MUMBAI: The country’s first angioplasty
was performed not in the five-star-like environs of a private hospital
but in a civic hospital’s medical school in central Mumbai. In 1987,
Sion Hospital’s cardiology department showed the country how blockages
in the heart could be fixed without huge cuts and blood loss; only a
thin catheter carrying a balloon travelled to the narrowed spot in the
blood vessel and unclogged it. The duo who performed the landmark
procedure, Dr A B Mehta and Dr D Pahlajani, are today counted among the
country’s leading cardiologists.

Clearly, though Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray
underwent an angioplasty in one of the city’s poshest medical centres,
Lilavati Hospital, a cursory look at hospitals run by the Sena-ruled BMC
reveals a classy performance over decades. The country’s first
angiography was performed in Sion Hospital in 1978 by Dr M J Gandhi. The
city’s seniormost bureaucrats often land up at clinics managed by
cardiologists of these teaching hospitals, the logic being doctors at
medical schools have the best training and wide experience and are hence
the best. “Chief minister Prithviraj Chavan chose KEM’s cardiology
department for a checkup,” said a doctor.

KEM Hospital,
the biggest corporation-run hospital located in Parel, boasts of two
catherisation laboratories instead of one that most hospitals have. Cath
labs are where minimally invasive heart procedures are performed. KEM
Hospital’s head of cardiology Dr Prafulla Kerkar holds the distinction
of performing the most procedures in the world to fix holes in the
heart’s often forgotten areas, the sinuses of Valsalva.

The BMC
runs medical schools at each of its three super-specialty hospitals –
KEM, LTMG Hospital in Sion and Nair Hospital in Mumbai Central. What
differentiates these hospitals from private sector ones is that they
perform procedures the latter wouldn’t offer. “We operate on children
and pregnant women with rheumatic heart disease. These won’t be offered
in the private sector because they aren’t too lucrative a proposition,”
says an old-timer.

Research is another area. When Lancet
published a study on worldwide trends in heart diseases, data from KEM’s
cardiology department helped understand that Indians get heart attacks
at least a decade earlier than their western counterparts.

An
old student of KEM’s medical school said, “Two decades back, Dr Samuel
Matthew Kalarickal would come to Mumbai to teach cardiology at KEM.”
Chennai-based Dr Kalarickal performed Uddhav’s angioplasty at Lilavati
last week.