Randas Batista


Randas José Vilela Batista is a Brazilian medical doctor and cardiac surgeon. He graduated in medicine at the Federal University of Paraná in 1972. After that, he moved to United States to do residency. Twelve years later, after passing through Canada, England and France, he would end up with a postgraduate degree in cardiac surgery. Then he returned to teach medicine in Brazil.

Cardiology

Doctor Randas developed eight techniques for cardiac care, considered revolutionary. The best known of these is the "Batista procedure", that removes a piece of the dilated heart to treat heart failure patients. Thus, the method would exclude the need of a transplant. The procedure became famous around the world, but there are some questions about its efficiency. According to information from the Brazilian Society of Cardiovascular Surgery, the technique has become obsolete. Four years since the first operation, only 25% of the patients survived.
Randas does not consider these data real. According to him, data from Instituto do Coração, which performs the surgery, indicates that survival 5 years after surgery is of 60%. He also suggests the reason why, in the United States, they do not perform procedures with the name "Batista Surgery": the technique is considered experimental there. In this way, the public authorities would not pay for the surgery, leaving to the interested patient the option to change the terminology to "ventricular aneurysm resection", which in practice is the same procedure, to have the treatment paid by the U.S. Government.
The techniques invented by him render honors until today in European countries and the United States. In United States he was considered one of the fifteen world heroes of medicine in a list of Time magazine and CNN. He also had his name engraved on a memorial on the island of Kos, in Greece. He is also the president of Vilela Batista Heart Foundation that, in partnership with the Japanese holding group Tokushukai, builds in the city of Apucarana, Paraná, the one who must be one of the largest heart hospitals in Latin America.