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Home is Where the Heart is: How Hygge Can Make Your Home Feel Like a Haven
Introduction to Hygge

The concept of hygge (pronounced hoo-gah) is a Danish philosophy that has gained popularity worldwide for its emphasis on creating a cozy and welcoming atmosphere in one’s home. The term itself is difficult to translate, but it roughly means a feeling of warmth, comfort, and togetherness. In essence, hygge is about turning your house into a haven where you can relax, unwind, and feel truly at home. In this article, we will explore the concept of hygge, its key elements, and how you can incorporate it into your daily life to make your home feel like a haven.

What is Hygge?

Hygge is a cultural phenomenon that originated in Denmark, where it is an integral part of the country’s lifestyle. It is a feeling that is difficult to put into words, but it is often described as a sense of coziness, warmth, and contentment. Hygge is not just about physical comfort, but also about emotional well-being. It is about creating an atmosphere that fosters a sense of community, connection, and belonging. In Denmark, hygge is a way of life, and it is deeply ingrained in the country’s culture and traditions.

Key Elements of Hygge

So, what are the key elements of hygge? Here are a few essential components that can help you create a hygge atmosphere in your home:
- Soft lighting: Soft, warm lighting is a crucial element of hygge. It can be achieved using candles, dim lamps, or fairy lights.
- Cozy textiles: Plush throw blankets, soft cushions, and warm rugs can add a cozy touch to your home.
- Warm colors: Warm, earthy colors such as beige, brown, and gray can create a cozy and inviting atmosphere.
- Nature: Bringing elements of nature indoors, such as plants, flowers, or branches, can add a touch of warmth and coziness to your home.
- Comfort food: Comfort food, such as baked goods, soups, and stews, is an essential part of hygge. It is about nourishing your body and soul with warm, comforting foods.
Creating a Hygge Atmosphere

Creating a hygge atmosphere is all about paying attention to the little details that can make a big difference. Here are a few tips to help you get started:
- Start with lighting: Replace harsh overhead lights with soft, warm lighting. Use candles, dim lamps, or fairy lights to create a cozy ambiance.
- Add cozy textiles: Throw blankets, soft cushions, and warm rugs can add a cozy touch to your home.
- Bring in nature: Add plants, flowers, or branches to your home to bring in a touch of nature.
- Cook comfort food: Cooking comfort food, such as baked goods, soups, and stews, can be a great way to create a hygge atmosphere.
- Make it personal: Add personal touches, such as family photos, artwork, or collectibles, to make your home feel truly yours.
Hygge and Mental Health

Hygge is not just about physical comfort, but also about emotional well-being. It is about creating an atmosphere that fosters a sense of community, connection, and belonging. In today’s fast-paced world, where stress and anxiety are commonplace, hygge can be a powerful tool for promoting mental health. By creating a cozy and welcoming atmosphere, you can reduce stress, improve your mood, and promote a sense of well-being.

Hygge in Different Seasons

Hygge is not just limited to one season; it can be enjoyed throughout the year. Here are a few ways to incorporate hygge into your daily life in different seasons:
- Winter: Winter is the perfect time to cozy up with a warm cup of coffee or tea, snuggle up by the fireplace, and enjoy comforting foods like soups and stews.
- Spring: Spring is a time of renewal and rebirth. You can incorporate hygge into your daily life by adding fresh flowers, greenery, and colorful textiles to your home.
- Summer: Summer is a time for outdoor entertaining. You can create a hygge atmosphere by hosting backyard barbecues, picnics, and outdoor gatherings.
- Autumn: Autumn is a time for coziness and warmth. You can incorporate hygge into your daily life by adding warm lighting, cozy textiles, and comfort foods to your home.
Hygge and Relationships

Hygge is not just about individual comfort; it is also about creating a sense of community and connection. It is about sharing moments with loved ones, creating memories, and fostering a sense of belonging. By incorporating hygge into your daily life, you can strengthen your relationships, improve communication, and create a sense of togetherness.

Conclusion

In conclusion, hygge is a powerful concept that can help you create a cozy and welcoming atmosphere in your home. By incorporating the key elements of hygge, such as soft lighting, cozy textiles, warm colors, and comfort food, you can turn your house into a haven where you can relax, unwind, and feel truly at home. Whether you are looking to reduce stress, improve your mental health, or strengthen your relationships, hygge can be a powerful tool to help you achieve your goals.

FAQs

Q: What is hygge?
A: Hygge is a Danish philosophy that emphasizes creating a cozy and welcoming atmosphere in one’s home. It is about turning your house into a haven where you can relax, unwind, and feel truly at home.
Q: How can I incorporate hygge into my daily life?
A: You can incorporate hygge into your daily life by adding soft lighting, cozy textiles, warm colors, and comfort food to your home. You can also try to create a sense of community and connection by sharing moments with loved ones and creating memories.
Q: Is hygge only for winter?
A: No, hygge can be enjoyed throughout the year. You can incorporate hygge into your daily life in different seasons by adding fresh flowers, greenery, and colorful textiles to your home in the spring, hosting backyard barbecues and outdoor gatherings in the summer, and adding warm lighting and cozy textiles to your home in the autumn.
Q: Can hygge help with mental health?
A: Yes, hygge can be a powerful tool for promoting mental health. By creating a cozy and welcoming atmosphere, you can reduce stress, improve your mood, and promote a sense of well-being.
Q: How can I create a hygge atmosphere on a budget?
A: You can create a hygge atmosphere on a budget by using items you already have at home, such as candles, blankets, and cookbooks. You can also try to find affordable alternatives, such as thrift store finds or DIY projects, to add a touch of hygge to your home.
January 7, 2026
Healthy-Looking Teens Also At Risk Of Heart Damage From This Hidden Condition

It is time to pay attention to your teen’s health. Even adolescents who look healthy and fall within a normal weight range could be on the path to heart damage if they have one hidden health condition, warns a recent study.

Teens with prediabetes, a condition marked by elevated blood sugar levels and insulin resistance, may face a much higher risk of heart trouble than previously thought. According to the latest study published in the journal Diabetes Care, adolescents with prediabetes are nearly three times more likely to have worsening of both structural and functional heart damage during growth to young adulthood.

Even more striking was the discovery that heart damage progresses five times faster in females than in males, highlighting the urgent need for parents and health professionals to pay closer attention to adolescent girls when it comes to early detection and prevention of prediabetes.

In the study, researchers followed 1,595 adolescents from age 17 to 24, using data from the University of Bristol’s Children of the 90s cohort. The prevalence of high blood sugar, insulin resistance, and heart enlargement of the participants was evaluated during the period.

Teens with fasting blood sugar levels of ≥5.6 mmol/L during the follow-up period faced a 46% higher risk of developing left ventricular hypertrophy, a thickening of the heart muscle that can lead to serious heart issues. For those with even higher blood sugar (≥6.1 mmol/L), the risk tripled. Researchers also noted that insulin resistance also played a role, raising the risk of premature heart damage by 10%.

“Earlier results from the same cohort indicate that late adolescence is a critical period in the evolution of cardiometabolic diseases. The current findings further confirm that even healthy-looking adolescents and young adults who are mostly normal weight may be on a path towards cardiovascular diseases, if they have high blood glucose and insulin resistance,” said researcher Andrew Agbaje, in a news release.

“Worsening insulin resistance and increased fat mass have a bidirectional reinforcing vicious cycle. In the new study, we observed that two-thirds of the effect of insulin resistance on excessive heart enlargement was explained by increased total body fat. The five-fold increase in the prevalence of prediabetes within seven years of growth from adolescence to young adulthood underscores the critical importance of lifestyle behavior and dietary habits, especially after adolescents have become independent from their families,” Agbaje added.

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May 4, 2025
Heart health in culturally diverse populations
In this Heart Week special, we’re joined by Dr Rebecca Luong – Accredited Practising Dietitian, Sports Dietitian and PhD-qualified expert in cardiometabolic health. With a passion for practical, culturally inclusive care, Rebecca shares real-world strategies for supporting heart health across diverse populations.

Hosted by Brooke Delfino

Biography

Dr Rebecca Luong is an Accredited Practising Dietitian and Accredited Sports Dietitian, also known as The Cardiometabolic Dietitian and co-founder of Heartful Flavours. Rebecca worked in various areas of dietetics, including private practice, outpatient hospital, supermarket nutrition and community health, before completing a PhD in nutrition and cardiometabolic health. Her aim is to improve the heart and metabolic health of individuals globally through providing the best practical evidence-based nutrition solutions. Currently, she provides online consultations and launched heart-healthy Asian seasonings on a mission to eliminate excess sodium intake and support heart health. Rebecca was awarded the Dietitians Australia President’s Award for Innovation, 2024.
In this episode, we discuss:

How heart disease risk presents across different cultural groups

Real case studies in cardiometabolic nutrition

How to adapt traditional food practices for heart health

Strategies for overcoming engagement and access barriers

Practical tips for flavourful, heart-smart meals
Additional resources

The content, products and/or services referred to in this podcast are intended for Health Care Professionals only and are not, and are not intended to be, medical advice, which should be tailored to your individual circumstances. The content is for your information only, and we advise that you exercise your own judgement before deciding to use the information provided. Professional medical advice should be obtained before taking action. The reference to particular products and/or services in this episode does not constitute any form of endorsement. Please see  here  for terms and conditions.
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May 2, 2025
Cardiologists, Heart Stents, and Upcoding

Cardiologists can criminally game the system by telling patients they have much more serious, unstable diseases than they really have—fraud that results in unnecessary procedures, unnecessary costs, and unnecessary patient harm.

“The history of medicine abounds with dogmas assumed and later overcome”—sometimes, much later. The Women’s Health Initiative study showed that giving women Premarin, a hormone replacement therapy, increased the risk of the number one killer of women, heart disease, as well as breast cancer risk. Millions of women stopped taking it, and breast cancer rates came down.

Another such reversal of an established medical practice is percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI)—angioplasty and stents for stable coronary artery disease. Billions of dollars are spent on procedures shown “unequivocally” to offer no benefits.

So, why are cardiologists still doing them? Researchers did some focus groups and concluded: “Although cardiologists may believe they are benefiting their stable patients with CAD [coronary artery disease] by performing PCI, this belief appears to be based on emotional and psychological factors rather than on evidence of clinical benefits.”

“The sense of irrationality surrounding this practice is so strong that the phenomenon has been coined the oculostenotic reflex (I see a stenosis; I stent it).” They see a narrowing and stent it as though they can’t even help themselves.

Since the procedure carries some risks, including death, there’s an argument that stents should only be used for individuals who are actively having heart attacks and are in an emergency or unstable situation. Thankfully, there are now published, appropriate-use criteria in place to help guide cardiologists, and the good news is that 82 percent of stents are “reported to be performed in emergency or unstable situations.” So, we can disregard that ORBITA study that showed there was no benefit in stable patients since it’s now almost always performed only in unstable patients, right? Well, that’s how it’s almost always reported. “There are 2 ways a physician can become compliant. One is to do fewer unnecessary procedures”—which is the whole point (but where’s the money in that?)—“and the other is to make unnecessary procedures seem necessary.”

Is the implication that a doctor would try to game the system by telling a patient that they had a much more serious, unstable disease than they actually had, so the procedure could be carried out anyway? This is referred to as “upcoding.” Another word for it would be “fraud.” Researchers found that “some of that decline [in inappropriate use] may be driven by upcoding, falsely and intentionally misclassifying patients with stable angina as UA,” having unstable angina. As soon as those appropriate-use criteria went into effect, suspiciously, there was a four- to tenfold greater increase in rates of stents for acute coronary syndromes like heart attacks. “In New York, the proportion of PCIs labeled as acute, but performed as outpatient procedures, increased 14-fold…” There’s no biologically plausible reason why that would happen, so they were unnecessary procedures with unnecessary cost and unnecessary patient harm. And harm not only from the risk of getting an unnecessary stent but also from lying to the patient by exaggerating how bad their heart disease is. “This practice, at best, damages the credibility of the profession, increases health care spending, violates patient autonomy, puts the patient at risk of procedural complications and, at worse, may cross the threshold into criminal activity…”

What’s the solution? There could be an independent review panel to protect patients. “Simpler might be to remove the financial incentive to perform more procedures.”

“How many established standards of medical care are wrong? It is not known.” Bloodletting was the standard of care for thousands of years, for example. “Rigorous questioning of long-established practices is difficult. There are thousands of clinical trials, but most deal with trivialities or efforts to buttress the sales of specific products. Given this conundrum, it is possible that some entire medical subspecialties are based on little evidence.”

In the landmark COURAGE trial that showed stents were useless for extending life, what did seem to determine longevity? Ironically, in the case of heart stents, it was how many risk factors the patients were able to control. Those who achieved all six by lowering their blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, and smoking, while improving their diets and activity, had five times the survival over the subsequent 14 years than those who didn’t, as shown below and at 4:36 in my video Heart Stents and Upcoding: How Cardiologists Game the System.

Should we be surprised that angioplasty and stents fail to improve prognosis? After all, they do nothing to modify the underlying disease process itself. In other words, it doesn’t treat the cause. Even if stents helped with symptoms beyond the placebo effect, they would still just be treating the symptoms and not the disease. So, it’s no wonder the disease continues to progress until the patient is disabled to death. Dr. Esselstyn wrote, “Thus, the leading killer of men and women in Western civilization is being left untreated. What is being practiced is ‘palliative cardiology’: nontreatment of heart disease leading to disease extension and frequently an eventual fatal outcome.”

Deaths by the planeload every week, are “regarded as unfortunate,” rather than a national, preventable tragedy. “It is as though in ignoring this dairy, oil, and animal-based illness, we are wedded to providing futile attempts at temporary symptomatic relief”—rather than the cure.

Thankfully, “we are on the cusp of a seismic revolution in health…not another pill, procedure, or operation,” but instead treating the underlying cause of heart disease with whole food, plant-based nutrition, “the mightiest tool medicine has ever had in its toolbox.”

To get there, we need to fight a key nutrition deficiency in education. A study found that 90 percent of cardiologists reported receiving no or minimal nutrition education during their cardiology training, leaving fewer than one in ten feeling confident in their nutrition knowledge. So, maybe it’s a good thing that most spend just three minutes or less discussing nutrition with their patients. Only one in five cardiologists themselves even ate five servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

Thankfully, this lifesaving information is slowly but surely getting out there. “Medical education has focused on being the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff rather than a fence at the top. Money talks, and there’s very little money in promoting eating broccoli and going for a walk, despite them being much more effective.” I was so eager to see the citation they used for that and was so honored when I did, as shown below and at 7:14 in my video.

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April 30, 2025
Do Heart Stents Benefit Angina Chest Pain?

Sham surgery trials prove that procedures like non-emergency stents offer no benefit for angina pain—only risk to millions of patients.

Angioplasty and stents—percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI)—for stable, non-emergency coronary artery disease are among “the most common invasive procedures performed in the United States.” Though they appeared to offer immediate relief of angina chest pain in stable patients with coronary artery disease, that didn’t actually translate into a lower risk of heart attack or death. This is because the atherosclerotic plaques that narrow blood flow tend not to be the ones that burst and kill us. Symptom control is important, though, and is much of what we do in medicine, but cardiology has a bad track record when it comes to performing procedures that don’t actually end up helping at all.

Case in point: internal mammary artery ligation. Though it didn’t make much anatomical sense—why would tying off arteries to the chest wall and breast somehow improve coronary artery circulation?—it worked like a charm with immediate improvement in 95 percent of hundreds of patients. Could it have just been an elaborate placebo effect, and surgeons were cutting into people for nothing? There’s only one way to find out: Cut into people for nothing.

As I discuss in my video Do Heart Stent Procedures Work for Angina Chest Pain?, people were randomized to get the actual surgery or a sham (or fake) surgery where patients were cut open and the surgeon got to the last step but didn’t actually tie off those arteries. The result? “Patients who underwent a sham operation experienced the same relief.” Check out the testimonials: “Practically immediately, I felt better.” “I’m about 95 percent better.” “No chest trouble even with exercise.” “Believe I’m cured.” And these are all people who got the fake surgery. So, it was just an extravagant placebo effect. Think about it. “The frightened, poorly informed man with angina [chest pain], winding himself tighter and tighter, sensitizing himself to every twinge of chest discomfort, who then comes into the environment of a great medical center and a powerful positive personality and sees and hears the results to be anticipated from the suggested therapy is not the same total patient who leaves the institution with the trademark scar.” He hears how great he’s going to feel, goes through the whole operation, and leaves a new man with that trademark scar.

One sham patient was actually cured, though. “The patient is optimistic and says he feels much better.” The next day’s office note reads: “Patient dropped dead following moderate exertion.” This has happened over and over.

What if we burn holes into the heart muscle with lasers to create channels for blood flow? It seemed to work great until it was proven that it doesn’t work at all. Cutting the nerves to our kidneys was heralded as a cure for hard-to-treat high blood pressure until sham surgery proved that procedure was a sham, too. “The necessity for placebo-controlled trials has been rediscovered several times in cardiology, typically to considerable surprise.” Before they are debunked, “often a therapy is thought to be so beneficial that a placebo-controlled trial is deemed unnecessary and perhaps unethical.” That was the case with stents.

Hundreds of thousands of angioplasties and stents are done every year, yet placebo-controlled trials have never been done. Why? Because cardiologists were so unquestioningly sure it worked “that it might be unethical to expose patients to an invasive placebo procedure.” Why perform a fake surgery to prove something we already know is true? “When patients are aware they have had PCI, they have a clear reduction in angina and improved quality of life.” But what if they weren’t aware they had a stent placed inside them? Would it still work?

Enter the ORBITA trial. After all, “anti-anginal medication is only taken seriously if there is blinded evidence of symptom relief” against a placebo pill, so why not pit stents against a placebo procedure? “In both groups, doctors threaded a catheter through the groin or wrist of the patient and, with X-ray guidance, up to the blocked artery. Once the catheter reached the blockage, the doctor inserted a stent or, if the patient was getting the sham procedure, simply pulled the catheter out.”

The researchers had problems getting the study funded. They were told: “We know the answer to this question—of course, PCI works.” And that’s even what the researchers themselves thought. They were interventional cardiologists themselves. They just wanted to prove it. Boy, were they surprised. Even in patients with severe coronary artery narrowing, angioplasty and stents did not increase exercise time more than the fake procedure.

“Unbelievable,” read the New York Times headline, remarking that the results “stunned leading cardiologists by countering decades of clinical experience.” In response to the blowback, the researchers wrote that they “sympathize with our community’s shock and its instinct to invalidate the trial. Applying a positive spin could have smoothed the reception of the trial, but as authors we have a duty to preserve scientific integrity.”

While some “commended them for challenging the existing dogma around a procedure that has become routine, ingrained, and profitable,” others questioned their ethics. After all, four patients in the placebo group had complications from the insertion of the guide wire and required emergency measures to seal the tear made in the artery. There were also three major bleeding events in the placebo group, so they suffered risks without even a chance of benefit. But “far from demonstrating the risks of sham-controlled PCI trials, this demonstrates exactly what patients are being subjected to on a routine basis, without evidence of benefit.”

Those few complications in the trial “are dwarfed in magnitude” by the thousands who have been maimed or even killed by the procedure over the years. Do you want unethical? How about the fact that an invasive procedure has been performed on millions of people before it was ever actually put to the test? Maybe “we should consider the absence, not the presence, of sham control trials to be the greater injustice.”

When a former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was asked at the American Heart Association meeting “whether sham controls should be required for device approval, he thought that it was more of a decision for the clinical community: ‘Do you want to get the truth or not?’”

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April 23, 2025
The Risks vs. Benefits of Angioplasty and Heart Stents

What do physicians and stent companies have to say for themselves, given that they promote expensive, risky procedures with no benefit?

“Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI)”—angioplasty and stent placement—“continues to be frequently performed for patients with stable [non-emergency] coronary artery disease, despite clear evidence that it provides minimal beneﬁt…” The procedure does not prevent heart attacks or death for patients with stable angina pectoris, for example, yet nearly nine out of ten patients mistakenly believed that it would reduce their chances of having a heart attack. “At the same time, the cardiologists who referred them for PCI and those who performed the procedure generally did not believe that PCI reduces the risk for MI [myocardial infarction or heart attack] in stable angina.” Then why on earth were they doing it?

“Focus groups of cardiologists have documented a chasm between knowledge and behavior; while aware of the results of clinical trials”—that is, evidence to the contrary—“they recommend and perform PCI because they believe that it helps in some ill-deﬁned way.” “Physicians tended to justify a non-evidence-based approach (‘I know the data shows there is no benefit, but’) by focusing on the ease of PCI and belief that an open artery was better”—even if it doesn’t actually affect outcomes—“while minimizing the risks of PCI.” The procedure only kills 1 in 150, so some are blaming the patients for not listening, but maybe the physicians are the ones who are ignoring the evidence.

Or “physicians may have too poor a grasp of relevant statistics to adequately inform their patients.” Regardless, what we have is “a failure to communicate.” So, tools have been developed. For example, a sample informed consent document lays out the potential benefits and risks, even laying out how many procedures doctors have performed and any out-of-pocket costs. As you can see below and at 1:58 in my video Angioplasty Heart Stent Risks vs. Benefits, there are a lot of blanks to be filled in. What are some concrete numbers?

As you can see below and at 2:20 in my video, the Mayo Clinic came up with some prototype decision-making tools. In terms of benefits, “Will having a stent placed in my heart prevent heart attacks or death? No. Stents will not lower the risk of heart attack or death,” but a week later those getting stents report they feel better—though, a year later, even the symptomatic-relief benefit appears to disappear. Nevertheless, there appeared to be a benefit of temporary relief of chest pain. What about the risks?

As shown below and at 2:53 in my video, during the stent procedure, out of a hundred people, two will have bleeding or damage to a blood vessel and one will have a more serious complication, such as heart attack, stroke, or death. Then, during the first year after the stent placement, three will have a bleeding event because of the blood thinners that must be taken because of the foreign material in the heart, but that doesn’t always work, so two people will have their stent clog off, leading to a heart attack.

What does the world’s number one stent manufacturer have to say for itself? It acknowledges that the evidence shows that stents don’t make people live longer, but the manufacturer thinks living longer is overrated. If we only cared about living longer, in medicine, “entire disciplines would dwindle or even disappear, such as dermatology, ophthalmology, orthopedic surgery, and dentistry.” So why go to the dentist? Of course, the difference is that 80 percent of people don’t believe that getting a cavity filled is going to save their life, like they mistakenly do for stents, as shown here and at 3:18 in my video, and there isn’t a one in a hundred chance you won’t make it out of the dentist chair.

The stent companies actively misinform with ads making heart-warming copy. “Open your heart and your life.” “When you open up your heart, you open up your life. LIFE WIDE OPEN.” “Freedom begins here.” Their TV ads mention a few side effects, but it turns out they missed a few. More importantly, they’re giving the false impression that stents are more than just expensive, risky band-aids for temporary symptom relief. But what’s wrong with symptom relief? Even if the benefits are only symptomatic and won’t last long, what’s the problem if people think that outweighs the risk?

What if I told you that even the symptom relief might just be an elaborate placebo effect, and you could get the same relief from a fake surgery, so there really aren’t any benefits at all? We’ll see what the science says—next.

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April 18, 2025
A Forgiveness Meditation to Connect With Your Heart
In this guided meditation, Will Schneider walks us through a three-step meditation to offer forgiveness to ourselves and others.
Forgiveness is a cornerstone practice of mindfulness, and it’s also one of the most difficult.

Extending forgiveness to others and to ourselves requires a kind of awareness and vulnerability that can feel deeply uncomfortable, especially if we are carrying heavy stories of shame, anger, or resentment connected to that experience.

In today’s guided practice, Will Schneider from Men Talking Mindfulness walks us through a forgiveness meditation filled with kindness, grace, and surrender that’s designed to help us walk a little lighter in the world.

A Forgiveness Meditation to Connect With Your Heart

Read and practice the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.
1. As you work through this meditation, please note that we’re not trying to force forgiveness in any way. Please do this within your comfort zone. You do not need to go into the deepest and darkest places that need forgiveness. On a scale of one to 10, choose something that feels about in a four to six range. This meditation is going to be very helpful to release the energy of stress and anxiety or depression, and really help to relax your body, relax your mind, and help you to be more present in this moment, instead of encumbered with the shame and the guilt that might be associated with events that have occurred in your life.
2. To begin, find a comfortable position. You can also do this lying down, but make sure you’re not going to fall asleep. If you choose to sit, then sit up in an upright, dignified position.
3. There will be three parts to this forgiveness meditation. Do the best you can to work from a heart-centric, heartfelt place deep within you. Let go of expectations and try to work from a vulnerable and authentic state of being.
4. Start by using your breath to help just naturally drop a little bit deeper into this moment. Maybe even bring a hand over top of your heart so you can begin to access your heart energy, which really helps to empower this forgiveness. Make some movements in your shoulders and your head to help to relax tension. Find several deeper breaths just to calm your nervous system down, drop into this moment. Bring your breath, your awareness down to your breath into your belly. Inhale really big. Exhale, soft and slow. Maybe you’ve got to wiggle your jaw a little side to side, or just take these first several breath moments to just create a little bit more comfort in your body and kind of get out of your head and into your body and into this moment by being aware of your breath and being aware of the sensations of your body without judgment.
5. Bring to mind a moment that you harmed someone else. Again, it doesn’t have to be so deeply personal. It could just be someone that you cut off in traffic or were a little curt with at the grocery store or something like that. Stay in that four to six range. In your mind’s eye, being specific, bring up this particular person that you would like to offer or ask for forgiveness. Clearly seeing that person in your mind’s eye, repeat to yourself from this heartfelt space to this other person, I am sorry. Please allow me to be imperfect. Please allow me to make mistakes. Please allow me to be a learner, still learning life’s lessons. Please forgive me. Please forgive me. If you could not forgive me now, please try to forgive me sometime in the future. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.
6. Sit with that for a couple of heartbeats, a couple breaths. Use the breath as a way to let go, detaching energetically. Feeling your heart once again.
7. Next, let’s shift to a way in which someone has harmed you. Again, keep this in that four to six range, something minor, but that definitely was an experience. Repeat to them through this heartfelt space, Just as I am willing to allow myself to be imperfect, I allow you to be imperfect. I allow you also to make mistakes. I allow you to be a learner, still learning life’s lessons. I forgive you. I forgive you. If I cannot forgive you now, may I forgive you sometime in the future. If I cannot forgive you now, may I forgive you sometime in the future.
8. Sit with your breath for a few moments again. Bring your hand over top of your heart and feel more of that heartfelt experience. Again, use the breath to relax and to release this energy.
9. Finally, let’s bring forgiveness to ourselves. Think of ways you have harmed yourself. Again, start with something small. Extend forgiveness to yourself by expressing these heartfelt words to yourself: I allow myself to be imperfect. I allow myself to be imperfect. I allow myself to make mistakes. I allow myself to make mistakes. I allow myself to be a learner, still learning life’s lessons. Really feel that. I allow myself to be a learner, still learning life’s lessons. I forgive myself. I forgive myself. If I cannot forgive myself now, may I forgive myself sometime in the future. I forgive myself.
10. Be with your breath for another few moments here, taking some bigger breaths. Filling with forgiveness, filling with love for yourself, filling with the opportunity to release and let go. Let it all go. It doesn’t need to be a part of you anymore. Take a couple more breaths in. Feel it and flow with it and fall with it. And let go.
11. I hope you’re feeling a little lighter after this meditation. Slowly come out on your own time. It’s a wonderful exercise to realize that you don’t need to hold on to all that stuff that gets in the way of your brilliance. All that love that you are. Thank you for meditating. Thank you for being the light that you are and bringing that light to more people in the world. Have an incredible day.
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April 16, 2025
Heart Stents and Their Risks

Why are doctors killing or stroking out thousands of people a year for nothing? How do doctors even convince patients to sign up for procedures that are all risk without benefit?

Millions of people have gotten stents for stable coronary artery disease (CAD), yet we now know that angioplasty and stent placement don’t actually prevent heart attacks, offer long-term angina pain relief, or improve survival for such patients. Why? Because the most dangerous plaques—the ones “most vulnerable to rupture or erosion—leading to a subsequent cardiac event,” that is, a heart attack, are not the ones doctors put stents into. They aren’t even the ones that are often seen on angiograms to be obstructing blood flow. So, “we need to avoid the ‘therapeutic illusion’ that we are accomplishing more than is shown by the evidence.” Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) looks great. Angioplasty and stents open up blood flow again, but if PCI doesn’t actually help, why do it?

We aren’t just talking about billions of dollars wasted either. Stent placement and the blood-thinner drugs that need to be taken can cause complications, including heart failure, stroke, and death, but the risks are relatively low. There is less than a 1 percent chance PCI will kill you or stroke you out, and the 15 percent risk of heart attack is only if your stent clogs off at a later date, which only happens in about 1 percent in the near term. There is a 13 percent chance of kidney injury, though, due to the dyes that have to be injected, but that typically heals on its own. The most serious complications, like death, happen in only about 1 in 150 cases, but that must be multiplied by the hundreds of thousands of procedures being done every year.

In an emergency setting, like while you’re actively having a heart attack, angioplasty can be lifesaving, but these hundreds of thousands of procedures are done for stable coronary artery disease, for which there appear to be no benefits. So, doctors are killing or stroking out thousands of people a year for nothing. And that’s not even counting the tens of thousands of silent mini-strokes that may contribute to cognitive decline caused by these procedures. Between 11 and 17 percent of people who go through angioplasty or stenting come away with new brain lesions, as you can see below and at 2:16 in my video The Risks of Heart Stents. That’s up to about one in six individuals.

How do doctors convince patients to sign up for PCI when it doesn’t lower the risks of death or heart attack, nor does it offer long-term symptom relief? Apparently, by conveniently failing to “inform the patient that PCI would not lower their risk of death or MI [myocardial infarction or heart attack], or that the symptom benefit is gone after 5 years,” thereby not offering long-term symptom relief.

Cardiologists are aware of how little they help, but studies have “consistently demonstrated” that patients think stents will reduce their risk of heart attack or death. More than 70 percent of patients erroneously believed that stents would extend their life expectancy or prevent future heart attacks. That’s why this study was done—to figure out “why patients overestimate these benefits.” Where are they getting these wild ideas? The answer is that many patients are being kept in the dark. Doctors, who overstate the benefits and understate the risks, may pressure patients into procedures that won’t benefit them the way they think. Why? Well, one reason may be because doctors may be paid per procedure. “Current reimbursement favors procedures over medication and lifestyle change, and it is possible that reimbursement may influence physicians’ recommendations.” Doctors are paid more for offering stents than recommending common sense diet and lifestyle changes.

Patients with stable coronary disease who undergo angioplasty and stent placement are frequently misinformed of the benefits. Of 59 recorded conversations between cardiologists and their patients, only two discussions included all seven elements of informed decision-making—telling people they have a choice, explaining the problem, discussing alternatives and the pros and cons, informing patients the procedure may not work, asking if they understand, asking if they have any questions, and asking them what they want to do. Only 3 percent of doctor-patient discussions about stents hit even just these basic elements! And this was the case when “the physicians and patients knew that they were being recorded, which could have affected their behavior. If so, it is likely that this represents a best-case scenario for these physicians.” Only 3 percent! Quoting from the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, when it comes to angioplasty and stents, “true informed consent rarely occurs.”

It’s no wonder that among the nearly 1,000 patients surveyed across ten U.S. academic and community hospitals, just 1 percent knew the truth. Remarkably, some blame the patients for their ignorance, saying patients are the ones who “commonly overestimate or misunderstand the benefits of treatment, such as patients with cancer who believe that palliative chemotherapy offers the potential for cure—the ‘therapeutic misconception.’”

“Why are so many patients having procedures with benefits that they poorly understand? Don’t look at the patients to find out why. Instead, examine the doctor’s motivation…Patients think they are having life-saving procedures because medical professionals want them to believe that this is so.” Now, it’s not like those 95 percent of cardiologists are lying to their patients and saying it will reduce their risk; they just happen to conveniently omit those details. But “[i]n the absence of information to the contrary, most patients and some doctors assume that PCI is life-saving and are biased towards choosing it. As a result, patients are rarely able to give true informed consent to undergo PCI.”

Why would they assume that? Because many have a wild concept of “‘personal care’—that a physician’s ﬁrst obligation is solely to the patient’s well-being,” but isn’t that naïve? “In the absence of information, or even when presented with evidence to the contrary, patients tend to believe that treatments offered will be beneﬁcial.”

It’s true, even if you explicitly tell patients that stents do not reduce the risk of heart attacks. You can cut that misperception in half “with relatively little effort—as little as 2 lines of text,” dispelling the myth in many people. But many participants continued to believe that angioplasty and stents prevent heart attacks, even when explicitly told they do not and given a detailed explanation of why they do not. After all, why would doctors be pushing them if they didn’t help? That’s a good question, which we’ll address next.

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April 16, 2025
Why Aren’t Angioplasty Heart Stents More Effective?

Most heart attacks are caused by nonobstructive plaques that infiltrate the entire coronary artery tree. There is no such thing as “1-vessel disease,” “2-vessel disease,” or “left main disease.” Atherosclerotic plaque is continuous throughout the coronary arteries of heart attack victims.

In angioplasty, a tiny balloon is inserted into a narrowed coronary artery that feeds the heart to force it to open wider to improve blood flow. It wasn’t put to the test in a randomized controlled trial until 1992. It not only failed to prevent heart attacks, but it also failed to show any survival benefit. However, the researchers only followed patients for six months and included people with relatively minor diseases who might not have been sick enough to benefit from the procedure. Enter the MASS trial. Researchers enrolled those with severe blockage high up in their left anterior descending coronary artery—the widow-maker or widower-maker (since coronary artery disease is also the number one killer of women)—and followed them for years. The findings? There was no difference in subsequent mortality or heart attack rates. There were only about 200 patients in that trial, though. Maybe the benefit was so subtle that a greater number of patients were needed to tease out the effect. Enter the RITA-2 study, which randomized more than a thousand patients. Researchers did indeed find a clear difference in the risk of future death and heart attack, but it was in the wrong direction. The angioplasty group suffered twice the risk compared to those randomized to forgo surgery, as shown below and at 1:18 in my video Why Angioplasty Heart Stents Don’t Work Better.

This was all before stents came into vogue, though. Instead of just ballooning up the artery, how about permanently inserting a stent, a metal mesh tube, to prop open the artery, as you can see here and at 1:33 in my video? Surely, that’s got to help.

Enter the MASS-II trial, which, again, saw no benefit after one year—but no benefit was seen after five years or even ten years. Then came the Courage Trial, which randomized thousands of patients, and it, too, fell flat on its face.

Those mostly used bare metal stents, though, not the newer “drug-eluting” ones that release drugs slowly. And what about high-risk groups, such as those diagnosed with diabetes and other more serious diseases, or those who have 100 percent blocked arteries days after having a heart attack? In meta-analysis after meta-analysis, looking at five trials with 5,000 patients, there was no reduction in death, heart attack, or even angina pain. In ten trials with more than 6,000 patients, there was no benefit for survival, heart attacks, or pain relief. Now, we’re up to more than a dozen major trials and nothing: no benefit from angioplasty and stents. “Furthermore, multiple analyses have failed to identify a single high-risk subset that benefits…” How is that possible? You’re physically opening up blood flow.

The reason it doesn’t work is that the majority of heart attacks in real life are caused by narrowings less than 70 percent—“i.e., most likely non-flow-limiting lesions”—so the plaques in our arteries that kill us tend not to be the ones that are restricting blood flow. Shown below and at 3:21 in my video are two atherosclerotic plaques. The one circled in green and labeled “Flow-limiting lesion” is squeezing off the blood flow so much that it can be seen on an angiogram and doctors can go after it with a stent.

Problem solved and life saved, right? No, because it was the invisible one (circled in yellow below) that wasn’t even impeding blood flow that was going to kill us all along, as you can see here and at 3:27.

Indeed, most heart attacks are caused by nonobstructive plaques that don’t even cut blood flow by 50 percent, as seen below and at 3:40 in my video.

There’s a misconception, a “clogged pipe analogy of stable coronary heart disease [that] has been particularly difficult to dislodge,” in which cholesterol plaques slowly and inexorably encroach on blood flow, eventually cutting it off completely and triggering a heart attack. In reality, “coronary artery disease…is an inflammatory disease in which cholesterol from the blood is deposited in artery walls, causing an inflammatory reaction, like a pimple. When those pimples pop, they cause the blood in the arteries to clot at the site…Before rupture, these plaques often do not limit flow and may be invisible to angiography and stress tests. They are, therefore, not amenable to percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI),” that is, to angioplasty and stents. Old plaques are like “scarred old pimples.”

The tightest blockages are made up of mostly calcified and dense fibrous scar tissue. They can still rupture and kill us, but there are so many more of the smaller lesions brewing, which are hidden from view. The way we visualize coronary arteries is with an angiogram. X-rays are taken after a black-looking dye is injected into the arteries, so we can only see plaques that encroach on the blood flow. That’s why we get these kinds of tip-of-the-iceberg illustrations, the point of which “is to emphasize that most of the atherosclerotic plaque in the coronary arteries is not seen well by angiography,” as you can see below and at 4:49 in my video. To really understand what’s going on in people’s arteries, we must turn to autopsy. William Clifford Roberts is probably the most pre-eminent cardiovascular pathologist in the world. What did he learn after studying coronary arteries for 50 years? After examining nearly 2,000 bodies, he learned that atherosclerosis is a systemic disease.

“In patients with fatal coronary artery disease…the quantity of plaque is enormous. There is not just 1 plaque here, another plaque there, with normal lumen [clean arteries] between plaques. Plaques are continuous! Not a single 5-mm segment is devoid of plaque” in the entire coronary artery tree. So, says Dr. Roberts: “Isolated coronary disease is a myth. There are no such things as ‘1-vessel disease,’ and ‘2-vessel disease.’ Plaque is in all of the epicardial coronary arteries if it is in 1 of them.”

Four main coronary arteries feed the heart—the right coronary artery, the left main coronary artery, the circumflex coronary artery, and the left anterior descending coronary artery, as seen here and at 6:00 in my video.

If we add up their lengths, that’s about 11 inches (28 cm) of coronary arteries, which, for examination, can be cut into about 50 quarter-inch (5-mm) slices. Shown below and at 6:17 in my video is what is seen: Plaque isn’t gunking up one or two slivers but throughout all the coronary arteries. If we look at more than a thousand of these slices from dozens of patients who died of heart attacks, “not a single segment was devoid of plaque.” So, it’s no wonder that stenting open in just one area has no impact on heart attacks or death.

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April 11, 2025
The Effectiveness of Angioplasty and Heart Stent Procedures

There are demonstrably no benefits to the hundreds of thousands of angioplasty and stent procedures performed outside of an emergency setting. They don’t prevent heart attacks, enable you to live longer, or even help with symptoms any more than placebo (sham) surgery.

Large national cardiology conferences may attract the majority of cardiologists across an entire country, convening them in one place. “While at the large cardiology conventions…[it’s been] joked that the convention center would be the safest place in the world to have a heart attack.” And, indeed, that’s when the American Heart Association president had his, within hours of his presidential address. With so many of the nation’s top cardiologists at a conference, that may be a bad time to go into cardiac arrest anywhere else, though. You don’t know until you put it to the test.

To much surprise, researchers found substantially lower mortality among those going into cardiac failure or cardiac arrest during the dates of national cardiology meetings. Why is the death rate lower when most of the cardiologists are away? “‘One explanation for these findings is that the intensity of care provided during meeting dates is lower and that…the harms of this care may unexpectedly outweigh the benefits,’ the researchers wrote.” Their results “echo paradoxical findings documented during a labor strike by Israeli physicians in 2000, in which hundreds of thousands of outpatient visits and elective surgical procedures were canceled, but by many accounts mortality rates dramatically fell during the year.” And it wasn’t just one strike. “Doctors’ strikes and mortality” have been looked at multiple times. In all reported cases, “mortality either stayed the same or decreased during, and in some cases, after the strike.” In four of the seven cases, “mortality dropped as a result of the strike, and three observed no significant change in mortality during the strike or in the period following the strike.”

The fact is that many current medical practices have been found to offer no benefit and present potential harm. Even physicians themselves estimate that about one-fifth of medical care is unnecessary. A national summit was convened by The Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, and the American Medical Association to identify areas of overuse, “described as the provision of treatments that provide zero or negligible benefit to patients, potentially exposing them to the risk of harm.” Five practices were called out, including prescribing antibiotics for viral upper respiratory tract infections and spending a billion dollars prescribing drugs that don’t work (and, if anything, make things worse). Another overused practice identified was elective percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI)—in other words, angioplasty and stents, as I discuss in my video Do Angioplasty Heart Stent Procedures Work?.

To get everyone on the same page before we dive in: Coronary artery disease, the number one killer of men and women, involves blockages in the blood vessels that supply the heart muscle itself. Low blood ﬂow can lead to angina, a type of chest pain, or, if it’s severe enough, to a heart attack. Plant-based diets and lifestyle programs have been shown to reverse these blockages by treating the cause of why our arteries are clogging up in the first place, but for those unable or unwilling to change their diets, there are drugs that can help, as well as more invasive treatments, such as open-heart surgery to try to bypass the blockage or percutaneous coronary intervention, when “doctors insert small balloons or tunnels (stents) attached to flexible tubes (catheters) into the large blood vessels in the patient’s groin and thread them up into the heart. The stent and catheter are passed through the blocked vessels, a process that opens up the vessels.” In this way, they can get inside the blocked vessels and try to open them up and keep them propped open. During a heart attack, this can be lifesaving, but hundreds of thousands of these procedures are performed every year for stable angina, meaning on a non-emergency basis. It can relieve angina symptoms “but it does not reduce a person’s chances of having or dying of a heart attack.”

However, not everyone knows that. “Some patients and doctors mistakenly believe that PCI does more than just reduce symptoms.” That’s one of the reasons I’ve created a video series on the topic. As Harvard put it: “Stents are for pain, not protection.” Then, unbelievably, it was discovered that stents may not even help with pain, as revealed in a double-blind, randomized controlled trial. People can be blinded to the active treatment in a drug trial by receiving a placebo sugar pill, but wouldn’t they notice if they had surgery? If a doctor cut into their groin? Not if they had sham surgery—placebo surgery. “In both groups, doctors threaded a catheter through the groin or wrist of the patient…up to the blocked artery. Once the catheter reached the blockage, the doctor inserted a stent or, if the patient was getting the sham procedure, simply pulled the catheter out.” The results? Those who underwent the fake surgery did just as well as those who had the regular PCI surgery.

There are no benefits to angioplasty and stents outside of an emergency setting. They don’t prevent heart attacks, they don’t enable us to live longer, and they don’t even help with symptoms. “Since the procedure carries some risks, including death, stents should be used only for people who are having heart attacks…” How are hundreds of thousands of people getting these operations for nothing? How do the doctors justify it? Is it just greed? How do they get patients to consent to it? Do they just not tell them the truth? And why doesn’t it work? After all, a blocked artery is being opened up. There are just so many questions, which we’ll start addressing next.

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April 9, 2025