Surprise! Surprise! Stress can cause heart attacks!
In a discovery of cosmic significance, it has just been proved scientifically that men are more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes after enduring great stress. Didn’t we already know this? Apparently not. Let me explain…
Organisations such as the British Heart Foundation (BHF) have until now claimed that ‘there is no evidence to suggest that stress causes coronary heart disease or heart attacks’ saying instead that: ‘Some people cope with stress with destructive behaviour – such as smoking, drinking too much alcohol and overeating. These increase your risk of cardiovascular disease.’ In other words stress itself is not really a standalone cause of cardiovascular disease, but can make you more susceptible to some of the known risk factors of obesity, lack of exercise, cholesterol and smoking.
The BHF may now have to revise that view because the men in white coats at University College London (UCL) seemed to have proved otherwise. The high priests of our so-called ‘evidence-based society’ (aka scientists) have finally proved that the stress hormone cortisol (which can lead to narrowing of the arteries) is raised during stress and the volunteers in whom this happened were more likely to have furred arteries. This suggests strongly that stress should join obesity, family history, smoking, lack of exercise, high blood pressure, diabetes and raised cholesterol as a risk factor for heart attacks and strokes.
So what can we do about this? To the understandable (if unforgivable) horror of dairy farmers, a heart surgeon who really understands the meaning of the term ‘medical authority’, has recommended that we ban butter! (sic) Good idea Mr Shyam Kolveka! As a Provocative Therapist I can only applaud doctors for using their superior intelligence, education and status in society to assert their inherent authoritarianism and to influence legislators to coerce people into health!
After banning butter, we should ration red meat, imprison and torture cigarette manufacturers (we cannot afford to lose the tax on tobacco at this point in time), make fat people pay more tax (and certainly higher air fares) and use cow prodders to shock the selfishly lazy into exercising. Government-provided exercise bikes linked to the interenet will be assessed by the Inland Revenue in relation to your tax bill as CPD (Continual Physiological Development) discounts are used to ‘incentivise healthy living’. Finally, all teetotallers should be force fed 2 units of alcohol a day because this has been proved to reduce the risk of heart attacks! Sorry if that offends anyone but Science Rules – okay?
And what about stress? I hear that the government is about to jump into action to help us become less stressful. Later this week Premier Gordon Brown and Health Minister Mike O’Brien (persuaded by a medical quango comprising Edzard Ernst, Ben Goldacre, Michael Baum and David Colquhoun) will announce that there will be free evening Autogenic Therapy (a proven form of stress proofing and stress releasing) at every general practice in Britain – not.
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Comments
You think this was a waste of money? This research has practical value. There are people that have spent lifetimes in universities trying to prove that 1+1 ≠ 2.
Swift describes how scientists can waste time and money in Gulliver’s Travels: “The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor’s gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me “to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.” I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them.”
Clearly the main thing that money should not be wasted on is research into CAM because we KNOW homeopathy can’t possibly work.
So how much did this research into the bleedin obvious cost us Taxpayers? Still it is reassuring to know that some group of scientists are now less stressed having managed to secure funding into an area that my granny could have probably informed them of the outcome. Hurrah