Gerald Buckberg Quotes

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

[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.

[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].

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...

Stopping the heart is accomplished by shutting off its blood supply (a process called ). I discovered blood ... We initally 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.

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