Classic of Difficulties: Difficult Questions in Medicine, Acupuncture, and Beyond

The Heart is Not a Pump? Pt. 1: The Evidence

April 19, 2021 Dr. James Mohebali Episode 4
Classic of Difficulties: Difficult Questions in Medicine, Acupuncture, and Beyond
The Heart is Not a Pump? Pt. 1: The Evidence
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

It's been 400 years of thinking the heart is a pump — isn't it time for a change? Let's look at the evidence, the history, and the way forward.

In an age where science is constantly overturning what we thought we knew about the body, and new theories come out every day trying to explain new phenomena, one theory remains unchallenged. Since 1628, when Harvey published his seminal text on the circulation of blood, we have believed more or less the same thing about the heart. But what if the heart isn't a pump at all? And what if it's time that we update Harvey's ideas? In order to move forward, Dr. James Mohebali tries to lead us through the evidence, and see what the shortcomings of our current understanding are. On the way, we critically examine the practice of empiricism & the idea of conspiracy theories, and discover the implications of and problems associated with holding on tight to our current beliefs. Between Galen, Harvey, Descartes, McDonalds hamburgers, and a father's responsibility to his family, the search for truth leads us to some difficult and deep questions, and hopefully a few answers.

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COOL STUFF I MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
Heart Blood Flow Diagram

Dr. James Mohebali on "Why Are We Talking About Rabbits" Podcast

Harvey's "On The Circulation of Blood"
Descartes' "Discourse on Method"
Dr. Tom Cowan's "Human Heart, Cosmic Heart"

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Music Credit:
"Let Yourself Be Huge" - Cloudkicker (under Creative Commons License)

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Greetings and welcome to Classic of Difficulties: difficult questions in medicine, acupuncture, and beyond. I am your host, Dr. James Mohebali, I’m a doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine, and I will be your armchair philosopher in residence and your tour guide as we try to ask some difficult questions about medicine, acupuncture, and maybe the meaning of life. Our goal in this podcast is that we will maybe leave with a couple of answers, but we will definitely leave with more questions than we had at the start. 

This is episode four, What does the heart do? Part One: The heart is not a pump.

You might have heard us talking about this hot-button issue on WAWTAR, that’s Why are We Talking About Rabbits, a podcast by my good friend John Heers and First Things Foundation, which is a very cool non-profit organization. If you didn’t hear us there, go check it out after this episode. In that discussion, we thrust you into the very strange and very new idea, or perhaps very old idea, that the heart is not a pump. That’s right, the organ in your chest that all that blood moves through in order to get to the whole body, our claim in that episode and today is that it is not what you think it is. Or at least, it’s not what medicine and modern science tell you it is; it might be a whole lot more like what your experience being a human tells you about your heart.

So, right away, you might be asking yourself: Well what does the heart do, then? And, if it’s not a pump, then how does the blood move Mr. Smarty-pants? And how come everyone tells me that the heart is a pump? And why are we even talking about this, since it doesn’t really seem like it matters that much?

Before we get into all of those very important questions, I need to give credit where credit is due. Just like the famous quote from Isaac Newton, we are standing on the shoulders of giants here. We wouldn’t be able to have this discussion without some very important and very smart people. First, we have to thank Jeffrey Yuen, who is my teacher, and who is a pretty cool guy, but we also have to thank Rudolf Steiner, Dr. Thomas Cowan - who also has a podcast and youtube channel, check him out - Branko Furst, Victor Schauberger, and, last, but not least, a friend of mine Taylor Nelson, who is a big fan of all things vortex. And of course, we have to thank the ancient Chinese classics - mostly the Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen and Ling Shu. 

So what does the heart do? Well, first let’s ask ourselves why we think it’s a pump, and how that pump might work to move blood. So the heart is this muscular organ in the chest, and it has four chambers, two on the right, two on the left. On the top right chamber, there’s a squishy sided, thin-walled giant vein, called the vena cava, that dumps a bunch of blood into there. Then between the right two chambers, there’s a valve that the blood passes as it moves into the lower right chamber, the right ventricle. This ventricle is pretty small compared to the left ventricle, just so you know. That’ll be important later. From the right ventricle, blood moves into the lungs, and then comes back into the left side of the heart, the left atrium. It passes another valve into the left ventricle, which is the hugest and strongest part of the heart. And then from the left ventricle, it leaves into the huge, thick walled aorta, specifically leaving through the aortic arch, which is a massive hairpin turn that the blood takes AS SOON AS IT LEAVES THE HEART. Remember the aortic arch and this hairpin turn, it’ll also be important later. The aorta breaks up into smaller and smaller arteries and arterioles, until finally, the tubes, the capillaries, are one blood cell wide, and it’s like a tight squeeze too, and they’re totally invisible to the naked eye. In these capillaries, the blood literally comes to a stop. It even goes backwards a little bit, so that all the good bits that the blood has in it, oxygen, food, whatever, all that stuff can dissolve into the areas around the capillaries, and nourish those cells. And then what? We have a bunch of stopped blood in these capillaries. Well, somehow or another, the blood starts its way back to the heart. It works its way into larger and larger veins, and all these veins are heading upwards, mostly, towards the heart (brain blood has the interesting feature of going downwards), and then eventually they all merge into the vena cava, and that dumps back into the heart.

That all sounds pretty familiar, especially to those of you who have taken an introduction to anatomy class. Of course this narrative leaves a lot of questions. Let’s start with the most obvious question. How does the blood start moving back to the heart, once it has come to a stop. And let me mention now, that the blood returns to the heart at the exact same speed that it leaves the heart. So whatever system we come up with here, it better be pretty good. That is, as good and as strong as the heart pump itself.  Imagine, you have a bunch of sticky balls that are about the same diameter as a hose, and you’re holding both ends of the hose; the hose goes to the floor, and as you drop the balls into the hose, they all collect at the bottom. I’ve been having a lot of bubble tea lately, so you can imagine it like little tapioca bobas, if you want. By the way, if you haven’t had bubble tea, you should try it. It’s like tea with cream and sugar, but with stuff in it. And the stuff is big silly round chewy balls. It doesn’t sound that awesome, but it is that awesome. Try it.

Ok so there’s a bunch of boba at the bottom of the hose, which is like our feet. As you shove another boba down in there, you might slowly push the first one like up half an inch or something, but basically without something else going on, you’re just going to have a bunch of boba trapped in your feet. So we found out from detailed that the veins have these one way valves. So like, once the boba makes it up an inch, the valve traps the boba so that it can’t go backwards. Ok, this secures our progress a little bit. You can imagine that if you just keep shoving more and more boba, you might get a steady, but very slow stream of boba coming back to the heart. And the pressure of all that boba in the arteries, that’s going to get really high, since it has to shove all that inert boba on the other side.

So since we don’t want our artery boba straws to explode, let’s add some extra oomph on the other side. Modern thinking says that as the calf muscles work, like with walking and stuff, they squeeze the veins, and that gives the boba an extra push upwards. So you would expect that, if we stop using our calf muscles, like if we lay in a hospital bed for a while, or if we take an airplane flight across half the world, or if you’re a paraplegic in a wheelchair, then your legs will swell up with boba. And they do! They get a little fatter. But like how much fatter? Remember what it looks like without any leg squeezing at all. We’re just shooting sticky balls at the ground and hoping that they push one another back up. So if we stop moving our legs, we would expect a huge amount of swelling. As Dr. Cowan says, we would expect that your legs just keep swelling and swelling until they finally pop and you start flying backwards across the room. But we don’t see that. We see a moderate amount of swelling. So we’re starting to see that there’s some unanswered questions about the venous return.

So now I’m going to say it again: the blood coming into the heart, through the venous system, is moving at the same exact speed as the blood leaving the heart. So somehow, between the endlessly stacking boba and the calf muscles, we manage to get the blood moving as fast as the arterial circulation, which has to shove the boba stack at high pressure in the first place. And again, following on Dr. Cowan, we have to ask: what kind of idiot would put a pump in the place where the water is already moving the fastest? And what kind of stupid pump doesn’t accelerate water at all, but leaves it at exactly the same speed as it came in? Common sense dictates that, first, you should put a pump where the water is slowest, not where it’s already moving at top speed. Second, you should put a pump at the BOTTOM of the hill, not the top. So, even if we’re ignoring the arms and legs, the heart should obviously be in the pelvis, not the highest point of the torso, the chest. Third, if the heart isn’t making the blood go any faster, then what exactly is it even doing with all that jumping around and lub-dubbing?

And remember that aortic arch, where all the blood of the body, at top speed, rushes around a hairpin turn as soon as it leaves the starting line? Well, it does something strange when the heart pumps. Imagine holding a hose, with a tight bend in it. And imagine turning on the hose full blast. What does the bend do? It straightens out. And then you turn off the water really quickly. The hose then goes back to being bent. So what does the aortic arch do when the left ventricle is seen contracting? The aortic arch doesn’t straighten out. The aortic arch actually does the opposite - it bends in tighter, making a sharper angle. So what does this mean? It means that the left ventricle isn’t forcing blood into the aortic arch. It means that it’s actually doing the opposite, it’s creating suction. And, suction aside, what kind of idiot tries to run his irrigation system with a hairpin turn right at the beginning of his main water line. 

Another big issue is the lungs and their circulation. If we need this huge left ventricle to force the blood into all the tiny capillaries of the body, then how could the tiny right ventricle possibly be adequate to get the blood through all the tiny capillaries of the lungs?

The last big issue is simply the numbers. If you line up all the blood vessels of the body end to end, they wrap around the earth three times. Or, if you put them side by side, they cover three football fields. Now the heart is about 1 pound, and it’s about the size of your fist - remember that for later, it’s important for understanding the acupuncture channel theory. So you take a one pound pump, with relatively thin walls - by the way, the heart muscle is THINNEST at the apex of the heart, where it connects to the aorta. So it is thinnest where it supposedly shoves a highly pressurized stream of boba at maximum pressure into the giant boba straw that is supposedly strong enough to push on all the thousands and thousands of boba stuck at the bottom of the cup. So you’ve got this pump that weighs one pound, and you’re expecting it to squirt sticky goo full of bobas across three football fields. Or three times around the world.

Here’s the thing, the numbers just don’t add up. And the theory just doesn’t add up.

Someone else way long ago had a similar problem with figuring out the numbers about the mainstream theory of the heart. It was the 1600s, and for about 1500 years, everybody thought that the Liver was the main source of the blood. And they thought that it worked like a fountain, where it just kind of kept pouring out blood and oozing it all over the body, so that all the tissues got their nourishment, and everyone stayed happy. Why did they think this? Because Galen said it. And who cares about Galen? Well Galen was the imperial physician to Marcus Aurelius. All you philosophy buffs out there know Marcus Aurelius. He was probably one of the only philosophers that can also claim to have literally been the emperor of Rome. Like the one emperor. Like the guy who was completely in charge of everyone in the Roman Empire. So Galen was his doctor, and he also treated a bunch of gladiators, and who doesn’t love gladiators. So here’s the thing about the emperor - whatever he says, it kind of goes. So you don’t really disagree with him, or his doctor for that matter. But then the Roman empire ended, right? But they still believed Galen and everything he said. They just kind of accepted that whatever Galen said was one hundred percent totally true. They did a similar thing with Aristotle, oddly enough. They even had a saying that meant, “Well, even he said it” he being either Galen or Aristotle. So it’d go something like this - “The planets orbit around the earth and move in perfect circles. Aristotle said so!” Or, “Women are just empty vessels, and men are totally responsible for making babies. Aristotle said so!” Or, “Go get me a sandwich. Aristotle said you have to! Aristotle told me I need extra mayo, too.”

It’s obviously a little hard to imagine for us modern folk, who won’t even believe what our best friend tells us without googling it first. So who was the guy who finally doubted Galen? And what exactly was his beef? Well, his name was William Harvey, and he was the first person, in the West at least, to really suggest that blood circulates. Why did he start to suspect something was wrong? Well, he looked at how fast blood was moving through the arteries - which, by the way, is pretty fast. And then he said, well if it’s just squirting out of the liver that fast, and it never returns back to the liver, then how much blood do we go through in a day? The answer was astronomical. Harvey calculated that, if the heart beats a certain number of times per minute, and if at each beat, 2 ounces of fluid are released, then, in an hour, the body would have to create 540 pounds of blood. So in order to make that much blood out of food, as Galen’s theory would have it, we would need to eat at least that much food per hour, if not more. And obviously we don’t do this. So we need to find another explanation.

So Harvey reasoned to himself, well it just wouldn’t be a very good system if we didn’t figure out how to reuse the blood, and we just kept making new blood constantly. So Harvey looked around and found evidence that the blood goes out from the heart in the arteries, and comes back in the veins, just like we were talking about earlier. And he did this all empirically, with cool little experiments, and vivisection - which, by the way, is dissection of a living animal. So like, it’s still alive, and you cut it open without anesthesia, and then you cut open arteries and veins and stuff and see how the blood squirts out. Often, it’s a pig. And it squeals. So the first order of business is cutting the nerve to its voicebox (which Galen became very famous for doing, by the way). And then at the end, you either stitch the pig back up and hope it lives, or you just kill it. It’s a pretty brutal process.

But from this brutal process, and from Harvey’s other much less brutal experiments, he came up with this model, and made a bunch of cool little old-timey pictures with disembodied hands wearing fancy little frilly gloves and pushing on the external veins and arteries of a burly farmer he knew. And everything is labeled and neat and delightfully clear.

He didn’t have a microscope though, so he couldn’t see the capillaries. So he had to make a massive leap of faith. He said, I see the blood going one way, and I see the blood coming back the other way, but I don’t see how the blood gets from the arteries into the veins. He happened to be right. But he definitely could have been wrong. A good guess, really.

And here’s the thing - Harvey mapped everything out, saying that the blood circulated. But he didn’t say WHY the blood circulated. Because that’s not really the purview of the empirical scientist. He just wanted to know how things moved the way they did; the question of why, if we can even get to that, comes much later. So Harvey mapped it out, sometimes he said that the blood moved itself, sometimes he said the heart had something to do with it; he definitely does not espouse a theory that the heart is a pump that squeezes the blood like we describe it today.

So who said that it does that? Well, the first guy is really Descartes. Good ol’ Descartes. Poster-child of the Enlightenement, I think therefore I am, the guy who just wanted to be a disembodied brain floating in a vat of jello so that he could think forever and ever and ever. In his Discourse on Method, a short little tight book written in French - not Latin - which is super revolutionary at the time, in one of the later chapters, he says - you know who’s doing a great job right now? My contemporary William Harvey. He’s just being such a good empiricist, and figuring out how to throw out old traditional knowledge by doing specific experiments carefully. He’s a guy who is really using his brain how I want to see people using their brains. 

So Descartes didn’t want any kind of vital force in the picture. He wanted a mechanical universe that would obey mechanical laws.  Ultimately, he really wanted God and spirituality and anything spooky to be relegated to the backseat, and he wanted thinking to take center stage. Because, “I think therefore I am,” means that the only thing that I can be sure of is my own thinking, and through my own thinking, I am sure that I exist. Only from this knowledge that I exist does the knwoledge of anything else originate. And how does the knowledge of new things come to us? Well, thinking about stuff, of course. It’s a worldview that is definitionally egocentric, mind-centric, and totally abstracted from any kind of meaning or significance outside of the individual and his mind.

So what does Descartes say about Harvey? He says that Harvey has outlined this magnificent idea that the heart doesn’t deal with any of those vital principles that Galen talked about, any of that magic “stuff of life,” but that the heart just pumps the blood. Like a mechanical pump. And that’s all there is to it. No spirit, no soul, nothing but squeezing and squirting.

And that’s where we’re at now. Unlike literally everything else in Western medicine and science, we haven’t really changed what we think about the heart in 400 years. Which is weird, because we can barely agree on anything in science. Let alone agree on anything for any amount of time. Let alone 400 years. So either Descartes was really super right - by the way, Descartes, who did no dissections himself, and probably never saw a beating heart - or there’s something amiss here.

I know what you’re thinking, this guy just hates Descartes, and you know what, he sounds like one of those conspiracy theorists. Well, Harvey himself was one of those conspiracy theorists! Let me clarify - when we talk about a conspiracy theory, here’s what the definition actually means. A bunch of people get together, and they all think the same way, and they have a particular goal, and they’re trying to get that goal accomplished. The “theory” part comes from the people on the outside - they say, “hey, I think you guys are missing something, and that you might be leaving out or ignoring some important information.” As to whether that’s on purpose or not, that’s a whole different discussion.

So let me give an example. McDonalds sells hamburgers, among other things. And they like it best when people buy their hamburgers. Lots of them. So there’s a bunch of people that work for McDonalds, and they all get paid by McDonalds to do their job well. So you know what McDonalds is? It’s a conspiracy. It’s a conspiracy to sell hamburgers. They’re going to do everything they can to sell these hamburgers, because that’s what their job is. And you know what pays the bills, and pays for Ronald McDonald’s kids to go to college, and all those tiny little hamburglar kids, too? Selling hamburgers. No one at McDonalds gets to feed their family, go on vacation, or lead a normal happy life unless somebody buys those hamburgers.

Let’s say Steve works at McDonalds. Maybe he doesn’t even eat at the restaurants, but he works there in HQ, doing some kind of office job, like designing the graphics for ads. Then he watches super-size me. Or he finds out that something in the hamburgers is like, really bad for you, and causes health issues. Does Steve quit his job because of this information? Probably not. Steve probably just keeps going to work, keeps not eating McDonalds, doesn’t feed it to his wife or kids, and continues supporting the mission of McDonalds to sell as many hamburgers as possible. That means that Steve is part of the conspiracy. 

So what happens when we have this crazy theory that McDonalds wants to sell hamburgers, and that Steve is involved, and he’s up to something in that office building? Well you’d be crazy to think otherwise - McDonalds wants to sell hamburgers. But then what if we suggest that McDonalds knows that such and such ingredient is harmful, and that they’re serving it in their restaurants anyways? Well, for some reason, we don’t believe that one.

 Why not? Because we think that it means that Steve is out to get us. And he’s not; we already said that. Steve is a pretty good guy, and just wants to go to the beach with his kids in the summer, visit grandma around Christmas time, and live a happy normal life. But Steve doesn’t have to be a bad guy in order for him to be involved with the burger-selling-conspiracy. He doesn’t even have to like eating the burgers!

So do we think that all those Galenic physicians that Harvey disproved were deliberately trying to conceal the fact that the blood circulated? No, we don’t. Or maybe they were. It doesn’t really matter. The fact of the matter is, what they were saying wasn’t true.

And do we believe that Harvey is now out to get us, and lie to us? Absolutely not. Descartes might be, but not Harvey, and certainly not your average cardiologist. In fact, you’d probably be hard-pressed to find a doctor who became a doctor for any reason other than wanting to help patients. I mean, being willing to put up with the rigors and trials of medical school, residency, and all the struggle and suffering there, you’d better have a good reason to put up with all that. So they most likely want to help people, and they most likely want to do a good job, just like Steve.

So what’s the conspiracy here? Well, as Dr. Cowan points out, the evidence for the efficacy of our current approach to cardiology, especially congestive heart failure, is very limited. Even though they are effective at resolving symptoms, and are an absolute blessing in the acute heart attack patient, stents and coronary artery bypass surgeries don’t tend to do as much as we hope they will, in particular with prevention of heart attacks. And medications that we prescribe based on the pump theory, like diuretics and blood pressure medications, they tend to cause a lot of problems, and often aren’t terribly helpful at treating the root of the illness either. I mean, how many people do you know who can say, “oh yeah, I used to have congestive heart failure, but now I don’t anymore. They fixed it.”

So we have this giant establishment of cardiology with billions of dollars of research, creating tons and tons of jobs, putting Steve’s kids through college, all full of people that are trying their hardest to help other people, but just doing so with an incomplete picture. So what’s the incentive for ignoring the evidence that the heart is a pump? Well it’s obvious. McDonalds doesn’t want to have to give up selling burgers, just because it turns out that they’re not the healthiest kind of food for you.

Think of it another way: the pharmaceutical industry and Western medicine really started in its current form after World War II. If there we could assign a historical period whose ideology most lines up with the ideology of western medicine, it would be 1950s America on to the present day. In large part, the current state of Western medicine is only made capable by the huge technological advancement that occurred during World War II. I’ll give you an example – I like to rock-climb. Sometimes in fancy climbing gyms, and sometimes outside. But before World War II, all rock climbing was done with hemp ropes. If you fall on a hemp rope with high speed, it’ll probably break. So rock climbing wasn’t really a very good idea before World War II. Now we have nylon dynamic ropes, which don’t break when you fall on them. Nylon was invented as a result of the boom in synthetic materials during world war II, and used primarily for parachutes and aircraft stuff. So we ramped up production on nylon, built all these factories, made all these machines, created all these jobs, and then, all of a sudden, the war ended. So what do you do? Well, you use those same factories to make climbing ropes. And nylon stockings. And all sorts of other things that characterize what we know as the modern world. We had the extra stuff, so we had to do something with it.

The same ethic is present in China, and has been present for thousands of years. Soybeans – they’re these huge, difficult to digest beans. But soybeans help add nutrients back into the soil, soil that’s depleted by farming other crops. China has a long history of experiencing and, in fact, accidentally causing ecological disasters, so they’re familiar with how important soybeans are. They have an overabundance of this product that they make because of how they structure their society and their industries. So what do they do? They make soy sauce, and fermented soybeans, and tofu, and all kinds of interesting and tasty soy products. They even process a few herbs in soy beans in order to make them into their final medicinal product – like he shou wu. All of this is not because they’re looking for a meat substitute, per se, but because they have all these soybeans on hand and they need to do something with them. We do the same thing nowadays, but with our current technology we extract all sorts of unusual things from soybeans, and try to make food additives and plastics and everything out of them. Same motivations, same behavior, different time period. So there’s a conspiracy to use these soybeans, there’s a conspiracy to use the products and tools we have at our disposal. The conspiracy to make soy sauce is really the same shape as the conspiracy that we like to call Big Pharma. It’s people making a practical decision about the resources that they have at their disposal.

So that’s the practical incentive to keep all of this going exactly the way it has been going, but there’s also an ideological incentive. Up until recently, since Descartes, the western world has pushed forward with an increasingly mechanized worldview. If you asked your average person on the street in Boston now - and I used to live in Boston - if you ask them if there’s some kind of higher spiritual power or higher spiritual reality - they would most likely laugh at you. Even when we make our very modern forays into the spiritual world, we tend to do so from a cartesian framework - I think therefore I am becomes I do zen meditation, therefore I am. By the way, one of Descartes other famous works is called the meditations. In fact, the whole word of meditation is actually taken from the Christian tradition, then co-opted by Descartes, then co-opted again by more modern scholars of Eastern thought. One phrase for meditation in Chinese just literally means “quiet sitting.” 

Anyways, so we have this huge ideological framework that we would have to destroy and rebuild from the ground up if we wanted to change our idea about whether the heart is just a mechanical organ. It would be a huge undertaking, and, to be honest, we don’t know what will be leftover when we’re done breaking it down, which is scary. And we definitely don’t know what we’ll be able to build up afterwards, which is even scarier.

 Unfortunately, I think we have to destroy it. Why? Well, the foundation of empirical science values one thing above all else - empiricism, that is, experience. If you can experience a phenomena, you can learn something about it. And, throughout the ages, and throughout different cultures, we have countless phrases and countless experiences of feeling things in our heart, of love being in our heart, and of divine truth coming through the heart. We also have this idea of heart-break. Of when we can’t deal with things in our life the way they turned out, and it’s too much for us to deal with. And then, we have the experience of modern life - we have more biomedically defined heart disease than ever before, and the numbers don’t seem to be slowing down considerably. With our dramatic, unparalleled advances in the care of acute heart attacks, we have seen an increase of chronic heart disease, and everything that comes with it. And you know what, our emotional and spiritual hearts are sick too. Especially during COVID, we don’t have the human connection that we’ve counted on for all of human history. We don’t get to share good times with friends in the same way, and we certainly aren’t having as much joy. Rates of depression, anxiety, mental illness - which are all considered to be diseases of the Heart in Chinese medicine - these are all skyrocketing.

So not only is our paradigm failing, but everything around us right now is crying out, asking us for a better option. In order to heal ourselves, our society, and our bodies right now, we need to have a new theory of the heart, and everything that comes with it. The evidence has accumulated, and it’s time we take a good hard look at what we believe in, to figure out whether it’s just a case of believing Aristotle just because, or whether it’s something we really want to stand behind. Steve might not want to quit his well-paying job at McDonalds if everything is going well, but what if his family starts to get sick from eating the burgers? And what if his kids won’t stop eating them, because they think that, well, if Dad works there, then these burgers must be fine?

So, let’s take a look at these figurative hamburgers, shall we? And let’s take a look at the heart and cardiology. Hopefully, some of the questions that we asked today will get answered in the next two parts of this three part series, “what does the heart do?” In the coming episodes, we’re going to look at some of the modern research, some anthroposophic medicine, that’s Rudolf Steiner’s medicine, who by the way, he was the guy behind Waldorf schools, and we are of course going to look at Chinese medicine. The classical texts of Chinese medicine have a LOT to say about the heart, so we have tons of material to cover. So let’s take a look, get some answers, and definitely, find some more questions - because wouldn’t it be a shame if we had all the answers? I mean, then the mystery would be over, right? Like if we just figured out the heart completely, and we could totally explain love? Why even bother dating then? So, thank you, thank you for listening, and we hope to see you next time on Classic of Difficulties for part two of this three part series on the heart. As always, keep asking questions, and stay difficult!

Acknowledgements
Summary of Heart Anatomy
Issues with Venous Return
Issues with Aortic Arch
Issues with Right Ventricle
Issues with Statistics
Galen, Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle
Harvey's Calculation
Vivisection
Origin of the Pump Theory
What is a Conspiracy Theory?
McDonalds Conspiracy Theory
Limited Evidence for Efficacy of Cardiology
Rock Climbing & Post-WWII World
Soybeans & Big Pharma
Spirituality in Boston / Zen Meditation as New Descartes
The Need to Break Down Current System
Outro