Word: cardiac
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...enlarge. Because he lacked the resources necessary for the standard American treatments for the disease--drug therapy and heart transplant--Batista needed to come up with a different solution. The one he finally adopted appears to be a relatively simple procedure, but it has shaken the world of cardiac surgery and offered new hope to people suffering from congestive heart failure. Batista's radical concept: Since the diseased heart is too big, why not cut off a slice or two and make it smaller...
While his operation goes against the general thinking in cardiac surgery, Batista believes he is just respecting nature's laws. He developed his ideas by studying the hearts of animals he found on his horse farm near the Angelina Caron Hospital, where he works. To his astonishment, the heart of every animal he examined, from snake to buffalo, had the exact same proportion of muscle mass to heart size. He found that the relationship came down to a simple equation, loosely based on the law of La Place: mass = 4 x radius3. For every centimeter that it enlarges, the heart...
...gets paid to talk at a conference, he donates the fee to charity. Foreign surgeons frequently try to wine and dine him at the finest restaurants, but he is happiest chewing corn on the cob at his favorite restaurant, Kentucky Fried Chicken. Batista's chief wish is to set cardiac surgery in a direction that will benefit both the developed and the developing world. "Heart transplants are available to maybe 1% of the world population," he says. "I'm trying to help out the other...
Others have not been so quick to join Batista's backers. "It's a good idea," says Dr. Lawrence Kohn, a cardiac surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, "but we're waiting to see the scientific proof." And lack of proof has certainly been a problem. Because many of Batista's patients do not have phones and come from all areas of Brazil, he has done little to track the long-term effects of his procedure. Surgeons in Brazil were no more eager than most American doctors to accept Batista's claims. "When I first heard...
...visit to the U.S. to present his findings to leading cardiac surgeons, Batista was rushed off to Baltimore, Md., to see a 32-year-old woman with congestive heart failure who was not expected to survive the weekend. In a moment of reflection, Batista offered a glimpse of what makes him tick: "The big thing for me is that an institution like Johns Hopkins can't do anything for this woman. And here I am, all the way from Brazil, and I have something that may be able to save her." Sadly, the woman was too sick to save...