“THERE’S NO MONEY TO FUND THE FUTURE TREATMENT OF THE CARDIO EPIDEMIC, AND YET WE BELIEVE OURSELVES INVULNERABLE TO IT”
Dr. Valentín Fuster
Science, technology, medicine have made great achievements, tremendous advances to provide a higher quality of life for more people around the world.
But our modern society faces new challenges in the field of health, and the key is: scientific research for the prevention of current pandemic diseases. If these are not cut they will lead the global health system to bankruptcy.
Currently, the cost of treating the cardiovascular diseases pandemic have already soared in many countries. In a few years it will be unsustainable for any local health system.
The good news is that it is in our hands to reduce this expense and make life healthier and happier for all.
How? Raising awareness, disseminating the message of prevention and contributing philanthropically to the scientific research of health education. In short: developing the vision that a healthier and happier society without the risk of cardiovascular diseases is possible through education.
People’s generalized thought is that a heart attack will never happen to me. It might happen to all the rest, but not to me.
Dr. Fuster believes that until we globally change this way of thinking, this culture, we will continue to have a global epidemic.
Dr. Valentín Fuster began his career in scientific research on a disease that already was becoming the number one killer: heart attacks.
As a researcher, the obvious question was to get to the root of the issue: What causes a heart attack? Is it a blood clot or is it something else? So, he moved from blood clots, to what actually caused the blood clots, which is arteriosclerosis. And then he moved to what causes arteriosclerotic disease and that is: human behavior.
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Human behavior is the root to solving it all, Dr. Fuster concluded.
And then again, the next natural question for Dr. Fuster was: Can we change human behavior, given a time pattern?
The huge change in Dr. Fuster’s Vision in treating cardiovascular diseases at a global level is that by changing human behavior in time to effectively prevent cardiovascular diseases, we are no longer talking about treating the disease with huge amounts of human pain and medicines, hospital and budget resources spend but instead, we are talking human HEALTH, which makes an enormous difference.
Dr. Fuster acknowledges: “I made a transition from a researcher understanding disease to a researcher understanding health. I believe in people. I like people a lot. To be a research scientist in a lab, isolated and not seeing patients is something that would have never worked out for me. So, from the very beginning I worked about 50% of my time in patient care and 50% in research. This has been very helpful to me, because I see the problems, and then, you may try to solve them.”