Natural Way To Keep Your Heart Healthy

The Times of India,
Oct 21, 2003
Sanjay M. John

Gone are the days when a patient used to lose hope the moment he was diagnosed heart ailment. While super drugs and miracle surgery have an answer to such ailments in the allopathy today, the ancient system of medicine and Homoeopathy too have several drugs to offer and, have their own ways of tackling various types of cardiac disorders, hypertension and high level of lipids.

The naturopaths school of experts, on the other hand, advocates a more effective weapon (along with medical treatment of course) in regular intake of carrots and also calcium. Plenty of love and compassion has, however, no substitute for, the heart patients. Lucknow based International Institute for Herbal Research (IIHR) headed by Dr Narendra Singh has come out with a drug which is, in fact, combination of four medicinal plants. The drug 'Heart Care' has been clinically tested and tried in over 350 cardiac patients since 1996 and, has worked well even in the cases which have undergone bypass surgery It also helped in regulating hypertension as well as the lipid profile. Overall 80 per cent patients responded well to the formulation.

The formulation consists of Terminalia (Arjun), Moringa Pterygosperma (Sahjan), Nardostachysjatamansi (Jatamansij and Sapindustrifoliatus (Reetha). While Arjun and Sahijan are anti-hypertensive and have been shown experimentally to reduce heart rate and blood pressure, Jatamansi is an anti-arrhythmic and Reetha is a coronary dilator. All the four when put together in the form of Heart Care drug cure dislipidemia (increased cholesterol) in patients and thus gives complete protection to cardiovascular system and supports the treatment of conditions like hypertension, myocardial infarction, angina and other coronary diseases, Dr Singh claimed.

In confirmed cases of heart disease on cardiovascular drugs Heart Care was given in the above mentioned conditions and their allopathic medicines were' gradually tapered and even stopped and all the above conditions improved markedly, he pointed out. In some cases where after angioplasty and stenting, occlusion of coronary arteries occurred and the TMT became positive, use of Heart Care produced negative TMT with marked improvement of the patients' condition. The findings have been presented at the international forum. The group of researchers led by Dr Singh compared the results with anti-dislipidemic drug like Simvastatin and they found significant reduction in lipid profile. Heart Care was found more effective than Simvastatin, Dr Singh claimed.

Dr Singh, an allopath-turned-herbalogist, during his stint at the erstwhile King Georges Medical College (KGMC), has done extensive work on medicinal plants and, is an authority in the research on hypertension besides other areas.

(The author is a free lance writer)