Survey results that will be presented during Heart Failure 2019 in Athens a few weeks from now are a good opportunity to discuss facts and myths about heart disease. Including some held by cardiologists.

20 percent of believe believe, for example, that heart disease patients should avoid exercise while just over 50 percent know that exercise can be a treatment for their disease. Meanwhile, doctors are unsure about the conflict between cancer treatment and heart disease. Does cancer promote heart disease? There are common pathways in tumor growth and heart failure and some cancer therapies are toxic to the heart so it could be that, or the other way around.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was once a serious, revered organization with the somber task of tackling what environmental factors caused what cancers so that we could eliminate them.(1)

And they did. Their decisions for the first 20 years were rock solid - there is no debate now that cigarettes, smog, and alcohol will kill you, especially if you routinely have high doses.  When California chose to abdicated its science policymaking to a French group, there were concerns that its power might be abused but they were dismissed because there was no indication IARC was heading in that direction.

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC is promoting a doomsday shortage where America is without 47-122,000 physicians, over a third of them being general practitioners, by 2032 and say it is due to the “graying” of America, both among providers and the public.

Just over a year ago I testified before a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel in support of the iQOS device, a smoking replacement tool that heats tobacco but doesn't ignite it.

There is a big difference between a trial lawyer convincing a jury in one of America's most anti-science regions that an herbicide that only acts on plants might be able to cause human cancer, and scientists with knowledge of chemistry, biology, and toxicology who know better.

Cows and chickens will never go extinct because they are food, and some useless critters like Aedes aegypti have managed to tough it all despite being just disease vectors. For everything else, it can be a crap shoot. Nature is out to kill us all.