The Body Temple: the Heart
by Jack Hoehn | 31 July 2024 |
Oh, my anguish, my anguish!
I writhe in pain.
Oh, the agony of my heart!
My heart pounds within me,
I cannot keep silent.
Jeremiah 4:19
It was 2:30 am when from sound sleep I suddenly awoke with a feeling of anxiety, terror, and pounding in my chest I had never experienced before. In dark seconds I changed from doctor to patient. My most valued core organ was demanding attention.
When our digestive system malfunctions, we have abdominal pain or a belly ache. If our lungs wheeze, cough, or squeal, we are short of breath. If the skin is damaged, we have pain, burning, or itch.
But if the heart signals trouble, it is not an ache, wheeze, shortness, burning, or itch—the first word to come to mind with cardiac dysfunction is heart attack!
Tora, Tora, Tora! Head for the bunkers! Call 911! All hands on deck—this is war!
All my life my resting heartbeat had been just under 60 beats a minute. With exertion it would go a bit faster. And the rhythm was regular and clocklike, comfortingly so. The quiet drum would encourage me into sleep.
Now suddenly something wild, irregular, and rapid was happening. It was too fast and it was very irregular. Some quick beats hardly moved the pulse at my wrist, others after a pause boomed. I was not in pain—I was in distress, anxious, fluttery, short of breath, and now mortal.
Jack the patient woke from his confusion enough for Dr. Hoehn to begin to self-diagnose. I was not having a heart attack after all, but rapid atrial fibrillation. After sunrise I called my doctor instead of calling 911, and he did the EKG that confirmed my suspicion that I had joined the ranks of men and some women who suffer from atrial fibrillation.
This began a sequential trial of medicines to stop or slow the rapid rate, followed by coronary artery angiograms and echocardiograms, and finally an open heart surgical repair of a leaky mitral heart valve that stopped the rapid atrial fibrillation for two years. Then ablation, more echocardiograms, repeat angiograms, and five years later—also on Valentine’s Day—another open heart surgery, this time to replace the malfunctioning valve with a pig’s valve.
(How dare we cage and exploit those wonderful animals with curly tails!)
An unsurpassed pump
Only the size of your clenched fist, this powerful pump works sixty times a minute without stopping any minute, hour, day, week, month, or year of your life. The second it stops is when you die. And yet it is two pumps, one to pump blood through your lungs and back, and the other to pump the blood to the rest of your body and then back.
The two pumps must be perfectly coordinated, as breakdown in one pump leads immediately to breakdown in the other. The heart muscle itself is totally unselfish, taking no oxygen directly from the blood itself. Like all other organs it gets its small share from the coronary arteries that come back to feed the never-stopping pump. The kidneys get the most, the brain the next. Your heart pumps 2,000 gallons of blood every day. That is more than double in one day what the average driver pumps into his car in one year.
Not just any muscle
Evolving just one kind of muscle would not satisfy the design needs of the body. Neither skeletal muscle nor smooth muscle is capable of the sustained work needed by a heart. If you took a grapefruit-size rubber pump and then squeezed it hard enough to shoot blood up nine feet into the air, once a second, how long could your hand muscles operate this little pump before being totally fatigued? Heart muscle must never get tired, and it has to work in a coordinated fashion with every other heart muscle cell.
Heart muscles are tubular structures made up of rod-like myofibrils in chains organized into little bundles, or sarcomeres. The myofibrils are long proteins, some thick and some thin, called filaments. The thin ones are called actin. The thick ones are called myosin. They slide past each other in a process involving the release of calcium, to make a kind of charge causing the contraction of the fibers and generation of the force of the pump.
As one would suspect if designing a heart, there must be many mitochondria in cardiac muscles to generate the large amounts of fuel (ATP) needed, along with oxygen. And the heart muscle fibers must be contained in a very clever membrane (sarcolemma) capable of controlling the constant flow of proteins, calcium, sodium, ATPases, beta-adrenergic receptors, etc., to allow for the exchange of needed materials with the extracellular fluid.
Unique systems to allow ions to quickly flow from one myocyte to another allow the synchronized contraction of the cardiomyocytes in unison. Tada! A heartbeat or pump. Everybody together now! How well and silently, how perfectly it functions, we animals with hearts don’t understand,
Until it malfunctions. Then we suddenly awake at 2:30 am knowing something is terribly wrong.
Not an anatomy textbook
Bible writers thought your feelings and emotions came from your kidneys. “Human kidneys are cited figuratively as the site of temperament, emotions, prudence, vigor, and wisdom. In five instances, they are mentioned as the organs examined by God to judge an individual,” says an entry in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
Other cultures felt that the pump located in the center of our chest could be where our love comes from. (By the way: when you put your right hand over the left side of your chest for a pledge of allegiance, you are likely pledging with your spleen, not your heart!) Perhaps it was because a shot of excited adrenaline occurs when you see your boyfriend or girlfriend, and makes your heart begin to beat a bit faster.
The Hebrews thought the heart was the brain, for when they describe some secret thought they write, “He said in his heart.…” There is no mention of the brain as an organ in the Bible.
The Bible is right about God, but wrong about anatomy and physiology.
So trying to use the Bible for divine insight into anatomy or physiology is not a useful project. We can all translate “He said in his heart” into “He thought to himself”—and understand the story. But pretending there is supernatural science in the Bible is not honest. We may acknowledge that the Bible writers were honest, and inspired to write, but unaware about many facts and details of science in the natural world. The Bible is real, and real means as true as it could be, not magically true; with facts as true as they knew, not as true as the eternal God knows them to be.
Remember: God did not write the Bible. Humans wrote the Bible, and it is as fallible as humans are. Inspired humans are still humans. Jesus is true, even though he used the wrong anatomy of his audience (we love and think with our brains, not our kardia) to bring us to the right conclusions.
“Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind… and…your neighbor as yourself.’” Matthew 22:37-39.
Changes evolved with intent
- The composition and purpose of the muscles called myocardium.
- The composition and purpose of the covering of the muscles called sarcolemma.
- The inside of the heart, called epicardium.
- The outside of the heart, called pericardium.
- The four unique types of valves between the chambers.
- The electrical conduction and beat coordination in the heart.
All these features are now studied—and often supported with slick engineering, using biological replacement valves, electrical wires and batteries in pacemakers, artificial temporary heart pumps, transplanted organs from accident victims to recipients with heart failure. These medical miracles are carefully engineered, tested, adjusted, designed.
Even random events such as penicillium mold starting to grow in Alexander Fleming’s laboratory never become useful and progressive aids to the evolution and progress of life unless minds, intelligences, brains take those events and make them useful, helpful, designed, extracted, adapted to purpose.
The Bible is not correct that cognition, planning, design, wisdom, thought, emotion come from our beating hearts, or that feelings come from our kidneys. But we could have none of those thoughts and feelings without the careful useful designs of the heart for circulation of the blood, and the kidneys for the purification of waste.
The featured illustration of open heart surgery was first used in Adventist Today six years ago when Jack wrote about his first open heart surgery.
Illustration of heart muscle complexity from Wikipedia Creative Commons.
[This is #10 in a series on worship guided by science. #1 is here. Jack is also known as Dr. John Byron Hoehn, MD, CCFP (Canada), DTM&H (London).
His book Adventist Tomorrow—Fresh Ideas While Waiting for Jesus in its second edition continues to be the most popular book Adventist Today has published. Chapters include: Error or Sin? We’ve Been Wrong Before, The Indestructible Sabbath, Is Friday Night Holy?, Honest With the Bible, 3 chapters on “The Expired Inspired–Ellen White, Very Political–Influencing Culture, Naked and Not Ashamed, and many more.
Jack’s wife, Deanne, has published a delightful new book called Loving You—I Went to Africa, about their 13 years as medical missionaries.
Readers say: “What a beautiful story. Completely drew me in and I read every word. The pacing, the way the events unfold feels like hearing a friend talking about an exotic life of service….” “Great storytelling, great read, hard to put down.”
These books are available at SHOP in the menu at the top of the page. All sales go to support Adventist Today.]
To comment, click/tap here.