ANGINA/REDUCING THE RISK: THE RIGHT SORT OF EXERCISE
If you have angina, advice to exercise more probably seems ludicrous. After all, doesn’t exercise do precisely what you wish to avoid—bring on the pain? And isn’t rest important for your heart? Look what happened to James Fixx!
As you saw in chapter 1, James Fixx was actually a success story. He probably gave himself an extra twenty years of life before he succumbed to heart disease, and he might well have lived even longer if he had heeded his warning signs and sought medical help.
The fact is that the news about exercise for heart patients is all good. Exercise is good for you, even if your heart has been damaged by a previous heart attack. This will surprise many older people, who remember the days when heart patients were advised to rest all the time, and became chair-bound or bedridden on the advice of their doctors. When I was a medical student in the early 1960s, victims of heart attacks were kept in bed for between six and twelve weeks.
The idea was that if you rested the heart until the scar of the attack healed, the scar would be stronger and smaller, and the eventual recovery would be better. From then on, though, the patient was expected to lead a quiet life.
This “advice was left over from the Victorian age, when it was fashionable to “take to your bed.” From the mid-1850s right up to the 1960s, people recovering from illnesses and operations were sent to convalescent homes where they rested and lazed around until they were better. It sometimes took a very long time. Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale spent many years languishing in bed during the daytime, suffering from “neurasthenia” or “nervous exhaustion.”
This attitude to rest, and advice against exercise, turned many people into “cardiac cripples.” They were told they were delicate, and must not overexert themselves. All sorts of activities were forbidden to them, including walking up stairs, running, and lovemaking.
None of this advice was based on fact. Some eminent physician had once decreed that this was the way to behave if you were a heart patient, and everyone believed the advice and followed it.
Not today, though. It is now known that the more you use an organ, the more effective it becomes, and the heart is no exception even when it is affected by atheroma. It needs to be stimulated to keep strong. If the heart works at resting pace all the time, then it makes it difficult to step up a gear when that is needed.
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Tags: General health