Is bringing changes in the diet and lifestyle better than angioplasty?

Dr. Mimi Guarneri is an interventional cardiologist who directs a reversing-heart-disease program, based on my work, at the Scripps Clinic and Hospital in La Jolla, California. She spends part of her time performing angioplasties and part of her time teaching her patients how to change their lifestyle.

"I recently gave a lecture to a large group of cardiologists," she told me. "At first, I talked with them about radioactive stents, a wire mesh designed to keep angioplastied arteries open by exposing them to high doses of localized radiation. Although it's a new, totally unproven method with the possibility of highly toxic long-term side effects, the cardiologists just loved the idea of these radioactive stents. They couldn’t wait to try them. In the second half of my presentation I talked about our lifestyle program. Even though we have twenty years of randomized controlled trial data supporting your program, the cardiologists got so skeptical and even hostile to the idea that patients could change their lifestyle and that emotions play a role in health and illness that many left the room."

Along the same lines, about two years ago I gave a lecture to more than five thousand cardiologists who make their living performing angioplasty - about why diet and lifestyle may sometimes be a better choice than angioplasty. Not exactly the most receptive audience. I was introduced by the director of the conference, Dr. Martin Leon, an internationally admired interventional cardiologist, who said, "You're probably wondering why I invited Dean Ornish to speak at a conference on aggressive interventional cardiology. Well, because his program is aggressive interventional cardiology of a different type."

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