How can I improve my quality of life after coronary intervention?

  Coronary artery disease is a disease of the coronary arteries, the blood vessels supplying the heart. Atherosclerosis occurs in the walls of the coronary arteries, causing narrowing or blockage of the heart’s vascular lumen, which affects the normal function of the heart, resulting in symptoms of insufficient blood supply such as chest pain, panic, chest tightness, shortness of breath and weakness. The three main modern treatments for coronary heart disease are medication, coronary stenting and bypass surgery. Coronary stenting is a technique by which the doctor delivers the stent needed for treatment to the coronary vessels through a catheter to lift or relieve coronary stenosis and open the occluded vessels, thus restoring the vessels to normal and achieving relief, and this technique has benefited many patients with coronary heart disease and even saved their lives. However, although a large number of post-stenting patients adhere to the standardized treatment of Western medicine, they still have recurrent episodes of chest tightness, shortness of breath and weakness for a period of time after surgery, which can even last for a longer period of time, seriously affecting the patient’s efficacy and reducing the quality of life.  So who will “care” for this type of coronary heart disease patients?  We note that atherosclerosis is a systemic pathological disease, and stenting is only a temporary, palliative, and local treatment method, and the atherosclerosis of blood vessels continues to progress after stenting, which does not block the systemic pathological changes. Chinese medicine is good at playing the two distinctive characteristics of “diagnosis and treatment” and “holistic concept”, especially good at adjusting and regulating the state of the organism from the overall and macroscopic point of view to delay or stop the progress of the disease, which is a good medicine to treat patients with coronary heart disease after stenting and meet the needs of such patients. The needs of such patients are met. In the early Warring States period, the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine put forward the theory that “if the evil is in the heart, then the disease is heartache”, and in the long history since then, Chinese medicine has summarized a set of distinctive and effective prevention and treatment methods for chest paralysis (coronary angina). According to Chinese medicine, the common pathological characteristics of coronary heart disease patients are blood vessels and blood veins that are not smoothly flowing and paralyzed, and chest paralysis is divided into several different types of symptoms, such as cold clotting, qi stagnation, phlegm obstruction, liver depression, blood stasis, qi-yin deficiency, yang deficiency, and yin deficiency, and different treatment plans are given. Post-stenting patients can completely improve their physical status through accurate dialectic, subtle prescriptions, perfect conditioning, and timely health maintenance to significantly promote post-stenting recovery, reduce angina recurrence, increase activity tolerance, improve quality of life, and reduce the probability of cardiac events.  For many patients who have already undergone stenting, individualized, holistic and comprehensive “patient-based” treatment is needed. Most patients with coronary artery disease have changed their disease mechanism before and after coronary stent implantation, so we should boldly break through the original classification of evidence and treat patients according to their actual postoperative evidence. With the accumulation of treatment experience, we have found clinically that patients with severe coronary artery lesions can be manifested by heart qi deficiency or even heart yang deficiency alone. Although these patients have received coronary stenting and their postoperative angina has been relieved to a certain extent, they still have shortness of breath, weakness, circumferential fatigue, chest tightness, and even wheezing when moving as the main symptoms. The essence of the lesion is cardiac insufficiency, especially associated with diastolic insufficiency, often accompanied by systolic insufficiency. These patients can be relieved significantly by “promoting heart yang, benefiting heart qi, nourishing heart blood, and regulating Ying and Wei”, which can achieve twice the effect with half the effort.  The combination of Chinese and Western medicine, overall conditioning and local treatment is the inevitable trend of complementing each other’s strengths and strengths and complementing each other’s weaknesses. The combination of Chinese and Western medicine will be a new choice for post-stenting patients.