In 1983 there were approximately 600 thousand angioplasty procedures performed in the United States.

The process entails snaking a tube through a vessel in the groin up to the heart and eventually into the blocked artery of the heart. Then an attempt is made to remove the blockage. Some catheters attempt to shave away the plaque and hopefully it will not shave through the wall and probably cause death. Shavers are not too popular now.

Another way is to use a balloon. Once the catheter is next to the plaque, it is inflated and the fat is "squashed" up against the wall in the hope that it will stay there. It is also hoped that the balloon will not blow out the wall of the artery. Lasers are another type of catheter. The premise is that the laser can bum out the plaque and hopefully not bum out the artery wall. These are not too popular at present.

The "squasher" is the most popular at present because it is the most lucrative to hospitals and the easiest for physicians. Hospitals can do thousands of the procedures without needing the outlay of major funds for open-heart procedures. If you run into trouble, out comes the helicopter and whisks you to a hospital that does major open-heart surgery. As you can imagine, pushing fat up against the wall does not work too well. So, frequently, weekly, monthly or even yearly, you may need the procedure done again, at $25,000 to $30,000 thousand dollars per hospital stay.

A small minority of physicians has always questioned the coronary bypass operation. As time passes, this skepticism is becoming more wide-spread. For instance, eminent heart specialists Dr. Michael Debakey, Dr. Nicholas Kouchoukos and Dr. Donald Harrison, have publicly stated that this operation is probably overused and that patients with less advanced heart disease have a better chance of survival being handled medically, rather than surgically.

Even more recently, Dr. Richard Ross, Dean of John Hopkins University Medical School, has said that one-fourth of the coronary bypass operations are based on incorrect assumptions by patients that they would be less likely to have a heart attack or die suddenly after such surgery is performed.

Even angioplasty experts say that 60% or more of the angioplasties are unnecessary!

It should be noted, however, that if there is a general atherosclerotic condition, surgery is not really effective because all of the entire circulatory system is not affected, whereas in chelation therapy, the entire system is treated.

It should also be realized that chelation therapy frequently eliminates the necessity of by-pass surgery and certainly is an option to be considered before angioplasty.