EMSIE FERREIRA, Cape Town | Friday
SOUTH African heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard (79), says that regular sex is the best way to keep one’s circulation flowing.
Barnard, who now lives in Austria, returned to Cape Town at the weekend with a two-year-old Russian boy who has a constriction is his main heart artery and will not live much longer without surgery.
Russian doctors do not have the necessary equipment, Barnard said, and former Soviet president Michael Gorbachev asked him to arrange an operation.
It is 34 years since Barnard transplanted the first human heart at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town but he said he still does not understand what all the fuss was about.
“What amazed us was not that the patient recovered but the amount of interest the operation generated. Frankly… I did not even inform the hospital superintendent what we were doing,” he told journalists this week.
Barnard also claimed that he never thought there was anything special about being a doctor or found the heart particularly interesting compared to other organs.
Promoting a new book in Johannesburg he told journalists: “I became a doctor to make money so that I could help my family, who were very poor. I never thought I was a better surgeon than anybody else.”
And in the opening lines of the book – titled 50 Ways to a Healthy Heart – he states: “For me the heart has always been an organ without any mystique attached to it… it is merely a primitive pump.
Barnard pioneered open heart surgery and became world-famous after transplanting the heart of a young woman who died in a car crash into 55-year-old Louis Washkansky, who had diabetes and incurable heart disease, in December 1967.
Washkansky died 18 days afterward of double pneumonia as a result of his suppressed immune system, but the operation has now become routine.
Barnard said he made no apologies for the glamorous lifestyle that came with fame.
“Maybe that was one of the reasons for a lot of my trouble, because I never acted like a big professor – I liked girls and dancing,” he said.
He has already confessed to romancing movie stars and in the book he drops more names, writing that he repeatedly tried to save Peter Sellers after he saw an electrocardiogram print-out of the comedian’s heart rate during a cruise off the Italian coast.
Sellers ignored his advice and instead consulted “notorious spiritual healers” in southeast Asia and proclaimed that he had been healed.
Sellers ignored his pleas to see a cardiologist and died of a heart attack two months later.
Barnard cites advice actress Sophia Loren once gave him on how to reduce anxiety. She told him: “Never cry over things that cannot cry over you,” he recalls.
Barnard advocates sleep, exercise, eating vegetables, ignoring your cell phone, eating a bit of fat, drinking wine and having sex, devoting many pages and ascribing much importance to the last but warning that it works best coupled with romance.
“Sex, regular sex is the most beautiful, healthiest and most pleasurable way to keep the circulation in gear, keeping the heart healthy,” he writes, adding that it also helps stave off the flu and makes men live longer.
Lonely people, on the other hand, are doomed to die young, he says.
Barnard also wholeheartedly recommends that men should use the anti-impotence drug Viagra, though he claims he never has.
He takes an unconventional approach to stress, writing that it is not the killer people believe it to be.
“Stress is not all. It can motivate and create self-confidence. The body’s true enemy is constant haste.”
Barnard left South Africa in 1999 and spends most of his time in Vienna. He has said he has only two regrets, endorsing a dubious youth elixir and not doing enough to fight apartheid.
“I opposed it whenever I could. But I didn’t stick my neck out.” – AFP