Love-Heart Link – Part 3.

Love: A Good Medicine

Love-Heart Link – Part 3.

I was most curious to know what the great Indian cardiac surgeon Dr Devi Shetty, MB BS, MS, FRCS thinks about the love-heart link and Google made me bump into a smart video where he is addressing the students at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore. He was sharing his experience about a project which his son, an alumnus of the Stanford Business School in USA and his friends undertook in one of Dr Shetty’s multiple hospitals.

According to him the project was on how learning can save lives – how you can train people a little bit and that can make a huge difference between life and death. But, I would highlight it as a case study on how love can be the best care-giver in the post-operative stage. When patients undergo a heart surgery, they stay in the care of the hospital for five days. During this period, the patient’s spouse generally stays with the patient but not allowed to touch the patient, or do anything for the patient like dressing the wounds or administering medicine. The patient is totally under the intensive care of the doctors and the nurses. The spouse plays the role of a silent spectator.

Exactly four days after the heart operation, the spouse (generally the wife) is called. She is given a plastic bag with all the tablets and told to go home with the husband and take total care of him. This is what happens all over the world. However, with such an abrupt instruction, she is lost as much as her husband is. They don’t know what to do. There was total intensive care by trained and experienced staff at the hospital; and now, at home, there is nothing.

Dr Shetty gave the project to the young MBAs on how to educate the spouse for effective care-giving soon after the operation. Dr Shetty explained to the youngsters that care-giving with affection and compassion comes naturally when our loved ones are suffering. It is an inherent skill – some possess it less and some others, more; but it is within everyone. But after a critical heart surgery, what would effective care-giving include, the fresh MBAs had to interact with all concerned, make a list of do’s and don’ts and educate a set of spouses. (Reference 1)

The few things the students found were essential included:

1. Reading/checking the blood pressure using a BP measuring apparatus

2. Dressing the wound properly.

3. What all medicine are to be administered and what are the likely side-effects.

4. Importance of taking the medicine on time as prescribed by the hospital.

5. Simple physiotherapy and body movements.

6. Maintaining input-output chart: what the patient drinks and how much urine he passes.

Once the patients’ spouses were educated on the above, the readmission rate following a discharge came down by 30 percent – because when the patient went home there was someone to take care of him with love and empathy. Why the spouses learnt so fast during their very short 5 days’ stay in the hospital because of their genuine loving relationship with the patients and as they wanted them to recover and restore normalcy or near-normalcy as soon as possible. This live case study from a world renowned cardiac surgeon reminded me of an experimental study I had done with the reputed gynaecologist & obstetrician Dr Gouri Kumra MB BS DGO MD on premature twins about a year ago where I recommended the infant’s mother to remain in the intensive care and pick up care-giving tips in addition to the music medicine that I had applied. This case study has been documented in my recent book on ‘Bio-musicology’. (Reference 2)

[References:1. Dr Devi Shetty, “Labour of Love/Future of Learning/IIM-Bangalore: 7th December 2020, YouTube.

2. Siddhartha Ganguli, “Music is Magic/Music is Medicine”, Noida: Allied Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2023.]