Podcast & Media
Kit
Everything a podcast host, producer, or journalist needs — bios, interview topics, hook scripts, sample questions, and a direct booking request form.
The Story
In January 2021, Jack Clifford was hospitalized at forty-seven years old with severe chest pain. His nuclear stress test came back, in the cardiologist's words, "very negative" — meaning very positive for coronary artery disease.
When he asked the cardiologist whether he might go under for the catheterization and wake up already in bypass surgery, he was told it was about fifty-fifty. He read the consent forms. They covered both the diagnostic cath and bypass surgery in a single authorization — there would be no waking him up to ask. Having watched his mother's cognition deteriorate after triple bypass surgery through pump head syndrome five years earlier — a decline that progressed to dementia and eventually memory care — he declined to sign. He left against medical advice.
He later had the cath at a small community hospital that didn't perform bypass surgery. It confirmed a 100% blocked LAD (the widow maker), a 95% blocked left circumflex, and an 80% blocked right coronary artery. Diffuse disease across all three vessels. Emergency triple bypass was recommended. Stenting wasn't possible.
Instead, Clifford had spent that hospital weekend finding a therapy called Enhanced External Counterpulsation — EECP. He drove three hours to a cardiologist willing to use it as a first-line treatment, completed 19 sessions while living in a hotel away from his family, financed his own machine on credit for $22,000, and has used it nearly every day since. He has accumulated more than 600 hours on the machine. The bypass never happened.
This journey became the book: EECP: The Most Underutilized Therapy in Medicine — the story of a therapy that is FDA-cleared, Medicare-reimbursed, supported by decades of peer-reviewed research, used widely in China and India, and yet largely unknown to most American patients and their physicians.
About the Book
The book is organized in six parts, each advancing a specific argument. Together they move from personal story through clinical science, global economics, practical access, frontier applications, and the future of cardiovascular medicine.
The personal story told from the inside: the Christmas hospitalization, waking at four in the morning in severe chest pain, the “very negative” stress test, the consent forms that bundled the diagnostic cath and bypass surgery into a single authorization, and the decision to leave against medical advice. Then the desperate weekend of research on a hospital phone during COVID, the drive to find a physician willing to use EECP first-line, 19 sessions in a hotel away from his family, a $22,000 machine financed on credit, and five years of daily use. The section also tells the story of his wife Jennifer — who navigated traumatic brain injury, scleroderma, and lymphoma across two decades — and whose own quiet, measurable improvements on the same machine turned a personal discovery into an obligation to share it.
The Day They Told Me I Needed a Bypass
I was forty-seven years old, sitting in a hospital bed, being told my chest might be cracked open before the week was out.
For the five years before that, my life had been consumed by keeping someone else alive. My focus — all of it — had been on Jennifer. My wife of twenty-seven years. My person. She had survived a traumatic brain injury so severe that, in the beginning, she couldn’t walk or speak. Before that, scleroderma. Before that, lymphoma. Together we had become reluctant experts in what you might call the medicine of last resort: the studies read at midnight, the unconventional paths pursued when the conventional ones closed. During those years, I stopped taking care of myself entirely.
When we moved to Florida, something loosened. She was improving. And for the first time in a long time, a quiet thought surfaced: Maybe I should take care of myself, too. I went down to the beach and ran along the sand. Within a few minutes, a strange pain appeared in my chest. Specific. Almost directly over my heart. When I stopped, it disappeared. I rested. Tried again. Same pain, arriving sooner each time. I didn’t understand what I was feeling. I hadn’t yet learned what angina was. So I stopped running. Problem solved, I told myself.
Christmas Night
For Christmas that year I asked for a ChiliPad — a mattress cooling system. Jennifer bought it for me. On Christmas night I set it to fifty-five degrees, climbed into bed, and felt quietly pleased with myself. At four in the morning, I woke up in severe chest pain. Not discomfort. Not a twinge. Severe pain — constant, radiating. Lying perfectly still in bed, having done nothing, I thought: this is it.
My son drove me to the hospital. The ER ran the standard tests. No heart attack, technically. But they ordered a nuclear stress test. The results came back described as “very negative.” That is the language cardiologists use. Very negative means very positive for coronary artery disease. The double negative is its own small cruelty.
The Consent Form
I asked the cardiologist whether I might go under for the catheterization and wake up already in bypass surgery. He said it was about fifty-fifty. I looked at the consent forms. They covered both procedures in a single authorization — there would be no waking me up to ask. I was being asked to sign a blanket consent for an irreversible intervention on a brain I had watched bypass surgery damage in my own mother through pump head syndrome five years earlier — a decline that progressed to dementia and eventually to memory care.
I declined to sign. I left against medical advice.
“If You Live That Long”
On Monday morning, before leaving, I tried one last time with my cardiologist. He was trying one final time to convince me not to go. He looked at me and said: “If you live that long.” Then he walked out. It was not theatrical. It was a clinical assessment, stated plainly, and it landed that way.
I was scared in a way that settled into my body rather than spinning in my head. But I left anyway — not out of recklessness, but out of a conviction that there had to be another way.
The Catheterization
I later had the cath at a small community hospital that didn’t perform bypass surgery. The results: 100% blocked LAD — the widow maker. 95% blocked left circumflex. 80% blocked right coronary artery. Diffuse disease across all three vessels. Emergency triple bypass recommended. Stenting wasn’t possible.
But something else was visible in the images. There were collateral vessels growing from my right coronary artery — small rerouted pathways feeding portions of heart muscle that should, by any conventional measure, have been starved of blood. Those detours the body had quietly constructed were the reason I was alive.
My cardiologist explained: EECP could take the collaterals I had already grown and expand them. That was enough. It was a Friday. I started EECP the following Monday.
Buying the Machine
For the first phase of treatment, I stayed in a hotel during the week and drove home on weekends — three hours each way, at significant cost to my finances and my family. I had 19 sessions with my cardiologist before it became clear the arrangement wasn’t sustainable.
I found a company that refurbished used EECP machines and stared at the screen for a long time. I had a 100% blocked LAD. I had a wife who had already watched me nearly disappear once. I had children.
I picked up the phone and paid $22,000. Five weeks later, the machine arrived. I have used it nearly every day since.
Excerpt from Chapter 1. The full chapter continues through Jennifer’s experience on the same machine and the transformation across 600+ hours of treatment.
What the machine actually does, stripped of jargon: timed compression cuffs around the lower body, synchronized to the heartbeat, applied thousands of times per session. The mechanism — diastolic augmentation, shear stress, nitric oxide production, arteriogenesis — explained for a general reader. The clinical evidence: the MUST-EECP trial, the PEECH trial in heart failure, the International EECP Patient Registry, and recent long COVID data. The history: developed at Harvard in the 1950s, refined in American research institutions, covered by Medicare since 1999 — and then progressively sidelined as interventional cardiology became the dominant paradigm. And an honest accounting of what EECP can and cannot do, including its genuine contraindications.
What It Does Not Do
EECP does not unclog arteries. It does not dissolve plaque. It does not physically widen narrowed vessels the way a balloon angioplasty does. If you have a coronary artery with a ninety-five percent stenosis before EECP, you will still have a ninety-five percent stenosis after it. EECP doesn’t change the blockage. It changes the routes around it. That is a fundamentally different intervention — and in many ways a more profound one.
One: It Pushes Blood When the Heart Is Most Receptive
The heart feeds itself during diastole — the brief resting phase between beats. During systole, the heart muscle is compressed, restricting its own blood supply. EECP is timed to that window with precision. The cuffs inflate during diastole, squeezing blood upward from the calves, thighs, and hips toward the heart at exactly the moment the coronary arteries are most receptive to receiving it.
Two: It Makes the Heart’s Job Easier
Immediately before each systole, the cuffs deflate rapidly. That sudden release drops the pressure in the vascular system at exactly the moment the heart is preparing to push blood through it. When resistance drops, the heart does the same work with less effort. The effect on any single beat is modest. But the heart beats roughly a hundred thousand times a day. Modest improvements repeated a hundred thousand times, across months of daily treatment, accumulate into something the body notices.
Three: It Creates Shear Stress — the Long Game
Blood vessels are not passive pipes. The endothelium — the cellular lining of every blood vessel — senses the mechanical force of blood moving across its surface. That force is called shear stress. When shear stress increases, the endothelium produces nitric oxide, which relaxes vascular smooth muscle, inhibits platelet aggregation, suppresses inflammation, and initiates the molecular cascade that drives new blood vessel growth.
The research on this is specific. After thirty-six hours of EECP therapy, nitric oxide levels increased by 62% compared to baseline. Endothelin-1 — a potent vasoconstrictor elevated in vascular disease — dropped by 36%. Three months after treatment ended, both markers remained improved. The body had changed something at the regulatory level — shifted its baseline chemistry toward a more favorable vascular state.
Four: It Tells the Body to Build New Roads
Arteriogenesis is the process by which small pre-existing arterial vessels enlarge and proliferate to create functional alternative routes around obstructed flow. The primary trigger for arteriogenesis is shear stress. EECP systematically amplifies this signal by driving increased blood flow through the entire vascular network with every heartbeat, raising shear stress throughout the peripheral circulation.
EECP is not a pill that targets a pathway. It is mechanical vascular training — the circulatory system’s equivalent of exercise. And like exercise, its benefits scale with consistency, duration, and time.
I pressed that button every morning for five years. The body I have now is the answer.
Excerpt from Chapter 7. The full chapter continues with pressure settings, the body’s adaptation over hundreds of hours, and an honest accounting of contraindications and evidence limits.
EECP was developed in the United States. It is now used widely in China and India and rarely offered in America. This section explains why — and the answer is not scientific. China’s system rewards functional outcomes and population health metrics. India’s cost constraints make a non-invasive, reusable device economically attractive. America’s system rewards procedures: stents and bypasses generate implant revenue and can be billed in fifteen minutes; EECP cannot. Three countries, three incentive structures, three completely different levels of patient access to the same evidence-based therapy.
There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from watching something work — watching it clearly, measurably, repeatedly work — and then trying to explain why the system built around it treats it as a footnote. I have lived with that frustration for five years. The research for this book has not reduced it.
EECP should be more developed in the United States than anywhere else. It was refined here. The contemporary pneumatic, EKG-synchronized form of the therapy was developed in American research institutions. American clinical trials established its evidence base. The FDA cleared it. Medicare covered it. The ACC and AHA put it in their guidelines. And then, slowly, it contracted. Not because it failed. Not because the evidence weakened. But because it could not find a durable home in the economic architecture of American medicine.
The Reimbursement Funnel
A single coronary angioplasty generates revenue in a matter of hours. A full course of EECP occupies a room, a machine, and staff time for thirty-five hours spread across seven weeks. The reimbursement for a full EECP course — roughly $7,000 when Medicare coverage was established — was a fraction of what a stent procedure generated. In a specialty organized around throughput, anything that required that much time per patient struggled for institutional space.
EECP also suffered from how Medicare defined its coverage. The national coverage decision restricted reimbursement to patients with disabling angina who were not suitable for further revascularization — patients who had already exhausted the interventional options. This produced a cultural effect that proved nearly impossible to reverse: EECP became institutionally the last resort. Once that positioning was established, it was self-reinforcing across generations of training. Residents were rarely taught to consider it earlier. Patients who might have benefited never heard the word.
The Access Problem
There are currently fewer than five hundred providers offering EECP treatment anywhere in the United States. In a country of 335 million people, that is approximately one provider per 670,000 people. There are more Michelin-starred restaurants in the United States than there are EECP providers.
When I searched for EECP in Florida — the third most populous state, with a disproportionately elderly and cardiovascular population — I found roughly fifteen providers. Of those, only one was willing to offer it as a primary treatment strategy rather than a last resort.
A standard course of EECP is thirty-five sessions, five days per week over seven weeks. For someone two hours away, that is one hundred and forty hours of travel — nearly four full work weeks — just to complete a single course. Access to EECP in the United States is a logistical ordeal that defeats many patients before they begin.
What It Would Take
The path forward requires coverage expansion — broader indications that reflect what the evidence actually supports. It requires training — residency programs that teach EECP as a first-line consideration rather than a last resort. And it requires patient awareness at a scale that creates demand the system can no longer ignore.
Physicians respond to patients who ask about specific therapies. Coverage decisions respond to utilization data. Utilization data responds to patients who show up and request treatment. The cycle begins with information — with patients who have read the evidence and arrived at their physician’s office prepared to have a different conversation. This book is intended to produce exactly those patients.
Excerpt from Chapter 9. The full chapter continues with the China and India comparison and a detailed structural analysis of what it would take to change EECP’s position in American medicine.
The practical guide the author wished had existed when he needed it. How to find providers in a landscape where availability is thin and uneven. How to raise EECP with a cardiologist who may never have offered it — and how not to raise it. How Medicare coverage actually works, what a standard 35-session course looks like, and what realistic outcomes the evidence supports. The central argument: patients will not be handed EECP by the system. Patient activation — arriving at the clinical encounter with specific questions, genuine preparation, and the willingness to advocate clearly — is the mechanism by which this therapy reaches the people who need it.
About the Book
EECP — Enhanced External Counterpulsation — is FDA-cleared, Medicare-covered, and guideline-acknowledged by both the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. It has been studied in peer-reviewed trials. Major academic medical centers have offered it. The evidence for its effectiveness in reducing angina, improving heart failure symptoms, and conditioning the vascular system is substantial.
And yet most Americans with coronary artery disease have never heard of it. In the entire state of Florida — home to 22 million people — Clifford could find roughly fifteen providers when he needed the therapy most. He had to buy the machine himself.
EECP: The Most Underutilized Therapy in Medicine is the story of one man’s survival — and a rigorously sourced investigation into why a therapy that demonstrably helps people remains so hard to find.
What EECP Does
EECP works by inflating compression cuffs around the lower body in precise synchrony with the heartbeat — augmenting blood flow to the heart during diastole and reducing the heart’s workload at systole. Across dozens of sessions, this mechanical stimulus does something no drug and no surgical procedure can replicate: it trains the vascular system to build new circulation.
The mechanism is shear stress — the physical force of blood moving across the endothelium. Shear stress triggers nitric oxide production, reduces arterial stiffness, suppresses vascular inflammation, and stimulates arteriogenesis: the growth of collateral vessels that route blood around obstructions. In a randomized controlled study, thirty-six hours of EECP raised nitric oxide levels by sixty-two percent and reduced endothelin-1 by thirty-six percent. Both remained improved three months after treatment ended.
The Scope of the Book
Part I follows Clifford’s personal journey — from the hospital bed to the machine in his office to more than six hundred hours of treatment that transformed his cardiac function, cognitive clarity, sleep, sensory experience, and physical capacity in ways he documents with the precision of someone who spent five years treating himself as both patient and clinician.
Part II explains the science for general readers: the history of counterpulsation from Harvard in the 1950s to Sun Yat-sen University in the 1970s; the physiology of shear stress, nitric oxide, and arteriogenesis; an honest accounting of what EECP can and cannot do; and the evidence base for applications ranging from refractory angina and heart failure to long COVID, vascular cognitive impairment, and erectile dysfunction.
Part III examines the global divergence: why a therapy invented in American research institutions and refined in China is used broadly in Beijing and Mumbai but has fewer than 500 providers in the entire United States. The answer is structural — a function of reimbursement economics, procedural identity, and a coverage framework that positioned EECP as a last resort rather than a first consideration.
Part IV is a practical guide to finding and completing EECP treatment in the United States: how to identify a serious provider, what questions to ask, what pressure settings mean, how to think about the standard protocol versus long-term conditioning, and what responsible self-administration looks like for the growing number of patients who pursue the therapy independently.
Part V looks forward — at EECP’s emerging role in long COVID treatment, vascular dementia research, and the broader shift toward understanding aging as primarily a vascular phenomenon, and at what it would take for this therapy to finally find the place in American medicine that the evidence has long supported.
Who This Book Is For
EECP: The Most Underutilized Therapy in Medicine is written for the patient who has been told their options are medication, stents, or bypass — and who suspects that isn’t the complete picture. For the caregiver reading at midnight. For the physician curious about a therapy they were rarely taught. For the researcher studying endothelial function, vascular aging, or long COVID. And for the person who is not yet a cardiac patient but who understands that vascular aging begins decades before the diagnosis arrives.
It is not an anti-medicine book. It is a pro-information book. The cardiologists who practice within the current framework are not the villains of this story. The system that created the framework is — and systems can be changed when patients are educated and partnered with providers who are ready to make a difference.
All clinical and scientific claims are sourced in endnotes drawn from peer-reviewed literature, including the MUST-EECP trial (JACC, 1999), the PEECH heart failure trial (JACC, 2006), the 2024 long COVID controlled study (COVID, MDPI), and decades of cardiovascular physiology research.
If you only understand EECP as a treatment for angina, you miss the bigger story. The endothelium — the continuous cellular lining of every blood vessel in the body, all sixty thousand miles of it — is not a cardiac structure. Condition it in one place and you influence it everywhere. This section examines the non-cardiac applications that follow logically from the mechanism: cognitive decline, long COVID, peripheral artery disease, renal function. It then asks the harder question: why does a cost-effective therapy with a strong evidence base stay starved of research funding and clinical infrastructure? The answer is structural, and it has a name: the economics of neglect.
About the Book
EECP — Enhanced External Counterpulsation — is FDA-cleared, Medicare-covered, and guideline-acknowledged by both the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. It has been studied in peer-reviewed trials. Major academic medical centers have offered it. The evidence for its effectiveness in reducing angina, improving heart failure symptoms, and conditioning the vascular system is substantial.
And yet most Americans with coronary artery disease have never heard of it. In the entire state of Florida — home to 22 million people — Clifford could find roughly fifteen providers when he needed the therapy most. He had to buy the machine himself.
EECP: The Most Underutilized Therapy in Medicine is the story of one man’s survival — and a rigorously sourced investigation into why a therapy that demonstrably helps people remains so hard to find.
What EECP Does
EECP works by inflating compression cuffs around the lower body in precise synchrony with the heartbeat — augmenting blood flow to the heart during diastole and reducing the heart’s workload at systole. Across dozens of sessions, this mechanical stimulus does something no drug and no surgical procedure can replicate: it trains the vascular system to build new circulation.
The mechanism is shear stress — the physical force of blood moving across the endothelium. Shear stress triggers nitric oxide production, reduces arterial stiffness, suppresses vascular inflammation, and stimulates arteriogenesis: the growth of collateral vessels that route blood around obstructions. In a randomized controlled study, thirty-six hours of EECP raised nitric oxide levels by sixty-two percent and reduced endothelin-1 by thirty-six percent. Both remained improved three months after treatment ended.
The Scope of the Book
Part I follows Clifford’s personal journey — from the hospital bed to the machine in his office to more than six hundred hours of treatment that transformed his cardiac function, cognitive clarity, sleep, sensory experience, and physical capacity in ways he documents with the precision of someone who spent five years treating himself as both patient and clinician.
Part II explains the science for general readers: the history of counterpulsation from Harvard in the 1950s to Sun Yat-sen University in the 1970s; the physiology of shear stress, nitric oxide, and arteriogenesis; an honest accounting of what EECP can and cannot do; and the evidence base for applications ranging from refractory angina and heart failure to long COVID, vascular cognitive impairment, and erectile dysfunction.
Part III examines the global divergence: why a therapy invented in American research institutions and refined in China is used broadly in Beijing and Mumbai but has fewer than 500 providers in the entire United States. The answer is structural — a function of reimbursement economics, procedural identity, and a coverage framework that positioned EECP as a last resort rather than a first consideration.
Part IV is a practical guide to finding and completing EECP treatment in the United States: how to identify a serious provider, what questions to ask, what pressure settings mean, how to think about the standard protocol versus long-term conditioning, and what responsible self-administration looks like for the growing number of patients who pursue the therapy independently.
Part V looks forward — at EECP’s emerging role in long COVID treatment, vascular dementia research, and the broader shift toward understanding aging as primarily a vascular phenomenon, and at what it would take for this therapy to finally find the place in American medicine that the evidence has long supported.
Who This Book Is For
EECP: The Most Underutilized Therapy in Medicine is written for the patient who has been told their options are medication, stents, or bypass — and who suspects that isn’t the complete picture. For the caregiver reading at midnight. For the physician curious about a therapy they were rarely taught. For the researcher studying endothelial function, vascular aging, or long COVID. And for the person who is not yet a cardiac patient but who understands that vascular aging begins decades before the diagnosis arrives.
It is not an anti-medicine book. It is a pro-information book. The cardiologists who practice within the current framework are not the villains of this story. The system that created the framework is — and systems can be changed when patients are educated and partnered with providers who are ready to make a difference.
All clinical and scientific claims are sourced in endnotes drawn from peer-reviewed literature, including the MUST-EECP trial (JACC, 1999), the PEECH heart failure trial (JACC, 2006), the 2024 long COVID controlled study (COVID, MDPI), and decades of cardiovascular physiology research.
We are entering a genuine transition in cardiovascular medicine: from crisis management to vascular restoration, from treating the lesion to training the system. The dominant intervention model has produced its victories and surfaced its limitations. What comes next is built around the endothelium, microvascular medicine, and autonomic regulation. EECP is one of the clearest existing examples of what training circulation actually looks like in practice. The final chapters address what patients, physicians, researchers, and advocates each need to do to move this forward. The book closes on a single idea: circulation is not static. It is trainable.
About the Book
EECP — Enhanced External Counterpulsation — is FDA-cleared, Medicare-covered, and guideline-acknowledged by both the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. It has been studied in peer-reviewed trials. Major academic medical centers have offered it. The evidence for its effectiveness in reducing angina, improving heart failure symptoms, and conditioning the vascular system is substantial.
And yet most Americans with coronary artery disease have never heard of it. In the entire state of Florida — home to 22 million people — Clifford could find roughly fifteen providers when he needed the therapy most. He had to buy the machine himself.
EECP: The Most Underutilized Therapy in Medicine is the story of one man’s survival — and a rigorously sourced investigation into why a therapy that demonstrably helps people remains so hard to find.
What EECP Does
EECP works by inflating compression cuffs around the lower body in precise synchrony with the heartbeat — augmenting blood flow to the heart during diastole and reducing the heart’s workload at systole. Across dozens of sessions, this mechanical stimulus does something no drug and no surgical procedure can replicate: it trains the vascular system to build new circulation.
The mechanism is shear stress — the physical force of blood moving across the endothelium. Shear stress triggers nitric oxide production, reduces arterial stiffness, suppresses vascular inflammation, and stimulates arteriogenesis: the growth of collateral vessels that route blood around obstructions. In a randomized controlled study, thirty-six hours of EECP raised nitric oxide levels by sixty-two percent and reduced endothelin-1 by thirty-six percent. Both remained improved three months after treatment ended.
The Scope of the Book
Part I follows Clifford’s personal journey — from the hospital bed to the machine in his office to more than six hundred hours of treatment that transformed his cardiac function, cognitive clarity, sleep, sensory experience, and physical capacity in ways he documents with the precision of someone who spent five years treating himself as both patient and clinician.
Part II explains the science for general readers: the history of counterpulsation from Harvard in the 1950s to Sun Yat-sen University in the 1970s; the physiology of shear stress, nitric oxide, and arteriogenesis; an honest accounting of what EECP can and cannot do; and the evidence base for applications ranging from refractory angina and heart failure to long COVID, vascular cognitive impairment, and erectile dysfunction.
Part III examines the global divergence: why a therapy invented in American research institutions and refined in China is used broadly in Beijing and Mumbai but has fewer than 500 providers in the entire United States. The answer is structural — a function of reimbursement economics, procedural identity, and a coverage framework that positioned EECP as a last resort rather than a first consideration.
Part IV is a practical guide to finding and completing EECP treatment in the United States: how to identify a serious provider, what questions to ask, what pressure settings mean, how to think about the standard protocol versus long-term conditioning, and what responsible self-administration looks like for the growing number of patients who pursue the therapy independently.
Part V looks forward — at EECP’s emerging role in long COVID treatment, vascular dementia research, and the broader shift toward understanding aging as primarily a vascular phenomenon, and at what it would take for this therapy to finally find the place in American medicine that the evidence has long supported.
Who This Book Is For
EECP: The Most Underutilized Therapy in Medicine is written for the patient who has been told their options are medication, stents, or bypass — and who suspects that isn’t the complete picture. For the caregiver reading at midnight. For the physician curious about a therapy they were rarely taught. For the researcher studying endothelial function, vascular aging, or long COVID. And for the person who is not yet a cardiac patient but who understands that vascular aging begins decades before the diagnosis arrives.
It is not an anti-medicine book. It is a pro-information book. The cardiologists who practice within the current framework are not the villains of this story. The system that created the framework is — and systems can be changed when patients are educated and partnered with providers who are ready to make a difference.
All clinical and scientific claims are sourced in endnotes drawn from peer-reviewed literature, including the MUST-EECP trial (JACC, 1999), the PEECH heart failure trial (JACC, 2006), the 2024 long COVID controlled study (COVID, MDPI), and decades of cardiovascular physiology research.
The book closes on a single idea: circulation is not static. It is trainable. That idea, taken seriously, changes how we think about heart disease, cognitive decline, long COVID, and healthy aging.
About Jack Clifford
Jack Clifford is a retired U.S. Coast Guard E-9 with 21 years of active duty service and the author of EECP: The Most Underutilized Therapy in Medicine. After being told he needed an emergency triple bypass due to severe coronary artery blockages, he discovered Enhanced External Counterpulsation (EECP) and spent the following years researching its science, clinical history, and global use. He has personally used EECP for more than 600 hours. His mission is to help patients and clinicians understand the role circulation plays across multiple systems of the body — and to ensure no patient is told their options have run out before they've heard about EECP.
Jack Clifford is a retired U.S. Coast Guard E-9 with 21 years of active duty service and the author of EECP: The Most Underutilized Therapy in Medicine. After retiring from the military at 39, Clifford spent years focused almost entirely on the health of his wife Jennifer, who navigated traumatic brain injury, scleroderma, and lymphoma across two decades. During that period, he stopped caring for himself.
In January 2021, he was hospitalized at 47 with severe coronary artery disease — a 100% blocked LAD (the widowmaker), a 95% blocked left circumflex, and an 80% blocked right coronary artery. After declining to sign a combined cath-and-bypass consent form and leaving the hospital against medical advice, he found EECP — a therapy he had first encountered years earlier while researching options for his mother after her own triple bypass and subsequent cognitive decline.
He drove three hours to find a cardiologist willing to use EECP as a first-line treatment, financed his own machine on credit, and has used it nearly every day since. Over more than 600 hours of treatment he observed changes across cardiovascular function, cognition, sleep, and overall vitality that deepened his understanding of the endothelium as a whole-body system. His wife Jennifer also began using the same machine and experienced her own measurable improvements — turning a personal discovery into an obligation to share it.
Through his writing and educational outreach, Clifford seeks to ensure that no patient is offered EECP only after being told their options have run out — and that the structural and economic reasons for its neglect become part of the public conversation about American healthcare.
Interview Topics
Select from these angles based on your audience. Jack can speak to any of these in depth.
Suggested Episode Titles
Pick 3–5 that fit your show's audience. Jack can work with any of these or develop a custom angle.
- PersonalI Declined the Consent Form — and Built My Own Bypass→
- Personal600 Hours: What Daily EECP Taught Me About the Body→
- ScienceHow the Body Can Grow Its Own Bypass Arteries→
- ScienceCirculation: The Missing Lever in Modern Medicine→
- SystemsThe Hidden Economics of Ignored Medical Therapies→
- SystemsThe Therapy Widely Used in China but Rarely Discussed in the U.S.→
- LongevityWhy Vascular Health May Be the Most Underrated Driver of Aging→
- BrainBlood Flow and Cognitive Function — What Cardiologists Don't Tell You→
Hook Scripts
These are ready-to-use as a pre-show introduction or as the basis for a short booking video.
Then I read the consent forms. They covered both the diagnostic cath and bypass surgery in a single authorization — there would be no waking me up to ask. I declined to sign and left the hospital.
Instead, I discovered a therapy called Enhanced External Counterpulsation — EECP. It's FDA-cleared and Medicare-reimbursed, yet most patients in the United States have never heard of it. After using it for more than 600 hours, I wrote a book called EECP: The Most Underutilized Therapy in Medicine.
Blood flow affects every organ in the body — the brain, metabolism, recovery, sexual health, and overall vitality. After being told I needed an emergency triple bypass, I discovered a therapy called EECP that focuses on improving circulation at the endothelial level. What started as a personal health journey turned into a much bigger exploration of how circulation influences the entire body — and why some medical therapies remain surprisingly underused despite decades of evidence.
Sample Interview Questions
These questions are provided as a starting point — Jack is happy to work from your format.
You left a hospital against medical advice after reading your consent forms. Walk us through what was in those forms and what you decided to do instead.
Your mother had bypass surgery five years before your own diagnosis. What happened to her — and how did that shape your decision?
What is EECP, and how does it actually work? Walk us through the physiology.
You describe EECP as "mechanical vascular training." What does that mean, and why does it matter that the benefits extend beyond the heart?
You had 600+ hours on the machine. What did you observe — in cardiovascular function, cognition, sleep, and elsewhere — that you weren't expecting?
EECP is FDA-cleared and covered by Medicare. It's used widely in China and India. Why don't most American patients know it exists?
You write about the economics of neglect. What specifically does the U.S. reimbursement system reward — and how does that explain what happened to EECP?
What would it take to change that? What's the most realistic path toward wider adoption?
If someone listening to this is facing a cardiac diagnosis right now, what's the first thing they should do?
You write that circulation is not static — it's trainable. What does that mean for how we should think about cardiovascular health, aging, and the tools we have available?
Book Jack as a Guest
Fill out the form below and Jack or his team will follow up within 48 hours. For urgent bookings, email directly at Jack.g.clifford@gmail.com.
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Press Contact & Assets
EECP: The Most Underutilized Therapy in Medicine
Self-published · 2026
Available assets upon request: High-resolution author photo · Book cover art · One-page EECP explainer · Advance reader copy of the book · Formspree booking form (above) for direct scheduling.
To request any of these, use the booking form above or email Jack directly at Jack.g.clifford@gmail.com.
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