'Pariah' Treatment Promises to Be Heart Disease Game-Changer

Dr. Gervasio Lamas has long been the business of healing hearts. These days, he has taken up a second calling – changing minds.

Chelation treatment, the use of intravenous infusions to rid the body of metals, is what Dr. Lamas, the chief of Columbia University’s cardiology division at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, calls a “pariah therapy” for treating heart disease and diabetes.

This means that many doctors see it as quackery and want no part of it. In fact, Lamas was once part of that crowd.

But then, after a patient requested chelation, he realized he had no real scientific basis for dismissing the therapy.

That’s when he embarked on a massive 14-year odyssey that culminated in a study involving 1,708 patients, 134 clinics and 55,222 infusions in an effort to find the truth, and answer the patient’s question.

The research was dubbed TACT, short for Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy. It was funded by the National Institutes of Health and was designed as a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled – the gold standard of scientific research.

To Lamas’ surprise, the results were nothing less than spectacular.

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