Hillary Clinton Prescribed a Dangerous Blood-Thinner

Being rich and famous does not necessarily mean you get better healthcare.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has released a letter from one of her doctors giving her a clean bill of health after a full medical exam and attesting to her physical ability to serve as president. The letter revealed that Mrs. Clinton is being treated with the drug Coumadin to help prevent blood clots, which she experienced in 1998, 2009, and 2012. Coumadin (also called warfarin) is an anticoagulant intended to prevent blood clots, heart attacks, and strokes.
We’ve written before about how dangerous this and other drugs like it can be. It is one of the leading causes of emergency room fatalities. In 2011, it was the subject of 1,106 serious adverse event reports, including seventy-two deaths—and that is just in hospitals!
Warfarin has a long list of nasty side effects, including bleeding gums, blood in the urine, blurred vision, chest pain, peeling skin, serious bone loss, and confusion. It can also cause necrosis—the death of skin tissue. One study found that long-term warfarin use after myocardial infarction (that is, after a heart attack) did not reduce mortality or reinfarction, but is associated with significantly more major bleeding.
Warfarin can also create a vitamin K deficiency and calcification of the arteries. In a study of patients undergoing surgery for aortic valve replacement, patients who took warfarin had twice the calcium build-up in their heart valves as patients not on warfarin, presumably because the loss of vitamin K was preventing the calcium from getting into the bones as it should. This is also why calcium should never be taken without important co-factors like vitamin K (in particular, vitamin K-2, which is especially important), magnesium, vitamin D, and omega–3 fatty acids.
Warfarin also requires constant monitoring. Patients taking it must regularly be screened by their physicians to ensure that their international normalized ration (INR)—a measure of how quickly blood coagulates—remains within a safe range. As Life Extension magazine reports, this can be difficult to obtain, as one’s INR can fluctuate due to even minor alterations in diet.
We might politely point out to Mrs. Clinton that there are natural blood thinning alternatives that do not come with the laundry list of side effects from Big Pharma medications. Dr. Robert J. Rowen, for instance, recommends omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin E, bioflavanoids (such as gingko), natural clotting modulators like garlic, and nattokinase, which is made from fermented soy. Other natural blood thinners include the enzymes serrapeptase and lumbrokinase. Blood thickness (viscosity) is a good thing to test on an ongoing basis. High viscosity is an important risk factor for heart disease, as Jonathan Wright, MD, and other integrative physicians have emphasized.
Mrs. Clinton is also reportedly taking Armour Thyroid to treat an underactive thyroid gland. We were glad to hear this. It means that at least one of her physicians knows something about natural medicine. Armour Thyroid is DTE—desiccated thyroid extract, the natural form of the hormones, as opposed the synthetic forms that conventional medicine often prescribes. We wrote about Armour in 2013, when there was a suspicious shortage of DTE. We suspected the FDA was up to its usual cronyism, clearing the way for Big Pharma’s synthetic drugs. But the letters our readers sent to Congress and the FDA seem to have averted that outcome.