The Heart Healers Read Online Free

reoxygenated.
    Because of the valve system, blood flows continuously in only one direction (it “circulates”). It’s the same principle as the locks on the Panama Canal. When the inflow valves close, the outflow valves open. Like the needle of a metronome swinging back and forth, the two pairs of valves in the right and left heart open and close in perfect synchrony: the ticktock lasts a lifetime. And of course both the right and left hearts receive and eject blood through large vessels. The most important of these vessels is called the aorta, which delivers blood from the left ventricle to the entire body.
    The muscle, valves, and electrical system do the work of the heart. Its fourth component, the coronary arteries, delivers oxygen-giving energy for all this hard work. The two coronary arteries, right and left, are the very first branches to come off the aorta; first dibs for life-sustaining oxygen goes to the body’s most important organ. The coronary arteries send branches that cover the entire surface of the heart and also plunge deep into the heart muscle so that no cell is deprived of oxygen.
    When the aorta delivers blood into each organ, the red blood cell that transports the energy-giving oxygen changes in color from bright red to dark blue. Now it’s time to deliver the blood back to the lungs, add oxygen, and repeat the cycle. The blood from all the organs is collected in larger and larger veins and returned back to the right atrium where the process of reoxygenation begins anew. Arteries deliver blood; veins return it. It takes about sixty heartbeats to complete one cycle at rest.
    The heart’s oxygen delivery system functions like a perfect machine because its form (anatomy) is so ingeniously integrated with its function. The muscular pump consists of collecting and pumping chambers. Circular flow is created by its system of one-way valves. The muscle meets its own intense need for an energy supply by first delivering oxygen to itself through its coronary arteries. And finally the whole system is exquisitely sensitive to the needs of its client, the body. Need more oxygen because you are in Yosemite, running from a black bear? No problem. Your heart can quintuple the flow of blood in seconds by tripling the heart rate and increasing the vigor of ventricular contraction.
    Now that you know how your own heart actually works, let’s meet our first patient, who could one day be you.
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    ALONE WITH HER morning mug of coffee, Greta Adams stood on her patio trying to savor this daily solitary moment she cherished. Thirty-five years old, she loved the moist morning fog that rolled off the Pacific Ocean to be momentarily trapped in the hills above her home in Pacific Palisades, a small community northwest of Los Angeles. Each year nature repainted the canvas behind her, as the torrential rains and mudslides of February led to the explosion of yellow and purple mountain flowers of April, the now-green hills of June, and then finally the dry gray chaparral tumbling before the hot dry Santa Ana winds of September. How could anyone say California has no seasons?
    This morning, though, the misty sea and mountain vista did not shake her free from a sense of foreboding. On most days her first thought was how to squeeze in an hour’s brisk walk and jog in nearby Will Rogers Park just north of Sunset Boulevard. But jogging, which had been her physical release, was now her bondage. Several weeks earlier she first noticed the discomfort, like a knot in her shoulder. At first, Greta was not so much concerned as she was puzzled. At first she thought it was a muscle cramp from climbing the rope that hung from a tree in her backyard. “I am young and I am healthy,” she reasoned. She had had her share of bumps and bruises over the years. Her thought seemed confirmed when she stopped her jog and the cramp rapidly disappeared. When it kept coming back on every morning run, she went to a massage therapist. Massage