2023-11-03 23:28:00
The surgeon Juan Carlos Parodi
Days following receiving the Lifetime Achievement award at the Konex Awards, the prominent Argentine surgeon Juan Carlos Parodi admitted this Friday that he was excited by the recognition and gave his vision regarding the current situation that Argentina is going through, which – he assures – has concerned.
It was in an interview with Nelson Castro, on Radio Rivadavia, where the doctor and inventor of the endoprosthesis ratified his decision to live in Buenos Aires, although he admitted to understanding the young people who choose to leave. In this sense, he said he had little hope for the future: “I am very worried,” declared the man who has an extensive international career and traveled to several countries around the world practicing his profession and teaching at prestigious universities.
Known, among other great achievements, for having saved the life of Pope Francis in 1982 and former president Carlos Menem, on October 14, 1993, Parodi said he still had “a small hope for the country’s recovery” and said that his dream It is that it goes back to being the place it was before, when he was a boy. Appealing to his memory, he described Argentina as “vigorous, supportive and with good possibilities for everyone.”
-How did you feel when you received the award at Konex?
-When it is from my country, where it was more difficult for me to impose things, it is incredible. It really was exciting. He made several developments, but the most notable was the treatment of aneurysms that today revolutionized the world’s aneurysm surgery, which today is the sixth cause of death. It had a great impact: in April the president of the American College called me and told me ‘young Carlos, a million-dollar case was made in the world.’ What you feel is ‘gee, I helped people’. Because it reduced mortality practically to 0. It is a great satisfaction.
-With the success achieved worldwide, why did you stay in Argentina, Professor Parodi?
-I was a full professor at Washington University, which is among the three best medical schools in the US. They treated me and paid me very well, but the ray sensor told me that I was receiving too many. The radiation is carcinogenic and the signal on my device said the limit was dangerous. There I had to convince myself that the projection with radiation had ended for me, because each procedure lasted half an hour while I was exposed to the rays. I had to stop there, but I already had so many disciples that the impact really wasn’t going to be important, they all operated the same as me.
Juan Carlos Parodi analyzed the current situation in the country and admitted to being worried
Not only in St Louis, but in practically all the states of the United States, in all the countries of Europe, in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay. The most interesting was one who called me from Japan a month ago. He was the president of an Asian surgical congress who had been my disciple. One day, on a visit to Japan, he approached me and told me he wanted to be one. Since he spoke English very well, I sent him to New York and in a few years he truly was a brilliant man. But despite everything, at age 8 he told me that he missed his culture and returned to Tokyo. And the other day he called me to go to Tokyo with my wife and he made me an Honorary Doctor at the University of Tokyo.
-How do you experience this very particular moment in Argentina, in which neuroprostheses are also lacking?
– I am very worried because coincidentally a few months ago I was in Rome and they invited me to dinner with the president of the RAI. And he tells me: “Argentine history is very easy, before and following we sent them the Duchenne scholarship recipient. You were a country that was first in GDP per capita in 1895, you remained high with Canada and Australia, but in 1946, with the arrival of the Duchenne scholar, you had an abrupt fall from 4th place, to the African place on the gross product curve.” .
And I believe that unfortunately Argentina had those two periods and we are in the second. And I don’t know if we’re going out. It makes me very sad because there are so many educated, good, hard-working people. But, on the other hand, they have done so much harm: they have created so much poverty, which is something that depresses me a lot because I did studies of demographic growth in the poor and the prognosis is not good. Crime and drug addiction increase, educational levels drop. 68% of the children are poor, poorly nourished, with poor education, addicted to paco since the age of 10, which produces brain necrosis. The IQ drops and it is increasingly dangerous to go out in the Conurbano, in Rosario. And this does not improve, on the contrary, the prognosis – unless a miracle occurs – is dire.
– Young medical students are looking to finish their degree to leave the country, what do you think?
-The life prognosis is really very poor. The residents earn less than a prisoner, they earn more than the minimum pension, which is what I have. What is happening is catastrophic. I have some hope, perhaps too small, but I hope that we are saved from what happened to us in recent years.
I was reading that you should not vote blank because Chávez rose because he won the blank vote. And he came out second, but since they were blank (the others), he came out first. And they have been there for 40 years and it is the poorest country in the world despite being the richest in oil. Lack of freedom, abuses, torture and everything we know regarding Venezuela. Not to mention Cuba. We don’t want that, but it can happen to us, perfectly.
The renowned Argentine doctor saved the life of Pope Francis in 1982
-In whose hands are we Argentines going to be left when there are 68% of poor children? It has a projective value that generates concern
-They are our future adults and this is how our society will be. And it already is because most of our society is already almost at levels of poverty and very bad education, the trials of educating are calamitous.
-This deterioration has implied the disregard of merit. Because merit, regardless of the individual, is projected onto society.
-I was young and it took me a long time to do what I did and it cost me effort. It’s what I always say. There is a book called “Out Lawyers” that says that to be successful you have to have an IQ, not much, 120 is enough, and you have to have emotional intelligence, but above all persistence. The law of 1000 days: if one does not have persistence… It happened to me in everything and I did not have sponsors, I did it alone, I paid for the research myself and in the end I was successful in many things I did.
-I recognize that you might live comfortably like a king anywhere in the world and you live in Argentina
-Yes, that’s true.
-He is a man who served many people in power and never took advantage of that, which is why he charges the minimum. What is his dream?
-Yes, I collect the minimum retirement. My dream is to see a country as it was when I was a child. Because I love my country. My country is my home, where my family is, my relatives. My dream would be to see something that we have already seen, which is to have a thriving, supportive Argentina, with good possibilities for everyone. Because when it comes to social assistance, I think the only thing that matters is giving opportunities to everyone. Because what is unfair, which I saw when I did field work in the villages, are those poor kids who had no possibilities. That is unfair. And they hugged my leg and wouldn’t let go because they had no affection. If I had been born in their place, I would surely be the worst in society, resentful, without education, without any degree of solvency in anything, and it makes me sad because not giving opportunities to children is very unfair. Because they did not choose to come, they were brought, so one is responsible for what one chooses and if one does not choose it, I think it is the responsibility of all of us.
That’s why I wanted to make a law, which in the end was vetoed, on responsible procreation. Because I saw that procreation in Argentina is asymmetrical: in places without possibilities there were 4.7 boys per couple and in the general population 1.9. And if one makes the projection that they first start having children in adolescence and then have more children, the number of people will double in less than two generations. It means that our adult future is going to be all like that.
In 2018 I did the study in Pozo de la Cava and in Merlo and a few months ago I saw those families once more and everything I had predicted came true. As Tévez said, a man who arouses admiration in me because he came from very low. When in Fuerte Apache they asked him regarding his childhood friends, he said two things happened: either they are dead or in prison. In 2018 I had the cadastre of the villas and I saw what had happened to those families. And those who smoked paco now take cocaine and ride motorcycles stealing cell phones. And we had already foreseen it, that criminals were going to come out of there. And another study that was done on teenage mothers: 50% of the children are delinquents.
Juan Carlos Parodi is known, among other great merits, for having saved the life of Pope Francis in 1982. In that year, the doctor was called by a cardiologist he knew to treat a sick priest to whom several of his colleagues refused. to attend. He visited him in a clinic in Parque Centenario and saved him: it was Bergoglio.
He told the anecdote in dialogue with Mirtha Legrand years ago: “I have a very sick priest and your colleagues are a little evading the burden,” was what his friend, the cardiologist José Diorio, told Parodi, when he asked for help. As he recalled, he encountered “a priest with sunken eyes, dehydrated, in pain.”
Upon examining him, Parodi realized that the priest had gangrene in the gallbladder and peritonitis. “He was going to die,” he assured. He intervened the next day with Bergoglio, then an anonymous priest, who was walking once more a week later.
“I’m not going to be able to pay you,” he recalled what today’s Pope Francis told him following the operation came out safely. “I didn’t come for money, I came for that book,” Parodi responded, pointing to History of Ignatius of Loyola, a copy that he took signed by a priest he didn’t know and who in 2014 invited him to the Vatican, although he mightn’t that time either. pay him.
On April 9, 2014, Parodi was at a congress in London and managed to have a private audience with the Holy Father. It was on that occasion that Francisco himself reminded him of the night when, as Bergoglio, he had saved his life.
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