Musing While Cutting

Cardiac surgeons took to the heart and claimed an exclusive privilege to intervene. The task of cardiologists was to identify "candidates" and feed the great surgical machine. Recently, catheter surgery was developed and has fallen into the hands of cardiologists who became interventionists. Cardiac surgeons are concerned about shrinking domain, identity, and the future. The analysis of the current situation requires another look at old concepts: surgery, intervention, therapy, patients, invasiveness, etc., and a revision of the philosophy of the entire profession. Therapeutic plans comprise three interrelated components: the target, the bullet (therapeutic agent), and the gun (the way of delivering the bullet on target ). This description characterizes surgery as a way of delivering. If side effects are effects that do not affect the target, surgical procedures are mostly side effects, with significant morbidity. Future surgical rationales should reconcile target-specific therapy and minimal collateral damages: "minimal surgery!" or to use a new buzzword, "less invasive surgery." Cardiac surgery has focused on surgical practice and neglected the science of cardiology, missing opportunities for new research, new rationales, new techniques, and new territories. Surgeons must again become Renaissance men, involved in the entire field of cardiology, with a special skill in surgical techniques. Cardiac surgeons should no longer confine their practice to the delivering end. This end does not, any more, justify the means.