Minimally invasive cardiac surgery—a push to kaizen!

Excerpt

The advent of cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) in 1953 brought most intracardiac structural disorders of the heart within the purview of cardiac surgery. The success of 1960s elevated the cardiac surgeons to the ‘Godly Pedestal’, and he became the undisputable numero uno of the medical fraternity. The ‘holier than thou’ image, the ‘cash-cow’ status of the speciality, sprinkled with the haughtiness and arrogance of being a cardiac surgeon, and topped with the exclusivity of treatment domain for most cardiac illnesses, there being no interventional cardiology then, led to a kind of an inertia and the surgeons sat on their haunches in 1970s and 1980s with no great innovations or developments in the field. The entire fraternity, however, was shaken up with a rude jolt with the advent of percutaneous interventions for coronary artery disease. Soon followed the device closure for left to right shunts and the turf seemed to be slipping under the sleeping giants’ lair. That got the cardiac surgical fraternity thinking and thus sprung the sub-speciality of minimally invasive cardiac surgery (MICS), not honestly for the felt needs of the patients, but of the treating doctors ….hic…cardiac surgeons. …