A 25-year-old scientist is taking on one of cardiology's biggest challenges: helping the heart repair itself after a heart attack. When a heart attack blocks blood flow, heart muscle cells in the affected area can die within hours. Unlike tissues such as the skin or liver, the heart has very little ability to regenerate. Instead, the damaged area is replaced with scar tissue, which can't contract like healthy muscle. Over time, this loss of function can weaken the heart and increase the risk of chronic heart failure. Pilar Ferrer, a biologist and graduate of Favaloro University in Argentina, is developing an experimental hydrogel through her startup, Amnova Biotech. Inspired by the amniotic membrane—a placental tissue already used in regenerative medicine—the gel is designed to be injected into damaged heart tissue, where it serves as a supportive scaffold that may encourage the body's own repair processes rather than leaving behind only scar tissue. So far, studies in sheep have shown encouraging results, including smaller areas of damage and improved heart function after treatment. While these findings are exciting, they're still in the early stages. Human clinical trials are not expected to begin until around 2028, and many therapies that succeed in animals ultimately fail to produce the same results in people. If future research confirms its effectiveness, this regenerative strategy could represent a major shift in how heart attack damage is treated. Would you be interested in seeing treatments that focus on rebuilding heart tissue instead of simply managing permanent scarring?

One of the most heartbreaking patterns I see in my cardiology practice is not medical—it's emotional. Especially in Persian and Jewish families, I meet extraordinary mothers who love their children so deeply that they slowly sacrifice their own joy, health, friendships, and identity. They believe that if their child is suffering, they too must suffer. They wear misery as proof of love. But the unintended consequence is devastating: the child doesn't just carry their own pain—they begin carrying the unbearable weight of believing they have destroyed their mother's life. Few burdens are heavier than a son or daughter thinking, "Because of me, my mother will never be happy again." That isn't love; it's guilt masquerading as devotion. Rabbi YY Jacobson puts it beautifully: "One suffering person doesn't help another suffering person. The greatest gift you can give your children is for them to know, 'Mommy is actually doing well. Mommy is enjoying life.' Empathy doesn't mean I become miserable. Empathy means I believe in your strength, I stand beside you, and I remind you that hope is still alive." That wisdom echoes the Torah. We are not called to become martyrs for those we love; we are called to become sources of light. The strongest mother is not the one who suffers the most, but the one whose joy gives her children permission to heal. Dance. Laugh. Take care of your health. Continue living fully. Your happiness does not diminish your love for your children—it may be one of the greatest gifts you ever give them.

I want to tell you why I brought this test into my practice. After more than two decades in cardiology, I've learned that the most painful sentence in medicine isn't "you have cancer." It's "we caught it too late." I've watched patients survive their heart disease — do everything right, transform their numbers, add years to their life — and then be taken by a pancreatic or ovarian cancer that nobody was looking for, because no screening test for it existed. Those losses stayed with me. They're the reason I've spent months studying the science behind multi-cancer early detection, and the reason the Galleri test is now available in my office. Here's what it is: a single blood draw that screens for a signal from more than 50 cancers — most of which have no routine screening in this country. It works by reading the molecular fingerprint that tumors shed into your bloodstream, and when it detects something, it also tells us which organ the signal most likely came from, so we know exactly where to look. I chose this particular test after reviewing the whole field, and I chose it for one reason above all: it is the only multi-cancer test that has been studied prospectively in more than 142,000 people who felt completely healthy — the hardest and most honest way to test a screening tool. Who should consider it: adults 50 and older, and anyone at elevated risk at a younger age — a strong family history of cancer, a known genetic predisposition, a significant smoking history, chronic liver disease, obesity or long-standing metabolic disease, or a prior cancer diagnosis. It is not a replacement for your mammogram, colonoscopy, or other standard screenings — please keep every one of those. It's an additional layer, aimed at the cancers we currently don't look for at all. And here is the whole point, in one sentence: for most cancers, early is curable and late is not. Survival for many of the deadliest cancers falls from 80 or 90 percent when caught early to single digits once they've spread. Same disease, same treatments — the only thing that changed is when we found it. That window is everything, and this test is a chance to find it while the window is still open. Please read the full article I've written below. I've laid out exactly how the technology works, what the trials actually showed — including their limitations, because you deserve the honest version — and how to think clearly about whether this is right for you. Then, if you'd like to discuss it, ask us at your next visit or call the office. I'd rather have this conversation with you now than have a different one later.

For Healthcare Professionals Only: Dziękuję, Poland! What inspiring days of clinical exchange. Last week, our latest device made its debut at the 2nd Kashubian-Pomeranian Interventional Cardiology Workshop, bringing together a highly engaged community of interventional cardiologists. The first clinical use, led by Dr. Michał Hawranek (@HawranekMichal), lays the groundwork for the rapid adoption of next‑generation #ShockwaveIVL# technologies in Poland and further progress in calcium modification. It was a pleasure to connect and exchange valuable perspectives on how this innovation can support daily practice and advance calcium modification. Together, we’re shaping what’s next in calcium treatment. For professional use only. US Rx only. Safety Info: Product availability may vary by country.

🚀 First case. New possibilities. #ShockwaveC2Aero# now in Poland. Join us on 19-20 June at the 2nd Kashubian-Pomeranian Interventional Cardiology Workshop to explore insights from the first Shockwave C2 Aero case in Poland and discuss how this technology is advancing calcium modification in clinical practice. Ready to rethink calcium treatment? Let’s take on the toughest lesions, together. Register now: US Rx only. Safety Info: ​Product availability may vary by country.

Wellness Editor Carly Stern sits down with Dr. Sunil V. Rao, Director of Interventional Cardiology at @NYULangone, to break down the biggest myths about heart-healthy eating. Full vid: #sponsored#

I'm a cardiologist. Four surgeries that millions of people have undergone work no better than fake surgery — where the surgeon cuts the skin, pretends to operate, sews you back up, and does nothing else. The patients who got the fake operation improved just as much as the ones who got the real one. This isn't fringe skepticism. It's from rigorous, blinded, randomized trials in the New England Journal of Medicine and the BMJ. And it reveals something profound about the human body — and about how much of medicine is ritual. Here's what the sham-controlled trials actually found: 𝗞𝗻𝗲𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗽𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘀. A landmark 2002 trial randomized patients to real "cleanout" surgery or fake surgery — skin incisions only, no actual procedure. Two years later, pain and walking ability were identical across groups. This was one of the most common orthopedic operations in America — hundreds of thousands a year, over a billion dollars. Guidelines now advise against it. The improvement was real. The scraping had nothing to do with it. 𝗠𝗲𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗰𝘂𝘀 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀. The 2013 Finnish FIDELITY trial compared real meniscus trimming to sham surgery. One year later, the results were the same. This was historically one of the most performed operations on earth — around 700,000 a year in the US. And later data suggests the real surgery may actually accelerate arthritis in some patients. 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁. The 10-year follow-up of the FIMPACT trial, published in the BMJ in 2025, found real surgery beat placebo surgery by about 1.5 points on a 100-point pain scale. You need around 15 points to even notice a difference. It was also no better than simple exercise therapy. 𝗩𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗯𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘁𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘀𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀. Two 2009 NEJM trials compared injecting cement into fractured vertebrae to a fake procedure — same needle, same pressure, even the smell of cement, but no injection. No meaningful difference. Both groups improved fast. Why does this happen? Because for subjective outcomes like pain, the ritual of surgery is one of the most powerful placebos in all of medicine. The anesthesia. The operating room. The care. The deep psychological closure of believing something decisive was done to fix you. That effect is often larger than any pill — and when you control for it, several high-volume operations simply collapse. Now the honest other half, because I won't overstate this. Not every surgery is placebo. Many are genuine, life-saving mechanical fixes. Even in cardiology, stents for stable angina looked no better than sham in the first ORBITA trial — but when the follow-up study controlled it more precisely, the stent clearly reduced symptoms. Real fixes can and do beat placebo. These four just didn't, for these conditions. And these trials are rare, because sham surgery is ethically and logistically hard to run. Which means there are almost certainly other common procedures we've simply never tested this way. So here is what I want you to do if you're ever offered surgery for chronic pain. Ask one question: "What did the sham-controlled trial show?" For many joint and back pain conditions, physical therapy, exercise, weight loss, and time match or beat the operation — without the infection risk, the anesthesia risk, the blood clots, the cost, and the recovery. Surgery is sometimes exactly what you need. But sometimes the most powerful treatment in the room is simply the belief that treatment has occurred. Your body has more healing power than the system profits from admitting.

I'm a cardiologist. Every day I tell patients some version of the same hard truth: the heart muscle you lost in your heart attack is gone. It won't grow back. We can open the artery, but the dead zone becomes scar — and scar doesn't beat. A 25-year-old scientist in Argentina is trying to prove me wrong. And her approach is clever enough that I'm rooting for her. Here's the problem she's attacking. When an artery blocks, heart muscle in that zone starts dying within hours. Unlike your skin or your liver, the adult human heart barely regenerates. So your body does the only thing it can — it patches the hole with fibrous scar. That scar doesn't contract. The heart pumps weaker, stretches, thins, and marches toward heart failure. This is why roughly half of heart failure patients die within five years. We manage the decline. We don't reverse it. Pilar Ferrer and her team at Amnova Biotech are going after the thing we've never solved: rebuilding the muscle itself. Their tool is inspired by one of the most quietly remarkable tissues in biology — the amniotic membrane. The sac that surrounds a baby in the womb. It's rich in regenerative and anti-inflammatory factors, and doctors already use it to heal stubborn wounds and repair the cornea. They've turned that biology into an injectable hydrogel. Cell-free — no stem cells, no animal components. It ships as a room-temperature powder, gets reconstituted, and is injected directly into the damaged heart zone, ideally during bypass surgery — the operation another Argentine, René Favaloro, gave the world. Once inside, it acts as a temporary scaffold that reengineers the healing environment: it calms the destructive inflammation, grows new blood vessels, and signals the heart's own cells to proliferate and repopulate the dead zone. Instead of surrendering to scar, the tissue gets a second chance to rebuild. The early data, in sheep — chosen because their hearts are close to ours in size and physiology — showed at 28 days: smaller infarcts, improved heart function, more new blood vessels, more dividing cardiac cells. Now the honest part, because I owe you both halves. This is early. It's preclinical. And the history of cardiology is a graveyard of therapies that looked beautiful in sheep and pigs and then failed in humans — different immune responses, different healing, different scale. Human trials aren't expected until around 2028. There is no peer-reviewed efficacy publication yet. This is a candidate to watch, not a treatment to expect. But I want to tell you why it still moves me. The whole strategy is elegant. It doesn't fight the body — it borrows the body's own oldest regenerative wisdom, the biology that builds an entire human being from scratch, and points it at a broken heart. It's cell-free, so it sidesteps the rejection and manufacturing nightmares that have stalled stem-cell approaches. It's stable at room temperature and delivered during an operation we already perform. Practical, not sci-fi. And it's the frontier I've been writing about for months, arriving from an unexpected place: the shift from managing damage to reversing it. Gene editing for cholesterol. Cell therapy for diabetes. Enzymes that erase arterial aging. And now, maybe, a gel that teaches the heart to remember how to heal. For my entire career, "the muscle is gone" has been a sentence with no appeal. A 25-year-old may be writing the appeal. Science with an Argentine accent — born in the same country that gave the world the bypass. Worth watching closely.