Gerald Buckberg Quotes

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

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

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."

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

[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.