Cardiologists

"It is clear today that a pediatrician must also be an educator. And surely there is joy in both tasks, as they are the most wonderful that can be imagined. We are entrusted with the care of the child, a fresh young creature who before our very eyes thrives and grows, one may even say flowers. It is given to us to accompany him from day to day and from hour to hour, from childhood to youth and adolescence along a shining and upward path. It is given to us to impart to him not only what is defined as the task as education - the culture passed down throughout the generations - but also health, strength and joy of life."

"To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors."

"Man is evil, by nature man is a beast. People have to be educated from childhood, from kindergarten, that there should be no hatred."

"The Bundists did not wait for the Messiah, nor did they plan to leave for Palestine. They believed that Poland was their country and they fought for a just, socialist Poland, in which each nationality would have its own cultural autonomy, and in which minorities' rights would be guaranteed."

"If I am Chernenko's doctor and if I am here, then Chernenko is well because a doctor should be with his patient."

"He wasn’t a man of erudition, yet very quickly grasped the significance of this or that problem for the state at large and for his own popularity rating. As one far removed from the sciences, he had tremendous respect for the opinions of scientists."

"I am convinced that today is a great and exciting day not only for the members of our international movement but also for all physicians on our planet, irrespective of their political and religious beliefs. For the first time in history, their selfless service for the cause of maintaining life on Earth is marked by the high Nobel Prize. True to the Hippocratic Oath, we cannot keep silent knowing what final epidemic-nuclear war — can bring to humankind. The bell of Hiroshima rings in our hearts not as a funeral knell, but as an alarm bell calling out to actions to protect life on our planet. We were among the first to demolish the nuclear illusions that existed and to unveil the true face of nuclear weapons — the weapons of genocide. We warned the peoples and governments that medicine would be helpless to offer even minimal relief to the hundreds of millions of victims of nuclear war. However, our contacts with patients inspire our faith in the human reason. Peoples are heedful of the voice of physicians who warn them of the danger and recommend the means of prevention."

"Confrontation is the road to war, destruction and end of civilization. Even today it deprives the world's peoples of hundreds of millions of dollars which are badly needed for solving social problems, combating hunger and diseases. Cooperation is the road to increased well-being of peoples and flourishing life. Medicine knows many examples when joint efforts to nations and scientists contributed to successful combat against diseases such, for example, as smallpox."

"I recall the telegram I received at the time of our first Congress from an ordinary woman in Brooklyn. It was short: "Thank you on behalf of the children." As adults we are obliged to avert transformation of the Earth from a flourishing planet into a heap of smoking ruins. Our duty is to hand it over to our successors in a better state than it was inherited by us. Therefore, it is not for fame, but for the happiness and for the future of all mothers and children that we — the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War — have worked, are working and will work."

"In medical science arguments are going on between behaviorists who perceive the function of brain as a multitude of simple and unconscious conditioned reflexes, and cognitivists who insist that humans sensing the surrounding world create its mental image which can be considered as memory of facts. I do not intend to argue the essence of these processes, all the more so because it has been proved that both types of memory function in the brain. However, I am convinced that those who once saw a nuclear explosion or imagined the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will forever maintain the mental picture of horror-stricken and dust-covered Earth, burned bodies of the dead and wounded and people slowly dying of radiation disease. Prompted by the sense of responsibility for the fortunes of the human race, Einstein addressed the following warning to his colleagues: "Since we, scientists, face the tragic lot of further increasing the murderous effectiveness of the means of destruction, it is our most solemn and noble duty to prevent the use of these weapons for the cruel ends they were designed to achieve"."

"Keep in mind that when the first A-bomb was developed as a defense against Nazism, moral objections and conscience of scientists and many others involved were lulled by assurances that everything would be over after production of a few bombs."

"The human mind finds it difficult to comprehend the figure of 2,000 million victims. As they say, one death is death, but a million deaths are statistics. For us, physicians, life is the aim of our work and each death is a tragedy. As people constantly involved in the care of patients, we felt the urge to warn governments and peoples that the critical point has been passed: medicine will be unable to render even minimal assistance to the victims of a nuclear conflict — the wounded, the burned, the sick — including the population of the country which unleashes nuclear war."

"Today we are talking not just about warring sides but about humanity at large. Any reasonable man finds it hard to believe that while hunger, diseases, social inequality, economic underdevelopment and illiteracy are in existence, hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted to feed the insatiable monster — the arms race."

"Nuclear war, unless it is prevented, would lead to the extinction of life on Earth and possibly in the Universe. Can we take such a risk? In our medical practice when we deal with a critical patient in order to save him, we mobilize all our energies and knowledge, sacrifice part of our hearts and enlist the cooperation of our most experienced colleagues. Today we face a seriously ill humanity, torn apart by distrust and fear of nuclear war. To save it we must arouse the conscience of the world's peoples, cultivate hatred for nuclear weapons, repudiate egoism and chauvinism, and create favorable atmosphere of trust. In the nuclear age we are all interdependent. The Earth is our only common home which we cannot abandon. The new suicidal situation calls for the new thinking. We must convince those who take political decisions. Our professional duty is to protect life on Earth. True to the Hippocratic Oath, physicians will dedicate their knowledge, their hearts and their lives to the happiness of their patients and the well-being of the peoples of the world."

"Although most of us conduct our lives as omnivores, in that we eat flesh as well as vegetables and fruits, human beings have characteristics of herbivores, not carnivores. The appendages of carnivores are claws; those of herbivores are hands or hooves. The teeth of carnivores are sharp; those of herbivores are mainly flat (for grinding). The intestinal tract of carnivores is short (3 times body length); that of herbivores, long (12 times body length). Body cooling of carnivores is done by panting; herbivores, by sweating. Carnivores drink fluids by lapping; herbivores, by sipping. Carnivores produce their own vitamin C, whereas herbivores obtain it from their diet. Thus, humans have characteristics of herbivores, not carnivores."

"Human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores."

"We all have to be students, who are often wrong and always in doubt, while a professor is sometimes wrong and never in doubt. Please join me on my student pathway..."

"[T]he heart... is, in reality, a that contains an apex. The cardiac helix form... was described in the 1660s by Lower as having an apical , in which the muscle fibers go from outside in, in a clockwise way, and from inside out, in a counterclockwise direction."

"This combination of clockwise and counterclockwise vortexes is common in nature. For example, within the flower bud of a daisy..."

"Nature contains many pathways of clockwise and counterclockwise spirals that are called reciprocal spirals. One example of natural reciprocal spirals is the sea shell. If one takes the tip of that shell and draws it outward, the formation becomes a helix... very similar to the shape of the heart."

"These helical patterns are common in many animals with horns, such as the ram or eland... [I]n combat... they do not break, because nature introduces... the formation of spirals within spirals... nature’s way of supporting one structure within itself. In a larger sense, nature introduces a harmony of structures from both outside and inside the visible shape."

"Pythagoras... described the golden section: the small is to the large as the large is to the whole... Throughout nature, there is a symphony of harmonies between... parts. ... ...defined this concept of harmony between parts as a ... Throughout nature... logarithmic spirals are commonplace. ...[T]he logarithmic spiral of DNA, a double helix holding the sugar and phosphate ions... the recipe for the blueprint of... life. ...[W]e can proceed upward ...to observe the ...in ...enormous macroscopic form."

"Counterclockwise and clockwise spirals exist within our fingertips. ...[T]his harmonic pattern within our fingertips also occurs in our heart, where clockwise and counterclockwise spirals are evident at the apex [lower tip]... shown in 1864 by Pettigrew... [W]e look at the heart anatomically and observe the internal and external spiral loops ...previously called the bulbospiral and sinospiral loops. Their infolding into the heart develops a pathway... similar to those that appear in the Handbook of Physiology and were made by Dr. . Their format characterizes a structural problem... called the of anatomy."

"Dr Torrent-Guasp... formalized this description by indicating that the heart looked like a "rope"... [in] three parts: a beginning and an end at the and ; a wraparound loop called a basal loop; and... a helix that he called the apical loop. ...He described a [billion year old] worm... with a vascular tube... like a rope, with a venous and an arterial system. ...[F]ish evolved to show the first generation of a heart, containing a single pumping chamber, and included gills... [Next] the amphibian and the reptile appeared, in which we observe an atrium and a ventricle. Each chamber was separated by an atrial and ventricular septal defect. Human beings developed... [later] and both the atrial defect and the ventricular defect are closed."

"At 20 days of life, the heart of an evolving human being looks like a worm... At 25 days... a clear-cut... single pump... In a sense, we mirror... a fish... At 30 days, the embryologic heart contains a patent ventricular septal defect and an atrial septal defect... we resemble the amphibian and the reptile... Finally, at 50 days... an intact atrial and ventricular septum.... our cardiac evolution encompasses 1 billion years of the phylogenetic development."

"To unfold the heart, we must separate the aorta from the pulmonary artery... to expose the free wall of the right ventricle. ...[W]e must unfold the helix of the heart ...unroofing ...the from its ventricular attachment to separate the ascending and descending [helix] limbs... by unwrapping the coil. ...[A] longitudinal myocardial band is demonstrated that corresponds directly to an open stretched rope. ...Dr Torrent-Guasp has performed this unfolding or unscrolling while dissecting an intact heart... to define the intact myocardium as a single muscle band that extends between the aorta at its termination to the at its beginning. ...A fascinating study was done by Dr P. P. Lunkenheimer... which can counteract concerns that this... may not be repro-ducible..."

"The classic view of cardiac anatomy relates to contracting and relaxing, or more specifically, constricting to narrow and eject, and dilating to widen and fill. This sequence was defined by William Harvey. However, the predominant motion of the heart is... rather shortening and narrowing. There are four fundamental motions... narrowing, shortening, lengthening, and widening... a downward twisting of the muscle fibers... shorten and thicken and thereby make the heart eject. This twisting or torsion was described by Borelli, in the 1600s, to simulate the wringing of a rag. ...[P]rogression of contraction into the ascending segment ...results in twisting and thickening in an opposite direction. This sequence is followed by relaxation to allow the ventricle to fill during the remainder of the diastolic phase. ...[T]he heart twists to eject and reciprocally twists to fill in a clockwise and counterclockwise manner... twisting and untwisting of the conical heart muscle in reciprocal directions. ...[T]he predominant action is shortening and lengthening, rather than narrowing and widening... ejection during shortening and suction to fill during lengthening..."

"The spiral formation within the helical heart conforms nicely to the mathematical description of spiral described by ... [A]fter manual dissection of the ascending segment from the descending segment... [t]hese lengths have a harmonic proportion, and... conform... to the ratio Pythagoras described within the golden section: the small is to the large as the large is to the whole. ...[A] hidden harmony of spirals... [that] starts with the master plan of DNA, a double helix..."

"[Y]ou think about knowledge and university. The student is often wrong, and always in doubt. The Professor is sometimes wrong and never in doubt."

"If you pick the heart up and look at the bottom... there are s... a spiral going inside-out, and outside-in. The same reciprocal spirals happen in flowers. ...[T]he circles get bigger as they get further outward. ...[T]hat increase in size is the secret of growth. ...[T]hese beautiful reciprocal spirals... are not just in daisies, but you see this in seashells... you pick the tip of the spiral... or the shell up... it becomes a , just like the heart... or the horns of an eland. ...Inside the horns ...are spirals within spirals. ...[T]he spirals... go into the... blueprint of life...in DNA between the sugar and the s. The use of the same reciprocal spirals exist in the microscopic way, just as they exist macroscopically in the galaxy. ...We all have spirals in our fingertips... But your finger is different than somebody else's finger, and that's because there is harmony in variance."

"[N]ot only does the fingertip have a spiral, but [there is] the spiral at the tip of your heart. Perhaps the tip of your heart is your apical fingertip. ...The ventricle, which is the beating part of the heart, has a spiral... it goes from inside-out, and outside-in. That spiral is very typical. It goes down to the apex of the heart, the tip of the heart, which is a vortex. The thing that really makes the heart a part of an active way of living."

"[I]t was thought many years ago that no one could understand the heart. The heart was called the ."

"[I]f you look at the helical heart, you see a hidden harmony of spirals. You see the DNA... the blueprint... You see the ventricle... You see that you have ejection and suction with the spirals going in different directions, with the spirals within spirals. You see it in the microscopic structure of the heart, the different forms of the heart called the , , , []... It's all the same. It's a reproduction of what is normal and very efficient."

"[I]t's really amazing... you look at a calcium coil that is the calcium ions... It spirals... and you look at the single calcium ion and see a spiral. So it's everywhere. So what we really have, in a sense, are gargantuan relatives. They're ionic and they're cosmic."

"Our job is to restore the helix... because congestive heart failure is the major killer in the world today. ...[T]he thing that makes the heart very effective is the way the spiral of the ventricle is formed. ...The minute you ...stretch the ventricle... the tranverse part... in the basal loop, it doesn't contract as effectively."

"[I]f you look at the diseases we see... a narrowing in the coronary artery... a valve becomes leaky, either the or the , or people who have muscular disease. The heart changes from an ellipse to a sphere. In a sense... from a football to a basketball. ...[T]here's alteration in the fiber direction of the ventricle."

"[A] normal heart... is twisting and it's very happy. But... a sick heart... it's dilated and not very efficient. ...What you have to make, is a basketball into a football. ...[A]s you do this operation, it's... not very complicated. Here's the dilated ventricle with the scar in it. We basically open the scar, put a little stitch in there, bring the edges together, throw a patch in there and fix the ventricle. ...The job is to make abnormality normality... restore nature, restore the natural form."

"[A] cathedral... has the principle of a and a . ...There's the heart. It's exactly the same thing. ...There's ...an iceberg. The iceberg and the heart are the same [form]. Imagination is that you have to see what is, not what you want to see. ...[T]he hurricane and a heart have exactly the same direction. They whirl in the same way. [T]he galaxy... it's exactly the same concept."

"Creation... is filling an empty room with new ideas. Testing them with ongoing change as you learn. It's a process. It's never an event. It's a process... ask questions and you begin to answer them."

"Torrent-Guasp was a Spanish cardiologist and artist who wrote a book [Anatomia Funcional del Corazon] about how the heart was formed, and nobody listened... because he deviated from society. ...He showed the ventricle had reciprocal spirals. ...[H]e looked at a pine cone because a pine cone has the same reciprocal spirals that the heart does. It's part of nature. A heart is just a part of a grand design and the design shares things everywhere. ...He says "Nature is simple, but scientists are complicated.""

"[T]he simplicity of nature is, you find it if you look for it, and you find a commonality, and there's something that goes from one thing to another."

"There was a famous cardiologist named ... and he talked about the heart twisting..."

"William Harvey... who in England discovered the circulation... wrote this wonderful book called Anatomical Exercises... [S]uddenly he is here with the new idea of the circulation and some other ideas... He contradicted Vesalius who fitted to the Galenic system of ebb and flow concept. That's the twist and suction that the heart always has. Harvey says it didn't happen that way. It didn't dilate and take the shape of cupping glass and suck blood into it. Well, Harvey was a brilliant and wonderful person, but he wasn't perfect, and he was wrong. Because the heart does exactly what he said it didn't do."

"I picked up a book [The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels ed., Saunders & O'Malley] on Vesalius... [H]e cut the heart... to see the different cavities... in the 1500s. ...[T]he cardiac structure is the first example since Leonardo da Vinci showing the thickness of the walls and the shape of the cavities."

"I looked up Leonardo [Leonardo Da Vinci The Anatomy of Man: Drawings from the Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II] to see what Leonardo found. Leonardo... showed also that the heart had these different cavities with different sizes. ...[H]e said "The apex, or tip of the heart comprises the left ventricle." ...[T]hat ...is the vortex. And then Leonardo made these fabulous drawings ...and he looked at the aorta, and he found as the blood came out it goes in reciprocal spirals going in different directions. ...[H]e said that's how the blood flows."

"The zebrafish is... interesting... It's aorta is 1/3 the size of a human hair. But yet.. it works exactly like yours and mine do. ...So we're not unique. We're just a part of a wonderful scheme of nature. ...[W]e're such a part of a scheme that we look at reciprocal spirals in heaven..."

"[W]e... talk about gravity as being pulled down, but Einstein said no, it's a warping of space and time. It's pulling you down into an ellipse. ...[T]he moving down-up of time may be no different than moving up and down of your heart, with ejection and suction."

"No matter how much we dislike something, we always have to listen, and find if some nugget of truth, some change is available to us. We can't just dislike someone. We have to realize there are many parts to them."

"A dilemma that I see is that ignorant people are unknowledgable, but can learn. Arrogant people are knowledgeable but unable to be taught."

"[A]s you look at this scheme of how we learn and grow... we go up and down this pipe. ...[G]rowth is knowledge to analyze, to differentiate, to take things apart. Wisdom is to synthesize, integrate, to bring them together. Wholeness means you have complimentary activity to use them both. You have to do something. Something has to happen, and as a surgeon we are lucky. We have the ability to combine wisdom and knowledge into action."

"Stopping the heart is accomplished by shutting off its blood supply (a process called ). I discovered blood '... We initially realized the return of regular blood to a heart that has been without blood supply, will create severe damage. We then discovered how to prevent this injury by using a blood cardioplegic solution that contains selected chemical ingredients (including key amino acids...)that safely protects the heart... [E]ffectiveness... depended upon their arriving at specific locations... But many of our patients had narrowed arteries... This barrier was overcome by delivering it in a "backward direction" via the heart’s main vein... further enhanced by administering it at different temperatures during the beginning and end of the operation."

"Heart attacks occur because a part of the heart stops squeezing after there is sudden loss of blood supply to that area. ...the damaged portion of the heart does not regain its ability to contract. The long-term aftermath is that 30% of surviving patients will develop heart failure within five years, despite having the artery successfully reopened. ...However, if instead of initially returning normal blood to the damaged region... we add specific ingredients to this nourishing blood and... control how it is delivered... contraction returns immediately. ...[T]he required equipment already exists in the cath lab, and needs only minor modifications. Yet this is not done, due to a lack of willingness to learn..."

"Today, wonderful operations can be performed on babies to repair heart defects. This includes "blue babies." During the corrective procedure, high levels of oxygen are typically administered by a heart-lung machine... But... lung and heart damage may worsen. ...[O]ne cause of the problem were the high levels of oxygen administered ...as toxic substances are produced when such oxygen concentrations are metabolized. Babies are particularly vulnerable... Yet we found this "re-oxygenation injury" could be avoided by lowering oxygen levels delivered... There was excellent recovery of heart function without lung or body swelling. ...A 2012 overview on reoxygenation injury was published in the World Journal for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Surgery that summarized international papers from others... [R]aising such questions to traditionalists garners vehement rejection, along with counterarguments that keeping oxygen levels high is a strategy ..."proven..." over many decades (since not all blue babies suffer damage...) They perceive the greater risk is losing the baby because of "insufficient... oxygen"... and... blame... unforeseen complications on other factors."

"Conclusive answers are not gained by adhering to past beliefs or by assuming that what seems logical is valid. The answer is only revealed through investigation."

"Sudden death... cardiac arrest... occurs because the heart suddenly stops (having either no beat, or develops a totally ineffective beat such as ). CPR is typically performed... and if one is available, a defibrillator... restoring the heartbeat. Yet... the harsh reality is that 85 to 90% of these patients die, and severe brain damage develops in half of those who do survive. ...CPR, defibrillation ...does not address the heart defect ...[W]hy stay so stubbornly attached to a method in which 85 to 90% of patients perish?"

"An alternate and effective three-step approach has been used experimentally... First, CPR specifically designed to provide sufficient blood pressure is employed to ensure blood nourishment to the brain. Second, body circulation is supported using a small portable heart-lung machine whose catheters easily access the groin arteries. ...Third, the dead heart is then brought back to life by the delivery of blood containing ...added ingredients ...[T]his new method was applied internationally to 34 sudden death patients. ...80% ...survived ...only one patient sustained brain injury. ...[W]ith present methods... 100% will die if CPR/defibrillation does not return an efficient heartbeat within 15 minutes. Yet these 34 patients underwent CPR for an average of 72 minutes... Because it also treated the cause behind the sudden death and not just the symptom (the heart stopping)."

"It is universally believed that just five minutes or more of no blood flow to the brain is always lethal. We had already verified that controlled reflow of blood after a heart attack (adding specific chemical ingredients...) returns healthy cardiac function. We tested if a similar recovery could occur in the brain... and showed an astounding return of complete brain function after 30 minutes of no brain blood flow! ...Yet ...the NIH rejected our request for funding to study this further. They... deemed this... as "not interesting.""

"[O]ur lab studies on test subjects... implied that while CPR plays a positive role in treating witnessed arrest (when applied quickly once the heart stops beating)... application of CPR in unwitnessed arrest (when there is a delay before its use) is... wrong... because after the brain has been ischemic... CPR will return normal blood to the brain. ...Yet medicine continues endorsing this approach—despite the 99% mortality."

"Our findings could lead to radical changes in protocol, in which CPR is not immediately applied in unwitnessed arrest, and other techniques are used instead... [to] include using controlled reflow (adding specific chemical ingredients...) ...additional lab studies suggest this new... approach could possibly lead to treatments for stroke victims that avoid brain injury, since the same extended period of insufficient blood flow to the brain occurs... [T]here are 700,000 stroke victims annually in the United States alone. Further funding and research... are vitally needed."

"Surgical Ventricular Restoration was successfully tested internationally in 1200 patients. Instead of the [typical] 50-to-75% two-year death rate... this surgical treatment showed a 70% five-year survival, with a return to near normal heart function and only very rare occurrences of dangerous ventricular rhythms. Sadly, a faulty NIH-funded study of this groundbreaking treatment utilized physicians who were not qualified... disregarded proper selection of patients, and incorrectly performed procedures. Its erroneous findings led to... abandonment... despite a report that supports this treatment... Its dismissal... is tragic, and leads to enormous and unnecessary suffering upon... millions"

"In managing heart failure in dilated hearts, we must recognize its cause is flawed heart anatomy... normality is restored after rebuilding the natural cardiac form."

"Paco Torrent-Guasp’s revelation of the heart’s authentic structure finally explains... stretching (dilation) during heart failure causes the heart’s normal elliptical shape (like a football) to become spherical (like a basketball). This geometric alteration rearranges the heart muscle pathways so the natural helix figure-eight pattern now becomes horizontal. ...[T]he spherical heart loses its normal ability to twist, which markedly reduces its contraction power, causing fatigue and breathlessness. ...Conventional treatments that only remedy diseased narrowed arteries or leaky valves do not restore... function correctly. ...Normality can only be returned by restoring the... shape... Paco’s helical heart... became my guide, leading to a new procedure called "Pacopexy"... [achieving] functional improvement... not... possible without... ventricular restoration to rebuild normality."

"Fifty percent of [heart] failures are caused by poor contraction of the ventricle (systolic dysfunction) that pumps blood... But the other half have poor filling (diastolic dysfunction) of blood into the ventricle... despite... normal heart contraction. ...[T]here has been uncertainty in how to treat diastolic dysfunction because its mechanical causes have been unknown."

"Understanding Paco’s "helix and wrap" structure solves this problem. ...[W]e found that suction accounts for most of filling (70%)... during the first 1/3 of the period when the heart relaxes... caused by how the figure-eight helix arms and its surrounding wrap interact. ...[W]hen the ventricle’s pumping ...during a heartbeat lasts longer than it is supposed to... [t]his shortens the available time for suction to fill... diastolic dysfunction develops. ...[W]e found ...calcium influences contraction and relaxation ... ...uniquely prevented calcium buildup. ...[T]he ...pharmacological trial ...failed after the manufacturer disregarded advice from the study’s steering committee. ...Diastolic dysfunction’s cause (helix and wrap dynamics) and curative drug (Cariporide) are neither taught in medical school, nor... known by... cardiologists..."

"A recent survey of 3,292 post-operative patients showed approximately 40% had septums that were bulging or showing "paradoxical motion." ....[A]fter valve surgery [it was] 60%. ...[T]he entire cardiovascular community (cardiologists and surgeons) has a lack in awareness of the critical importance of the septum."

"[O]ne of the great anguishes in medicine is its inability to treat right (ventricle) heart failure... [due to] an absence of understanding how the normal right ventricle... functions. Conventional views hold... a 400-year-old belief that the right ventricle compresses like "a "... But... that... only accounts for 20% of the... pumping... The shortening of the septum... produces 80% of its function. ...Torrent-Guasp’s "helix and wrap"... model clarifies why... [m]odern 3-D imaging confirms that the septum portion of the helix... twists to pump... from the right ventricle to the lungs... In animal testing, we further verified [this]."

"Clearly it’s important not to injure the septum during operations. So why is it happening repeatedly? ...[L]ikely ...improper myocardial protection (the technique used to protect the heart... that was my initial major medical discovery and quickly adopted worldwide). We... tested 119 consecutive patients and found no septum damage when protection was done correctly. ...Successful protection involves ...the cardioplegic solution and adopting a correct delivery strategy. ...[I]f surgeons are to prevent the all-too-frequent injury to the heart’s vital septum, they must avoid taking shortcuts that compromise this essential combination."

"[P]acemakers elevate the heart rate... but they don’t always reproduce a normal heartbeat. ...[I]f the pacemaker leads are placed directly in ventricular muscle... the natural electrical system is not utilized. ...[T]here is loss of the natural twisting motion needed for efficient contraction. It may even cause heart function to worsen and produce heart failure in patients with dilated hearts. In other patients, fatigue will not improve, and shortness of breath will not get better."

"I used [Paco's] heart model... as my guide, to place pacemaker electrodes through a location on top of the septum... to reach the natural conducting system. The twisting motion was immediately reproduced to create normal heart performance! This approach was applied to over 700 patients around the world... and yielded similarly positive outcomes. Yet conventional cardiac approaches have not changed. Why..? Manufacturers would need to produce new types of pacemakers... Cardiologists would need to learn new techniques... Acquiring proficiency... is a little harder at first, but once learned, requires only 20... minutes of added [surgery] time."

"I have a way of looking at things, because I discover failure and find solutions. ...I'm grateful that I've been able to implement medical care that's given, but realize there are major limitations, major failures... I have spent... fifty years finding solutions to many of those different problems."

"[T]he age-old obstacle to growth, it's called rigidity. ...When you talk about... finding an answer, proving it, and nobody uses it. A book called ' by ... it was about... who worked in a maternity ward and found that many women after they gave birth... would die. ...He found the women that lived were delivered by the wet nurses and the women that died were delivered by the doctors... He realized that the doctors that would deliver the babies, go across the street [and] do an autopsy, but there's no germ theory. The doctors would wipe off their hands, and go back and infect the women. ...[H]e said, what you have to do is to wash your hands. He told the Titans of medicine. They still exist today. All these Titans of medicine that know everything, that you're doing it wrong. ...[T]hey didn't listen to him but eventually... it did win, it was right, because truth always wins."

"What Dr. Buckberg and I did for 35 years is, we looked at... ischemia reperfusion... What Gerry and I did for all of that time was to look at how can we avoid that injury. How can we let those cells repair themselves rather than being damaged with reperfusion? ...How do we protect the heart? Because every heart surgery, or the majority of them, you have to stop the heart so we can operate... while it's not having blood supply and while it's not beating. That means... you may have a reperfusion injury... [S]olutions that Dr. Buckberg pioneered probably helped save more people that any surgeon alive, because those solutions protect the heart. But we took it to the next levels because there are a lot of diseases like heart attacks... nothing more than a part of the heart gets no blood supply, and that part eventually dies. A stroke... transplants where we take organs out and they're ischemic. ...[W]e apply that concept to these other things. ...If we have a patient that has a heart attack... the cardiologist... will open up the artery, and suddenly the blood goes in there and the patient's pain goes away... but they've still killed that area of the heart. ...What we would recommend is... avoiding that reperfusion injury. ...[T]hose patients with some of this dead muscle, 1/3 - 40% of them will go into heart failure... 4 to 5 years later... which is a huge cost to society."

"The central focus of his medical research was to validate, and explain, the effects of ancient Indian systems repackaged as his proprietary Relaxation Response in scientific and technical language. For instance, the deep rest provided by the TM technique is renamed ‘a hypometabolic state of parasympathetic activation’. Given his clout, funding sources, and sponsorship from Christian institutions, such as the John Templeton Foundation (brought in as a board member), he succeeded in rebranding Maharishi’s distinctly Indian ideas as his own Benson Method. He became a significant bridge to bring the bounties of Indian mind sciences into Western frameworks and ownership."

"Benson traveled to India with the intent of adding Tibetan Buddhism ideas on to his own meditation system to make it seem different than TM. In 1980, when Benson and Wallace met in India, Benson pretended he had done no wrong, to the contrary claiming he had contributed to Indian spirituality by popularizing Maharishi’s ideas. Maharishi was asked several times about Benson’s plagiarism; he was aware of it but wanted Wallace and others to ignore it and not pursue the matter officially."

"The academic world as well as mainstream American media gave Benson complete credit for the discovery of the science of meditation. Seldom mentioned was its debt to Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation. In fact, Benson was credited for having ‘demystified meditation’ by removing the mantra that seemed threatening to many Judeo-Christian Americans. He made a fortune and a great career at Harvard selling these techniques acknowledging neither the Indian origin of the practices nor the Sanskrit-based theories and epistemologies that interpreted and explained the higher states of consciousness."

"Seventy per cent of the funding of the World Health Organisation comes from commercial entities…. As long as the WHO is getting industry funding or funding from vested interests, it should not be considered independent and the Indian government should ignore its advice. Those commercial entities are not interested in your health, they will make money by deception."

"Doing that work is the true joy of training the next generation of scientists and clinicians who are going to be doing science differently, who are going to be translating science into care differently"

"That is so critical. Because I’m training the young women who are going to go into these fields, we don’t want them to be harassed out of them,"

"We all have a responsibility to create and sustain environments where women can not only compete, but can thrive. Institutions of higher education have had to rethink some of their models amid the pandemic and find new ways to provide experiential opportunities for students amid remote learning and, in some cases, this has led to new partnerships and collaborations between companies and organizations and colleges and universities."

"To be able to heal confers an obligation to heal, In an atmosphere of mistrust, it is critically important for clinical physicians and physician scientists to be able to translate their knowledge, their practice, and their science into the public domain."

"No data is better than wrong data."

"Nothing makes you more humble in medicine than the autopsy table."

"Words are like numbers, if you say 2, you mean 2. You don't mean 3."

"The trouble is no one thinks anymore. Creative thinking is limited to a few. To sit or lie and think is a pleasant hobby."

"You'll never learn medicine with books or without them."

"Everyone has to take part in this war against cholera, we’re almost there, there’s just a little bit left and if we all work together we’ll be able to get rid of cholera in Angola."

"This is a journey marked by immense challenges but also by unwavering courage and the conviction that no obstacle is greater than guaranteeing vaccination and every child’s right to a healthy future."

"We celebrate the achievements and reaffirm our unwavering commitment to completing this journey. May this honour serve as an eternal tribute to all who, yesterday and today, have dedicated their lives to the cause of public health in Angola."