Would you believe that doctors and hospitals are the third leading cause of death in America? Only cancer and heart disease take more lives annually (and stress drives both).

How can this be? Aren’t doctors the ones to call and aren’t hospitals the places to go when we’re ill? Perhaps so-but as medical research indicates-we do so at considerable risk.

Dr. Barbara Starfield of the John Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health published her research findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), findings that show clearly that America’s health care system can be dangerous to our health. Here’s how dangerous: 12,000 people die annually from unnecessary surgery; 27,000 people from hospital errors; 80,000 from hospital infections, and 106,000 people from drug side-effects. This sad state of affairs costs the American taxpayer $77 billion annually.

Drug Side Effects Are A Scandal

You’ve seen the TV ads right, for drugs for make believe diseases like “erectile dysfunction”. At the end of the ad there’s sweet music in the background while someone tells you if you have an erection for more than four hours go to your nearest hospital. More seriously, listen to the side effect warning for drugs that include liver failure, heart failure and stroke, among others. Well these “side effects” as they are euphemistically called-actually happen. And they do kill people in significant numbers.

The drug side-effect deaths are especially scandalous because drug companies throw a ton of money around to gain influence over doctors, universities and even the FDA. They do this to make even more money selling Americans drugs, dangerous drugs they often don’t really need.

According to a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the drug review process does not ensure that harmful medications won’t be approved for public consumption. The approval review for new drugs cannot be trusted when the reviewers are being paid by the companies making the drugs. These same companies spend billions of dollars marketing and promoting their drugs to physicians, physicians who too often fall prey to the marketing hype or to the financial rewards they get from a company for prescribing its drugs.

Greed and Manipulative Marketing

The drug company Pfizer, for example, was forced to pay $425 million plus in 2004 to settle unfair marketing charges. Pfizer marketed the drug Neurontin, by, among other things, flying medical doctors to high end resorts and paying other physicians to ghostwrite articles hyping the drug.

Even more worrisome is that Dr. Starfield cautions us that her findings are very conservative because they involve numbers from “in hospital” patients only. Moreover, her figures are “death only” statistics; they don’t include a tally of people who’ve been harmed or disabled, in or out of the hospital, while under medical care.

Protect Yourself-Take Action

The good news is that you can take steps to protect yourself from becoming a health care statistic. First you need to stop thinking of your physician as Yoda-as some all knowing being whose advice you can passively follow. Many physicians are outraged at what’s going on in medical care today, and they are in the front lines to change things. Such physicians welcome patients willing to actively inform themselves. The internet offers good sources to gather information about our medical concerns. A useful one is the Consumer and Patient Health Information Section at http://caphis.mlanet.org/consumer/.

Many hospital deaths typically result from errors of commission, things that should not have been done but were done; or errors of omission, things that should have been done but weren’t done. Hospital workers are typically overworked and so prone to make errors.

Make Sure You Have an Advocate When You Move Into the “Sick Care System”

It’s a good idea to have a friend or family member serve as your advocate while you’re in a hospital, an advocate who stays with you and protects you against errors by asking firm questions and settling for nothing less than good answers. You and your advocate should also work to make sure you get in and out of a hospital as quickly as possible. The best way to avoid hospital based infections, infections that are especially strong and dangerous, is to get out of a hospital quickly.

The fact is that we don’t have a health care system-we have a sick care system. We get tested and treated only after we’re ill. The system does little to help us prevent illnesses before they happen. And very often we get too much very expensive testing and potentially dangerous treatment, including drug treatment.

You should know why you’re being tested and for what, and you should understand the reasons and risks for any treatment prescribed to you.

Here’s Your Best Protection

Your best protection against doctor and hospital errors is to stay healthy. Don’t imagine your doctor will be able to help you at all times, and don’t follow her like a sheep. Be active in safeguarding your health. You probably won’t live long and well unless you do.

Most importantly, you need to learn how to get free from stress.

As the World Health Organization declared, stress is the #1 health problem in the entire developed world. Stress hormones put you at great risk. They drive heart disease, including sudden death and stroke, as well as cancer, diabetes and other serious illnesses. Stress hormones also trigger anxiety and depression. Because your doctor gets most of her information from drug company reps, there’s a good chance you’ll get drugged for stress related problems including anxiety and depression. Most physicians were not trained in the mindbody science needed to understand and relieve stress. Job stress can be especially dangerous.

Research also shows that you’ll stay much healthier if you walk for 20-30 minutes at least 4 times a week. It’s also important to avoid eating too many refined carbohydrate foods loaded with chemicals to enhance taste and extend shelf life. Ditto high saturated fat meats filled with growth hormones, antibiotics and fillers.

One of the most important predictors of health and well-being, and so of minimizing doctor and hospital based risks to our health, is to be happy doing what we truly want and love to do. Make the effort to avoid settling for less.

“There are well over two dozen diseases that have been linked with a lack of Vitamin D or have been shown to improve with appropriate Vitamin D supplementation.”

You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Vitamin D3

Most of us have inadequate vitamin D levels. This is a concern because the best way to deal with health problems is to prevent them. Unfortunately, we have a for profit sick care system, not a health care system. The money is in treating illnesses after they develop, not in preventing them before hand. Of our 2.2 trillion dollar health budget, little more than 2% goes toward prevention. More about this in another article, for now let’s consider your Vitamin D3 needs.

If you’re in the sun regularly, chances are good that your vitamin D3 levels are OK. Just ten minutes in the sun without heavy sunscreen gives you about 10,000 IU’s of vitamin D3. But if you’re not in the sun regularly, you may need to take a Vitamin D supplement to get your blood levels up. Authoritative estimates for adequate supplementation are 5000 IU’s a day for people who have no significant sun exposure.

How to Determine If You Need Vitamin D

The best way to determine your needs for Vitamin D is to get a reliable blood test. Then assess your needs accordingly. And then retest to evaluate whether your plan for supplementation is working or if it needs to be modified. There are different schools of thought on how to supplement with vitamin D3. Let your blood levels inform your decisions-not just other’s opinions.

Of the many tests available, the most accurate is to assess 25 hydroxyvitamin D or 25 (OH) D blood levels. Many medical scientists and other nutritional experts consider the so-called “normal” 20-50 ng/ml level to be too low. They consider 50-65 ng/ml (nanograms per milliliter) level to be optimal with levels under 32 being worrisome and levels below 20 indicating an extreme deficiency.

A Look at the Power of Vitamin D3

Studies show that Vitamin D impacts the following areas.

Cancer-the further away from the equator, the greater the cancer rates. Leading Vitamin D expert Dr. William Grant estimates that if D3 levels were higher, 2 million cancer deaths per year could be prevented.

Coronary Heart Disease (CHD)-low levels of vitamin D double risk of heart attack and premature death.

Autoimmune Diseases-Rheumatoid arthritis, Type 1 Diabetes and multiple Sclerosis are all more prevalent in people with deficient vitamin D levels.

High Blood Pressure and Stroke-decreased Vitamin D stimulates parathyroid hormone which raises blood pressure and vitamin D inhibits mechanisms that raise blood pressure.

Depression-reduced sunlight exposure and depression go hand in hand and studies show that increased Vitamin D blood levels reduce the incidence of depression in older adults.

Diabetes-A Finnish study showed that children who took vitamin D supplements in childhood had 10 times less incidence of diabetes as adults.

Susceptibility to Infection-Vitamin D produces 200 plus antimicrobial peptides that fight infections.

Here’s What to Look for in a Vitamin D Supplement

Buy high quality vitamin D3 supplements from a reputable manufacturer. Avoid commercial pharmacy brands unless you’re certain of what you are getting. Beware of supplements loaded with D2 (ergocalciferol) rather than D3 (cholecalciferol), the active form. Look for the words “D3 cholecalciferol” on the label.

Did you know that in the 1920′s heart disease accounted for only 10% of deaths a year in America, but today heart disease is America’s #1 killer? I’ll tell you what’s responsible for this increase just up ahead. But first let me tell you why you should care.

Heart disease sneaks up on people, it doesn’t knock first-it just breaks down the door. People don’t see it coming and, at first, they actually have trouble believing that it has happened to them. You don’t want to be one of these people, right?

OK so let me ask you two questions here:

1. Do you want to avoid dying before your time or spending your life stuck in the misery and limitations of a serious health problem that won’t go away?

2. Do you want to enjoy a long, well-lived life, one where you can get your fair share of happiness and satisfaction?

If you answered yes to both, then I want to give you the real skinny on your heart health.

Here’s What You Need to Know

What I am going to tell you now will explain what is behind the rise in heart disease and what exactly you need to know and do to prevent heart problems.

Psychological and medical science has pulled back the curtain on what’s driving so much heart disease and heart attacks, including “sudden death”.

Here’s what’s standing there: STRESS.

We now know that stress drives a good deal of heart disease, heart attacks and what’s called “sudden death.” Sudden death is just that. With no warning, the heart dies. So unexpected, so devastating and so final.

Now what you need to know about stress is that it is not just feeling tired, wired and on edge. Stress is about the release of dangerous chemicals into your body, chemicals that put your heart at serious risk.

Let me explain.

Your Fight or Flight Response is Obsolete

You have a hard-wired mechanism built into your body. It’s called the “Fight or Flight Response.” This mechanism prepares you to fight or flee from life threatening danger by releasing chemicals or stress hormones into your blood.

Unfortunately your “Fight or Flight Response” was designed for a time that is no more. It was well-suited to a simpler time, a time when life was much less chaotic and hectic. When your ancestors were in life threatening danger, their Stress Faucet would turn on releasing hormones to prepare them to fight or run like hell. If they survived, their Stress Faucet would soon close.

But yours doesn’t. Here’s why.

The pace and style of life today leaves you prone to a lot of stress, stress at work, stress at home, stress in your relationships, and stress in your financial life. As a consequence, what we call your “Stress Faucet” gets turned on too frequently and it stays on too long.

And this often happens in error, triggered by your psychological fears and worries that a part of your brain misinterprets. Then stress chemicals seep into your blood and heart tissues and linger there. This causes strain and damage to your heart and can even “kill” it.

Two Senior National Institute of Health Scientists, Drs. Chrousos and Gold, put it this way:

“In our modern society, stress…hormones continue to wash through the system in high levels, never leaving…and so the stress response that once gave ancient people the speed and endurance to escape life-threatening dangers runs constantly in many modern people and never shuts down. Stress leads to serious health problems.”

Stress is clearly linked with the leading causes of death today with heart disease being first among them. For example, a Report focused on 409 heart attack patients found that over half of the patients had their heart attack following a very recent stressful event. (Journ Invas Cardiol, 2006; 18:376-81)

The research is clear and strong on stress and heart disease, but vested interests prevent the knowledge from being commonly known.

Uninformed and Misinformed-Don’t be Fooled

And so a majority of people are either uninformed or more often misinformed about what really threatens their heart. But I am working here to give you an accurate statement of the problem so you can move toward some real solutions.

To give you a feel for how much the public is misinformed, the idea that high cholesterol is the prime driver of heart disease is false. Dr George Mann a highly respected science researcher calls this idea “the worst fraud perpetrated on the American public” (Dr. Paul Rosch, preeminent medical scientist, American Institute of Stress, June 2007)

Unfortunately, too often the media distorts information so as not to incur the wrath of the deep pocket vested interests which pay them a ton of money. You will see a nightly array of drug company ads for cholesterol drugs this week, but you’ll hear nothing of the prize awarded to Dr. Uffe Ravnskov .

Dr. Ravnskov won the prestigious 2007 LEO Prize for his research and criticisms of the alleged and advertised relationship between cholesterol and heart disease, especially as a basis for prescribing expensive and often dangerous medications. (http://www.leohusswalinprize.org/?type=static&id=4&mo=4)

The fact is that stress raises cholesterol levels more than fatty foods. Moreover, consider this: Dr. Will Castelli, the director of the Framingham Heart Study, in a 26 year follow up, found that 50% of people who developed coronary heart disease had below average cholesterol levels.

The Real Details

You need the details on the real risks to your heart. Let me give some important ones.

Most people don’t understand what stress is and what it does to threaten their heart and their lives. They think that all they need to do is eat well, exercise, not smoke or keep their cholesterol levels in check to keep their heart healthy and alive. Now doing these things is important.

But as we’ve seen, people who do them still develop heart disease and die from heart failure, sometimes very suddenly. Here’s a picture of what happens.

Most of the cardiac arrests that lead to sudden death occur when the electrical impulses in a heart go into an irregular heart rhythm known as arrhythmia. The troubled heart rhythm can become very fast or very chaotic or both.

Either can cause your heart to abruptly stop beating. And death can suddenly follow, without any warning. Actually, would you believe that the first warning sign for half of the people who die of heart disease in the United States is just that-i.e. death. It’s true.

The picture is getting clearer: Most Coronary Heart Disease risk factors are psychological and stress driven, not genetic or body-only. Sudden death can happen even if your heart is healthy. In the United States, 350,000 Americans die yearly of sudden death, many with no prior heart problems whatsoever.

What happens? In a worst case scenario, stress hormones can cause a person’s heart to die. A stream of stress hormones paralyze the heart muscle and prevent blood from reaching areas that must have it to stay alive. (Journal Int Med; 2007; 261, 245-254)

And the secretion of a stress hormone (called noradrenaline) at the nerve endings of the heart muscle can cause heart attack even in people with low cholesterol, healthy arteries and no blood clots. (American Institute of Stress February 2008)

And we now also know that anxiety and depression-two stress hormone driven problems-can also increase risk for heart attacks and sudden death.

Here’s How to Protect Your Heart and Your Life

And so in a nutshell-it’s clear that stress and stress chemicals present a major threat to the health of your heart and so the quality of your life.

And so now let’s turn to the important questions, what do you need to do and how exactly do you do it?

The two main things you need to do to protect your heart

1. keep your Stress Faucet from getting turned on by mistake,

2. flush stress hormones from your blood and heart connected tissues

That’s it.

And consider this: When you stop the unnecessary release of stress hormones into your system and flush them out of your blood and tissues you will not only safeguard the health of your heart, but you will also feel a whole lot better and vastly improve the quality of your life.

That’s what you want, right?

OK here’s what you need to do to get this done.

You need to learn how to strengthen what we call your “Stress Fighting Muscle”. Once you do, you can carry a heavier stress load without your Stress Faucet getting turned on by mistake. And you will be able to short circuit the unnecessary release of stress hormones into your blood and heart tissues.

In addition, you need to develop your capacity to be in what we call the Stress Free State. The Stress Free State is a condition of calm, relaxed awareness.

When you enter the Stress Free State, your stress reactions will decrease as will your stress levels. Stress hormones will flush out of your system rather than seeping into the tissues in or near your heart.

Now the good news even gets better. Once you strengthen your Stress Fighting Muscle and develop your capacity to enter into the Stress Free State, not only will your heart be safer, but you will live a whole lot better and longer.

Put This to Work in Your Daily Life-Picture This

You can take these skills into your life circumstances and put them to work every day.

Picture your daily life when you will be able to stay calm, relaxed and centered while stress rolls off of you like rain on a just oiled piece of wood. You’ll feel like someone who has just gone from a coach seat on a crowded airplane into a first class seat with plenty of room to feel comfortable and be at your best.

So here’s my invitation to you.

Would you like to learn how to strengthen your Stress Fighting Muscle and learn how to get into and operate from the Stress Free State?

Well, we can show you how. That’s what we do.

We’d be happy to show you how in the most recent edition of our Little Black Book of Stress Relief Secrets.

At one time or another we’ve all felt the unpleasant effects of stress:

* Your stomach is constantly in knots.
* Your muscles are sore and tense.
* You feel dog-tired a lot of the time.
* You have that “red in the face” feeling from high blood pressure.
* Most days you feel low and unhappy.
* When you try to think of a solution or a way out, you go blank.

These feelings are typical and quite normal.

Stress is taking a terrible toll on the nation’s health and economy. It is a heavy contributor to heart disease, cancer, respiratory distress, lupus and many other life threatening illnesses.”
Dr. Paul Rosch, Medical Scientist and Stress Expert

But over time, stress can do tremendous damage to your health and general sense of well being.
How Stress is Killing People Just Like You

When your body is under stress, your cells actually change shape and become unhealthy. In turn, the delicate tissues in your body become more susceptible to free radical damage—the process that causes aging. Sickness and disease now have an “easy way in.”
It’s a dangerous cycle that leaves you vulnerable to countless health problems.

Living with constant stress will literally wear your body out. Stress hormones will weaken its ability to fight or prevent serious diseases—including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. Not to mention making you more prone to colds, infections and other distressing illnesses.

“Stress hormones can badly upset the biochemical balances in our body. That can impair our immune system and leave us open to invasions of cancer cells and dangerous infections.”
Dr. Bruce McEwen, Former Director Rockefeller University’s Neuroendocrine Laboratory

It’s true. Stress kills.

According to the American Medical Association, stress is a factor in more than 75% of sickness today. And according to the World Health Organization, stress is America’s #1 Health Problem.

And as a nation, we’re not very healthy. In 2001 alone heart disease killed an estimated 700,142 people (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). The American Cancer Society Inc. reports an estimated 1.4 million new cases of cancer in 2005, with 570,280 people dying of cancer that same year.

You can be sure that stress weakened the health protecting defenses of these unfortunate people.
The Emotional Costs of Stress

Stress not only wears your body down physically, it also threatens your mental well being. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that the most frequently prescribed class of prescription drug from a physician office visit is antidepressants. But the fact is that stress hormones trigger depression.

These “stress facts” are shocking. But you don’t have to be a statistic when you understand exactly how to stop stress from ruining your health and quality of life.

Click here to receive your FREE copy of “The Little Black Book of Stress Relief Secrets”. You’ll learn about Stress, what it is doing to you and how to get relief.