Be afraid of old ideas. They keep you where you are and stop you from growing and moving forward. Concentrate on where you want to go, not on what you fear.—ANTHONY ROBBINS, AMERICAN MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKERAS MASON SONES and René Favaloro pursued surgical solutions to CAD, surgeons cast their eyes on heart failure (severe reduction in the heart’s pumping function). The two most common causes of heart failure in adults are diseases of the heart valves and scarring of the heart muscle after a heart attack.Today it is hard to imagine the era before the spectacular developments in surgical treatment of heart failure. Cardiologists relied on digitalis, a foxglove-derivative handed down from the prior century, which sometimes provided a spectacular relief of symptoms. One of the toxic effects of digitalis is distortion of visual shape and color. Vincent Van Gogh’s obsession with yellow and his distortion of perspective has been alleged to be the result of digitalis intoxication. Even if the story is apocryphal, his paintings do capture how digitalis’s toxicity affects vision.
