Randy Martin: Well I’m obviously privileged like all of us to have a chance to visit with Professor Carpentier. Professor, you sat in the audience this morning. I saw you in the audience this morning. Sitting on the podium this morning I was overwhelmed at the 900 individuals here to learn about mitral valve disease and really the operative repair. What’s it feel like for you to see what you’ve postulated all of these years and taught us all to have this much of a gathering?
Alain Carpentier: Well I couldn’t imagine how fast and how deep would be the changes in the mentality of the surgeon with regards to valve disease. I think this has something to do with a current evolution of the society and mainly the fact that our society people are mainly concerned by quality of life. If I had only one definition to make comparing the surgery from the past to the surgery of today or tomorrow, I would only say quality of life. In the past, the people were afraid to have a reoperation, that’s why they didn’t like valve repair, or bioprosthetic valve replacement. Today they say, well, give me a normal life for 10, 15, 20 years so that I can enjoy life and this is, of course, the unexpected success of what I call non-thrombogenic surgery.
Martin: Right. I’m going to come back to that because you’ve received a phenomenal reward for that, but, so you’ve been a pioneer in mitral valve reparative surgery and my first experience with outstanding cardiac surgery, really outstanding, was when I was doing my medicine training at Stanford in the late 60’s and seeing outstanding surgeons. So you’ve been a proponent of not only excellence in cardiac surgery, but this concept of really understanding the mitral valve and repair, to see where it is. I mean, just sitting in the room and seeing 900 people sitting there, spending a morning and two days talking about this it must be very encouraging to you, isn’t it? To see how it’s come to that?
Carpentier: Well, I’ve been encouraged in the past. Also and I would say it was mainly a surprise. It is, of course, encouraging as you said, but it is a surprise, but this is the merit of David Adams who was able to, he is really in this country as a promoter of these techniques. There are very few people having caught the spirit of valve reconstruction because this is really, the term “spirit”, is probably the best to express that. And I go back to the beginning by saying that how important is the quality of life.
Martin: In your paper in 1983 you know, most cardiologists, and I’m obviously a cardiologist who images the valves, most cardiologists, had no concept, and I’m afraid even today many of them don’t, the concept of the incredible structure of the mitral apparatus and how you would repair it So, you’ve not only enlightened surgeons, but you’ve also enlightened cardiologists.
Carpentier: I like to work with cardiologists from the very beginning. There is a tendency for surgeons to think that they know everything and that the cardiologists don’t know any anything. I have a totally different approach and I’ve been introducing the cardiologists in the operating room, probably the very first in the world, from the very beginning. This was at least at the beginning of the availably of echocardiography. And working as a team is such a gratifying approach and allows you to really improve your techniques and improve your results because a cardiologist is in the operating room and he tells you there is a leak. “No, there is no leak.” “Yes, there is a leak! You have to go back!” And still now, this is really the cardiologist’s responsibility to tell me, “You have to go back,” even if it is a tiny leak.
Martin: I would agree, but it works the other way too. The tremendous admiration that we have for what you, as a surgeon, a generic you as a cardiac surgeon, does, because again, I had the experience in my early cardiology training at Stanford by going to the operating room and beginning to understand anatomy, because the only exposure I had to anatomy prior to echo, was in the post-mortem, when I was doing an anatomy.
Español
