Editor’s note –
November 2025

The American College of Cardiology has finally discovered inflammation – only about 45 years late

“The time for taking action has now arrived”, grandly proclaims ACC bigwig George Mensah, MD, as if he’s just discovered fire.

The ACC’s new Scientific Statement on Inflammation and Cardiovascular Disease describes this as “reflecting a new era”. They’re calling the evidence linking inflammation with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease “compelling and clinically actionable”.

Groundbreaking? New era? I’ve been writing about inflammation and heart disease since the 1980s. Integrative practitioners have been focused on it for decades.

Nutritional biochemist Jeff Bland, PhD, was the first to introduce us all to the importance of inflammation. He first began emphasising inflammation as a root driver of chronic disease in the late 1980s, around the same time he was formulating what was to become functional medicine.

By 1991, when he co-founded the Institute for Functional Medicine, Jeff was already describing chronic inflammation as one of the core “dysfunctions” underlying modern illness – years before systemic inflammation became a mainstream medical topic.

As if it is not excruciating enough to see the ACC embracing functional medicine tenets without the merest nod of acknowledgement, their Statement also includes a big section on “key recommended lifestyle actions” which could have been lifted direct from the classrooms of ION and CNM (read all about it on page 8).

The ACC has no shame. It says it “envisions a world where science, knowledge and innovation optimise cardiovascular care and outcomes”. It boasts more than 60,000 members worldwide and says “we are focused on transforming cardiovascular care and improving heart health for all”.  Yet this is the outfit that – often jointly with the American Heart Association (AHA) – has actively promoted the use of statins for both the prevention and management of cardiovascular disease for more than a decade, completely ignoring the role of inflammation.

Ironically, just as cardiologists worldwide emerge blinking into the 21st century, the conversation is already moving on.  

Our very own IHCAN conference favourite Dr Malcolm Kendrick, author of The Clot Thickens, has declared: “Whenever I see anyone stating that inflammation is a cause of anything I simply change the word inflammation to the word ‘healing’, to see how sensible it then sounds. Inflammation is, in most cases, the way the body heals itself after injury. The injury comes first, then you get the inflammation/healing. You would be hard pressed to state that inflammation causes twisted ankles”.

Kendrick’s core argument is that heart disease originates with repeated endothelial injury and imperfect clot repair, not cholesterol accumulation or general inflammation.

I remember sitting in a British Naturopathic and Osteopathic Association seminar (organised by the late great Leon Chaitow) around 1985, where Jeff Bland astonished the lot of us with his insanely quick-fire, total recall presentation. He had to keep stopping because he saw we were dazed. At one point he asked us to guess how long it took for a breakthrough in medical/scientific knowledge to work its way into acceptance and then into everyday clinical practice. It was 65 years.

By that count, the cardiologists have done well!

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