After Don Williams suffered a heart attack in 1972 at age 37, a doctor wrote this statement as part of a prognosis on a Social Security form: "Death within 2 years given this man's life-style." After a second heart attack 10 years later, another doctor told him that without surgery he had just minutes to live.

In 1995, a doctor in Portland looked at Williams' medical history and noticed that he had refused bypass surgery seven times between 1972 and 1985. The doctor said, "If you'd had bypass surgery every time they ordered it, you'd be dead by now."

Dead by Now is the title of Williams' book which chronicles his search for alternative approaches to heart care, his struggle with what he calls "medical terrorist" who administer fear at a time when he needed alleviation from the fear that plagued him. He saw himself "like a log being tossed into the flume and headed for the sawmill of bypass surgery." Williams, who now lives in Keizer, said he wrote the book to let others with heart problems know that alternative methods exist and that people c an take over their own lives, become captains of their own soul.

Before the first heart attack, Williams admitted that as a Type A hurried person, he was living a sedentary life-style that included too much drinking and eating the wrong foods. "My diet was probably 60 percent fat in those days," he said. As an insurance salesman, he lived life in a pressure cooker, and in 1972 the cooker exploded while he was on the road and staying in a motel.

Fearful that he did have only two years to live, Williams began an intense college study of exercise, nutrition and stress management. As part of his study, he began developing a three-legged outline for caring for himself, a program that he would later refer to as WET (walking, eating, thinking). It was his spiritual heart disease prevention program.

In the continuing effort to take control of his life, Williams explored the works of Nathan Pritikin and Richard Passwater. He also came in contact with Nobel Prize winner Dr. Bernard Lown of Harvard School of Nutrition, whose 10-year study concluded tha t 98 percent of bypass surgeries are unnecessary; Dr. Andreas Gruentzig, the Father of Balloon Angioplasty; chelation therapy with Dr. Robert Cathcart; and eventually Dr. Julian Whitaker and the Whitaker Wellness Institute.

Dr. Whitaker, who wrote the foreward for Dead by Now, says of Williams: "His story is an inspiration and hopefully will help others to stand on their own two feet to seek a safer, more natural healing for heart disease than is currently advocated by so called heart specialists." In 1976, Whitaker joined the staff of Pritikin's Longevity Center and in 1979 founded what was then the National Diabetes and Heart Institute and is now the Wellness Institute in Newport Beach, California. In 1992, Williams spent one week at Whitaker's clinic.

Perhaps the primary message of Dead by Now is that healing is an inside job, much of it the courage to overcome fear, which Williams says is the real killer. Heart disease is one of the weapons it uses. If the book is an indictment of those docto rs and other caregivers who practice medical terrorism, it is also a tribute to those whom Williams calls medical angels, those who allowed him to "establish my own protocol and act as my advisors, not my God."

Today at age 60, Don Williams says he just enjoys being alive when he should be dead by now. He does not take any medication, is still under medical care, takes vitamins and walks four miles an hour comfortably each day. "I'm healthier now in every way than I was in 1972 at age 37," he admits. "I said no to heart surgery and won."

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