Gerald Buckberg Quotes

[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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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 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.

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.

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."