Supplements to increase your heart efficiency and improve heart function

Many nutrients are important for heart health. In six weeks, these treatments may increase your heart efficiency and often improve heart function, lessening the angina.

For Chest Wall/Muscle Pain — Willow bark and Boswellia

Willow bark and Boswellia may be very helpful for most kinds of inflammatory pain. They increase in effectiveness over the first week of use and then even more over 6 weeks. Though often helpful with the first dose, they are more effective over time to help eliminate the problem.

Coenzyme Q10

If on cholesterol-lowering medications, be sure to take Coenzyme Q10 (at least 200 mg a day). These medications deplete this nutrient, and the Coenzyme Q10 deficiency can cause fatigue and muscle pain followed by heart failure — which the doctor will blame on your heart disease. Your doctor means well, but no one is paying to be sure they learn about this.

FOR CHEST WALL/MUSCLE PAIN:
Medications

Tylenol

Tylenol is OK to use for the pain, but aspirin related medications like Ibuprofen can cause stomach irritation or ulcers and actually worsen the chest pain over time.

Lidoderm patches

Lidoderm patches (like Novocaine in a patch) by prescription are excellent. Put the patch(es) over the painful area for 16 hours a day (though the box says 12 hours). They may start to work in 1/2 hour, but give them two weeks to become optimally effective.

Other Therapies & Advice

Hot compress

If the pain is chest wall tenderness, a hot compress for up to 20 minutes 4x times a day can help the muscle relax.

Relax your chest muscles

Learning to relax your chest muscles (we may keep them tight during stress) can be very helpful.

Hot baths

A hot bath also helps.

FOR ANGINA PAIN:

Follow your physician’s advice for this important problem. Other natural options to consider which may help heal the problem include:

External counter-pulsation

This safe and simple technique helps your heart to grow new blood vessels to bypass the old blocked ones naturally (visit the American Heart Association website for more on external counterpulsation). The economics didn’t work (invasive cardiology like surgery is one of the biggest revenue centers in most hospitals) and it has been slow to catch on. Fortunately, many health insurers will pay for the treatment.

Intravenous chelation

This series of intravenous treatments was found to markedly decrease angina in studies in the 1950’s, and was used without going through the usual placebo controlled studies. Because of this, it became very controversial, with many natural physicians using it and standard practitioners attacking them for this. It is very safe (safer than aspirin) but costs over $5,000 for the series of injections (not covered by insurance). A placebo controlled trial is underway to test its effectiveness. However, many people have had wonderful results with it, so it should be considered before having non-emergency heart bypass surgery performed.