How Can Social Support Help Women With Heart Disease?

Dr. Scherwitz explains how social support can benefit a woman with heart disease.

Dr. Scherwitz:
Social support helps women with heart disease by easing the stress that they experience in life, feeling connected to others, having a loving feeling in the heart, which tends to have the heart muscle and the arteries relaxed, getting social support we don’t compensate with cigarettes or drugs or overwork or other ways. So, social support is real important to even for helping reduce how much we eat. We often eat too much because we are not getting fulfillment in the other areas in our life.

About Dr. Scherwitz, Ph.D.:
Larry W. Scherwitz, PhD, is a leader in the field of behavioral medicine research with 25 years experience in developing and testing approaches to managing chronic disease with lifestyle changes. Dr. Scherwitz has been on the faculty of various medical institutions including Baylor College of Medicine, University of California at San Francisco, California Pacific Medical Center, and the Preventive Medicine Research Institute. He worked at the research director with Dr. Dean Ornish to demonstrate that it is possible to reverse coronary heart disease with lifestyle changes including diet, exercise, stress management and social support. Dr. Scherwitz’ is often a keynote speaker at conferences and has published his research discoveries in an array of prestigious medical journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, and Psychosomatic Medicine. Presently, Larry and his wife Deborah Kesten, MPH have a coaching practice to help clients lose weight as well as prevent, halt, and reverse heart disease. Larry also consults with clients to help them design studies to evaluate the efficacy of complementary and alternative practices.

Visit Dr. Scherwitz at his website