reverse heart disease in 4 steps

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going after the cause

The idea came to him while learning bypass surgery in medical school in the late ’70s.

“At first, it was exciting and dramatic to cut people open and ‘cure’ them,” he says. “But then they’d go home, eat the same unhealthy food, and never exercise; their arteries would clog up and they’d be back for more surgery—an incomplete approach. I wanted to understand the underlying cause, and treat it, so I designed and monitored a study. As a second-year medical student, you try things you wouldn’t do if you knew better!”

The medical profession scoffed, until the results were in. In his studies of people with severe cardiac disease on his new program, 90 percent realized an immediate and permanent end to angina—something surgery hadn’t been able to accomplish. They no longer needed massive doses of drugs. Their lives were improved and medical bills cut.

“At the time it was a radical idea. Now it’s mainstream,” Ornish says. Hospitals all over the country have adopted his teachings, and Medicare recently validated it as a means of reversing the mounting costs of cardiac disease—“a real breakthrough,” he says.