By: Dr Bimal Chhajer
In the course of history, we have witnessed that the number of heart problems is increasing at an astonishing rate in India (almost doubled in the last decade) even when many treatments are already available. To solvethe root cause of this problem, Dr. Bimal Chhajer started SAAOL in 1995 with the aim of spreading awareness about preventing heart diseases through lifestyle changes, avoiding bypass surgery and angioplasty, adapting non-invasive treatments for heart diseases and making it popular throughout the nation.
For the past 27 years, SAAOL has marked its presence all across India and is now aiming to spread globally. Punyya Life Foundation (PLF), an NGO which is a social venture by SAAOL will take the Education Vaccine globally and will educate the masses about the importance of lifestyle change in order to prevent heart diseases.
By seeing the kind of lifestyle people follow these days it can be easily predicted that a lot of people are going to face heart problems in the future, and to solve this, we want to reach every corner of the country and spread education about taking care of their heart. This will be done by spreading our “Education Vaccine” by organizing Free Heart Health camps across India, targeting specially the economically weaker section, and providing them with free checkups including Lipid profile, and Blood Sugar tests, BMI checks, real-time doctor’s consultations along with dietary advice through our expert dieticians and bone care by our physiotherapists.
Since its inception, Punyya Life Foundation has organized multiple camps starting with areas around its registered office i.e. South Delhi, and plans to target every village within the city and reach out to those people who are unable to get these check ups done by themselves as they collectively cost between Rs1000 to Rs1500. PLF tends to reach the entire nation by covering all districts and states and organizing multiple camps in multiple locations and spreading heart health awareness to the masses. Our long-term vision is to involve all corporates, social workers, philanthropists, and other NGOs to get associated with PLF and help us reach our goal of eradicating heart disease from the nation and from the world by providing free education to every individual and avoiding deaths from heart diseases.
Recently many famous and young personalities lost their lives due to heart attacks. Treating cardiovascular diseases through bypass surgery and stents is also not giving any assurances that your heart disease is now completely cured. This happened to one of the best comedians of all time, Raju Srivastava who died of a heart attack. Raju got around 9 stents implanted and also had undergone angioplasty but still died due to a massive heart attack which left people with a question, “Are these stents/angioplasty/bypass surgeries really successful? Will these treatments save lives or are they going to be effective in the future? “.
Treatments involving stents and angioplasty have proven to be a big failure. PLF firmly believes that by following a healthy lifestyle, avoiding oily food, and adopting non-invasive treatments to cure heart diseases can help save thousands of people who die because of heart attacks or cardiovascular diseases.
It was not just Raju Srivastava but celebrities like KK, Puneeth Rajkumar, Sidharth Shukla, etc. also lost lives because of heart attacks. It was not only stents or angioplasty but the lack of adequate knowledge about taking care of your heart that became the sole reason for these deaths.
The need of the hour is to spread the “Education Vaccine”.
SAAOL with the help of Punyya Life Foundation aims toeradicate the root cause of heart disease under its mission “Beat Heart Disease” and will penetrate into every corner of India and the world and educate the masses about heart disease and its prevention. The intervention will include providing extensive knowledge about the prevention of heart disease by registered allopathic doctors along with nutritional and lifestyle counseling and physiotherapy. Prescription and advice are based on blood parameters and ECG and other parameter checks will be free of cost by PLF.
PLF says that “Awareness and proper education is the key to living a long and healthy life”.
The writer is Director, SAAOL Heart Centre, New Delhi
