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In his clinic, Batista, at right, sewing up after finishing an operation, works under conditions that are spartan at best |
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What keeps Batista going is not fancy equipment but his
insatiable desire to find a better way of doing things. He
trained in the U.S. and Canada for 12 years, but he discovered
on his return to Brazil that he could not count on the
state-of-the-art technology he had grown used to. So he had to
make do with the available resources. "Established systems don't
allow for any creativity," he says. "Here I can ask questions
and find new answers. I love challenges." He fills his office
walls with inspirational sayings like "He who tries can fail. He
who doesn't try, already has" and "Good judgment comes from
experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."
Batista's income is as modest as his clinic. He receives about $80 for performing each heart procedure; a doctor in a U.S. hospital would charge about $50,000 to perform the same operation. When he gets paid to talk at a conference, he donates the fee to charity. Foreign surgeons frequently try to wine and dine him at the finest restaurants, but he is happiest chewing corn on the cob at his favorite restaurant, Kentucky Fried Chicken. Batista's chief wish is to set cardiac surgery in a direction that will benefit both the developed and the developing world. "Heart transplants are available to maybe 1% of the world population," he says. "I'm trying to help out the other 99%." Batista first tried his heart-trimming procedure on a Brazilian patient named Rogerio Luis Mocelim. Mocelim had been suffering from constant exhaustion, and doctors told him of a surgeon who might be able to help. Batista's procedure enabled Mocelim to increase the amount of blood pumped through his body from 15% to 60%. That was three years ago. Today Mocelim drives a truck and regularly plays soccer. Working in his subpar facilities in Curitiba, Batista becomes discouraged by the U.S. medical system's reluctance to help the sickest patients. "In America," he says, "if a doctor doesn't do anything and the patient dies, it's called a natural death. But if the doctor tries to do something to save that person and he dies, the doctor gets blamed for the death. That's backward thinking." The sickest patients excite Batista most because, he says, "they are the ones I can help the most." Despite the continuing controversy over Batista's theories and procedures, some American doctors have adopted, and adapted, his work. Chief among them is Dr. Patrick McCarthy of the prestigious Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, who has done the most extensive testing of the procedure. He has performed close to 60 operations since April 1996. "When I first heard about this procedure, I had to go see it for myself, it sounded so improbable," he says. "But after a few days in Curitiba, we were ready to start trying it out in Cleveland."
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