic, I believe giving them IV magnesium will likely buy them the time needed to get an emergency evaluation. Magnesium is said to be anti-thrombotic, meaning that it reduces clotting. It is needed in over 600 enzymatic cellular reactions and is a key mineral in the production of ATP, the energy currency of our cells. If you have a clearly noticeable, pounding heartbeat, getting sufficient magnesium will allow your heart to relax and eventually your heartbeat will fade back into the background, rather than feeling as though it will pound right out of your chest.

A study of heart attack victims found that those given 5 grams of IV magnesium greatly improved their odds of being alive 5 years later: magnesium is a very big deal! If you’ve looked at the results of some old blood work that says your blood magnesium levels are fine, it does NOT mean that magnesium levels in your cells are also fine. Your body maintains blood magnesium in a very tight range, and it is only off when things are pretty dire.

There’s no easy way to measure cellular levels of magnesium, and scarfing down random magnesium supplements will not assure you are getting enough magnesium (though it will help to some degree). The fastest way to improve cellular magnesium levels, short of getting it by IV, is for it to be absorbed through the skin, either from magnesium oil or soaking in a bath of magnesium chloride flakes.8

Conclusion

My crash happened in mid 2010. The first clear indication that something was wrong was my cracked teeth in late 2014. And it took another four years before I was in a full blown crisis. It only took three months to fix things, and sometime within the following two years, my body miraculously managed to fix my cracked teeth.

If I had gone to my dentist back in 2014 when I cracked that first tooth, I probably would have ended up with a mouthful of crowns, none of which were necessary once it became evident what was causing them to crack (depletion of minerals). How much a mouthful of crowns would have affected my future health is unknowable, but I still feel like I dodged a bullet on that one, as well. At a minimum, I saved a lot of money by waiting.

I have friends who are absolutely certain that I could not possibly be right about any of this, that if my issue had been that easy to fix, the cardiologist would have done so. I either had a lousy cardiologist (I didn’t), I’m just completely full of shit (I’m not) or I’ve greatly exaggerated my symptoms and the possible consequences thereof (I haven’t). What happened to my teeth before and after this event is direct evidence supporting the latter. But I’d rather be alive and healthy, and have people not believe me, than to be dead. There’s simply no contest there.

My visit to the chiropractor permanently resolved my heart arrhythmia, sleep apnea and seasonal allergies, and saved me from the fate of being a “cardiac cripple.” The cost of my treatment was $3,000 (I opted for the deluxe package, considering how much the treadmill and Holter monitor were going to set me back), though I suspect my issues could have been resolved for around half that amount. My little EKG device set me back $80. The cardiologist cost me $550, and the doc-in-the-box was a few hundred.

Likely because of the specialization of allopathic medicine, an obvious cause of severe heart problems is largely ignored. Cardiologists stick to the heart, neurologists stick to the nerves, orthopedists stick to the bones: all three were part of my heart disease puzzle. These specialties are siloed, and inexplicably don’t seem to be interested in areas of jurisdictional overlap (perhaps to prevent a competing specialty from taking home the paycheck?). And that is to the detriment of many of the 700,000 patients who die each year from the leading cause of death in the United States: heart disease.

Postscript

The book that I believe does the best job of explaining the cause of the majority of heart problems, including mine, was written not by a cardiologist, but by chiropractor Dr. Stephen Hussey: Understanding the Heart (2022). And much of his work was based upon a book by Dr. Thomas Cowan (who was trained in anthroposophic medicine): Human Heart, Cosmic Heart (2016). In the latter, he shows that the heart functions not as a pump, but more like a hydraulic ram. And he explains how the heart cannot create the force needed to circulate blood out to the capillaries and back again - that it is a recently discovered fourth phase of water that supplies the energy needed for vascular blood to flow against gravity (in tandem with muscular contractions and one way valves), in much the same way that sap can travel to the top of a 300-foot Sequoia tree.9

If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing for free. Since these posts are mostly built around personal anecdotes, I have limited supply to offer. My plan is to try to share one roughly every week until I run out of ideas.