Our guest on this episode of Backstage with Bill Walton is Bill’s cardiologist Dr. Joshua Yamamoto who has some startling and optimistic things to say about our heart health.
“There is almost no such thing as heart disease: it’s just natural aging and you can manage it,” declares Josh. “We now look at aging not just as a bag of diseases, but as a process.”
While health issues are not normally among our Show topics, unlike our polarized politics, our personal health is something we can actually do something about.
The biology of aging is no longer mysterious. If we start paying attention when we are young, heart and blood vessel health is knowable, measurable, and manageable.
In You Can Prevent a Stroke, Dr. Joshua Yamamoto and Dr. Kristin Thomas help us understand what we can do, and what we can ask of our doctors, to manage the effects of aging on our circulation so that we do not have a stroke.
Josh Yamamoto is one of America’s leading cardiologists with a degree in physics from Princeton University and who trained at Dartmouth Medical School, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, National Naval Medical Center and Georgetown University. He was the cardiology consultant to the US Congress and Director of Cardiac Imaging and served in Kuwait as the theater cardiologist for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Old school” medicine said that if something isn’t broken, don’t fix it. A great emphasis was placed on symptoms. What are your complaints? If you don’t have a complaint, then all must be well. Not necessarily.
To keep your brain (and yourself as a whole) healthy, you need to know the answers to the questions:
1. What is the actual health of my heart and circulation?
2. What can I do, or what can I do differently, to keep my circulation working as safely and efficiently as possible?
Fundamentally, these are the only questions you need to ask. The questions are simple, but the answers are different for every one of us.
“The leading cause of death is supposedly heart disease. And I always roll my eye at that notion because heart disease isn't simply one thing. It's like if you take your car to the mechanic, and he says, "Oh, I know what's wrong. You have engine trouble." Really? How did that help? So, you have to understand what are all the processes affecting the heart.”
“A famous bioethicist once said that there is no meaningful life after the age of 75, so why should anyone go to the doctor after that point?”
“In my practice, I can spend an entire day and see no patient younger than 90. And they are active and healthy, and enjoying life. I have 96-year-olds still wearing suits to the office. I have a 106-year-old complaining that no one will dance with her. I have an 89-year-old who wanted a stress test to make sure he could keep up with his new girlfriend (who in fact is older than he). I prescribe plenty of Viagra.”
This is just a sampling of Josh’s original thinking, deep insights and humor. Listen in and learn how to anticipate, navigate and manage the aging process.
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This was an incredibly helpful interview, thank you