Dr. George Thayil- Keep your heart beatin'

• 27 Oct 2015
• Sebin
• Features

The heart of life is good when you take care. Dr. George Thayil believes that preventive medicine is the key to living life. He tells us when our heart takes a beating.
Heart diseases are so commonly associated with cholesterol, what are other intertwined factors?
Cholesterol is among the ten risk factors that cause heart diseases. It has an interesting philosophy but there are other factors according to Framingham study. In that, it mentioned smoking, high cholesterol, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, stress that cause 80% of heart attacks. If anyone gets a heart attack under the age of 55, then it’s prone to be genetic.
From your approach, you believe in prevention. So what’s the other setbacks apart from eating and lifestyle patterns that contribute to heart diseases?
Lack of awareness, most of my patients only understand their situation when they land in the ICU and many at times, they are not instructed during the primary prevention stage (when an individual is checked intensively through checkups and instructions are given). Also, I believe many doctors do not take an effort to instruct, they are more interested in intervention rather than prevention. Doctors must look into counselling and teaching their patients, so the patients understand the gravity of the situation.
Isn’t it an irony, that even with awareness, taking care of health is still something taken for granted?
That’s true, secondary prevention the precautions you take after your first heart attack- is not looked after. Many people think when they get their angioplasties, their issue has been rectified and the chapter has been closed. One doesn’t understand that you consume your medicines till death and you have to change your lifestyle as soon as possible. You have to increase your budget for expenses too. When you don’t take care of yourself there’s a 40% chance for the attack to occur again. People are stressed these days too, they give priority to work rather than health.
There’s a thought that runs among the youth, eat to live when you’re young and when you grow older then control, just another misleading belief?
Guidelines by the American Pediatric Association say you can give any amount of food to a child until they are two years old. According to the Cleveland Clinic, USA. There were two eight year old children who died in a car accident. When they did an autopsy and observed the cross section of coronary arteries, arteries were lined with cholesterol which could have triggered a heart disease in their early twenties. These days, children in America are having cholesterol pills at the age of eight. Prevention should start from your childhood. Even pregnant woman should take a precaution in having a healthy diet, they should never starve themselves. How you eat also matters determining your child’s genetic coding – the stage that determines genetic diseases.
In your years of practice you witness the world becoming unhealthier, what would you like to do?
Take an initiation to make people more aware and incorporate the thought in your mind it’s possible to avoid heart issues, once you are in it, you can’t get out of it.

“Over the past thirty years, there has been a shocking 300 times increase in heart diseases in India. More commonly seen among the urban people. In our world, 17.5 million people are suffering of heart diseases, and it’s predicted that by 2025, 25 million people will suffer of heart diseases.”