How to Keep Your Heart From Killing You | Michael Rocha | TEDxNewBedford

so I just finished my walk-around Buttonwood park and I was headed back to my car when I spotted Ken Ken's 50 years old and he'd never been health-conscious since I had known him so seeing him out for a walk was a little unusual I didn't expect what he was going to tell me next last May he was driving to work and all of a sudden he started to develop a severe squeezing sensation in his chest he couldn't breathe he felt like he was going to vomit and he started to have drenching sweats he knew he was having a heart attack and somehow despite all those symptoms he was able to drive himself to the hospital and the first thing that he thought about when he got to the hospital was about his three sons being fatherless within a day he had open-heart surgery to bypass severe blockages in his heart and Ken it had had been given his second chance unlike his father who passed away at age 51 of a massive heart attack ken was now making the most of his second chance now as a cardiologist I know that we've made some incredible advances in the care of heart disease over the last several years if your heart loses its beat we can pace it if you have a severe blockage we can bypass it or we can put a stent in if the pump becomes weak we can actually put a device that can help it pump and we can even replace a failing heart with another heart our ability to treat heart disease has changed certain death into a day or two in the hospital but we still lose far too many people in the prime of their life so how can we keep your heart from killing you is it really only pills and procedures is that the only thing that we have to offer now in the last several years we've learned a great deal about the importance of lifestyle through many studies we learned that being sedentary was twice as deadly as being obese and the researchers in that study suggested that just 20 minutes a day could significantly reduce your risk of death in another study we learned that four out of five heart attacks could be prevented with very simple things eating healthy exercising not smoking and maintaining a normal waistline a Mediterranean diet which is rich in vegetables fruits nuts olive oil fish beans and whole grains while limiting sugar dairy and red meat was shown to reduce the risk of heart and vascular disease by 30 percent and we also learn that you're five times more likely to have a heart attack in the two hours after an angry encounter so you have to ask yourself is it really worth that last argument with you had to someone so we've learned the great importance of how lifestyle affects our heart health yet too often I hear from other doctors that people won't change their habits I disagree this is me this is me in medical training and to think that seven years before that picture was taken I was the starting point guard on a state championship basketball team at New Bedford High School driven the ball up and down the court at the Boston Garden that person there couldn't dribble a basketball without getting short of breath and it took a wake-up call from one of my mentors as a cardiology fellow and that looked at me one day he said you know you're fat and how are you going to be able to take care of how are you going to be able to talk to your patients about living healthy if you're not and you know what he's completely right I wasn't living it so I started to eat half of my portion sizes and I started exercising more and my weight went from 230 pounds to 180 over a couple years and now I'm finally down 250 pounds however the other thing that I was struggling with was with my stress and stress is something that doctors as doctors we don't usually like to talk about but it's something that's very important you know we usually push on and we oftentimes don't take care of ourselves and I'm not alone about 50% of doctors are actually burned out and if we're going to take better care of our patients we need to be able to take better care of ourselves I didn't have the tools in the toolbox at that point in order to deal with my stress and it was affecting every part of my life I was surviving my weekdays and crashing into my weekends and this kept repeating itself with no end in sight fortunately a vacation to San Diego where I met this man changed my life John Pierre marks is a behavioral and spiritual therapist artist health and wellness instructor and a grand master of martial arts he introduced himself while I was looking at some of his art and after speaking with him he gave me his book wake up to life when I read this book on the plane flight back to Boston I realized there was a lot more to well-being that I had learned just in medical school and those that had known me known the old me would be surprised to find out that I was studying such things as mindfulness yoga and healthy eating so it was at this point that I realized that the fog had lifted and this painting in my home of John Pierre mocks marks when I change from surviving to living and we've become great friends and he continues to impart wisdom so the fog had lifted I could now see that heart disease could be preventable through lifestyle and I was trying to do that myself scripts in the office were being written for healthy eating yoga meditation exercise and laughing and I kept going in this direction because patients were actually doing it they were quitting smoking they were losing weight they were exercising and overall happier one patient looked at me and said so what you're trying to tell me is that we should be eating from farms not factories she really got it I was learning that being a heart doctor was a lot more than treating the physical heart it was about helping patients realize that they are their own best doctors dan is a vice president of a major corporation who's a self-proclaimed workaholic he was working long hours overseas on a project and not taking care of himself he was eating fast food and his clothes were no longer fitting him he wasn't sleeping and he wasn't exercising and he had none of the typical risk factors for heart disease he didn't have diabetes he didn't have high cholesterol and he didn't have hypertension but one night he started to develop severe squeezing chest discomfort but of course it couldn't be a heart attack because he had none of those risk factors he kept brushing it off but when it wouldn't go away he had his friend take him to the nearby hospital where the tests suggested that he was hat in the midst of having a major heart attack but he still wouldn't believe it so he actually had placed a phone call to me before he would undergo any procedures and that was the longest second opinion of my career 8,000 miles away I was on the phone with another cardiologist and Dan discussing what was going on it was clear he needed to have a stent placed and that was done and he had almost no heart damage when he returned to the United States he came to my office and put this down on my desk and he said this caused my heart attack this r2d2 USB charger was the project he was working on when he wasn't taking care of himself and he had his heart attack he blamed his unhealthy lifestyle and his stress as the cause of his heart attack and he was on all the right medications but he still wasn't in balance and during that visit we talked about eating vegetables reducing the amount of sugar exercising more and sleeping more and he did all these things into the shortness of breath that he had after his heart attack resolved and he's had no further chest discomfort he realized that his life is more important than r2d2 however we shouldn't have to wait for a wake-up call an emergency like that this article was in the local newspaper New Bedford was one of the least healthy places in the state of Massachusetts to grow older and a large part of that was because of heart disease this problem was a lot larger than could be tackled one-on-one in the office this is when I started to think more like a coach than as a doctor and laced up the sneakers on the first Saturday in April of 2014 we had a wellness walk around Buttonwood Park at this two-mile walk we had people from all over our community including people that have had heart attacks stents open-heart surgery and it was this weekend that the New Bedford wellness initiative was born with the mission to raise health awareness prevent disease and recover from illness social media actually was a great platform as Facebook proved the easy way to get information out quickly we're able to let people know where the farmers markets were where there was exercise where there was yoga meditation healthy restaurants we also started to have community sponsored events such as hosting health documentaries and national speakers like dr. Don Berwick from the Institute of Healthcare Improvement we also because last year is we all remember around about two feet of snow we moved our walks into the mall so we kept our momentum going and the group was starting to take on a personality of its own this is Cesar Cesar's pretty much a celebrity of our group he's a person that struggled with his weight and underwent gastric bypass a few years ago he now gets up almost every morning and before work he walks six or seven miles a day and he shares these posts on Facebook Caesars not only decreased his risk of having a heart attack he's been an incredible inspiration for others in the group to change their habits Loretta LaRoche is a friend of mine she's a humourist stress specialist motivational speaker and author who's been participating in our group since it began with her humor and wisdom on our Facebook group and also through workshops what we have to realize is the value of humor is undervalued and she really is the doctor of laughter medicine for us in that spirit we've tried not to take ourselves too seriously and we've had tie-dye yoga Fridays at the hospital at Red Nose days in the office and like I talked about before it's really hard to have an angry encounter that can increase your risk of having a heart attack if you're laughing or smiling over the last month we've actually had the opportunity to take the next step and we've started a wellness program at the local Boys and Girls Club with free programs in aerobics nutrition smoking cessation meditation we've also learned that it's important for us to grow we need to partner with other groups and we've been able to partner with the national walk with a doc and tomorrow will be our next walk we've also partnered with the 100 million healthier lives movement which has a bold goal to improve the lives of a hundred million people by 2020 so this is our prescription in New Bedford to hopefully prevent you from having to see a cardiologist it's pretty simple but the data suggests it's effective walk eat healthy laugh often and live now and this slide was designed by my friend and patient Mike and Mike is somebody that I met several years after his heart attack but in the last few years Mike has increased his walking he practices yoga and meditation and he's so proud of his healthy cooking that he shares it on Facebook with us Mike's been able to transform his life and prevent himself from having another heart attack I'm grateful for the opportunity to return to my hometown and practice medicine and share these stories with you which motivate me every day we're building a community in New Bedford that is taking one step at a time to prevent heart disease soak in your community get moving get healthy and be well thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 26,121

Rating: 4.87251 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Health, Community, Heart health, Medicine, Public health

Id: FW4iMnZwUeA

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2015