Cardiologists

"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."

"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)."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."