Infinite Health with Dr. Arasi Maran
Sep 29, 2026 · 50 min · 13 segments
Welcome back to Infinite Health! In today's episode, Dr. Arasi Maran unravels the fascinating story behind one of modern medicine’s small but mighty marvels: the stent. From its humble…
So what happens to
them? 1970s, in the early 1970s, there were only two options, okay? Number one, medication, which at the time was fairly limited.
okay bypass surgery bypass surgery had arrived in the late 60s and honestly it was quite transformative but it is exactly what it sounds like a sternotomy splitting the breastbone heart-lung machine weeks of recovery with nothing in between that was the entire menu okay you had a handful of people looked and thought oh the blockages inside the tube we can get catheters into the tube Why are we opening the chest itself, you know? And honestly, the person who first thought of it was not a cardiologist.
In 1964, he had a patient, an elderly female with very bad diseased legs, you know, blood vessels all blocked, had a gangrenous foot.
He passed a series of progressively larger-sized catheters through the narrowed artery in the leg, essentially forcing the blood vessel to open mechanically.
He just pushed it through and through a small one, a slightly bigger one, a slightly bigger one, and just like stretched out the blood vessel.
And even though it sounds really, really crude, and a lot of his colleagues thought he was absolutely reckless, you know, his nickname became Crazy Charlie.
And that's a well-known story that surgeons wrote and, you know, and try to be just visualize things.
So they would say angiography only, just visualize, don't treat because they were very worried that crazy Charlie would do something crazy to their patients.
So what happens to
them? 1970s, in the early 1970s, there were only two options, okay? Number one, medication, which at the time was fairly limited.
okay bypass surgery bypass surgery had arrived in the late 60s and honestly it was quite transformative but it is exactly what it sounds like a sternotomy splitting the breastbone heart-lung machine weeks of recovery with nothing in between that was the entire menu okay you had a handful of people looked and thought oh the blockages inside the tube we can get catheters into the tube Why are we opening the chest itself, you know? And honestly, the person who first thought of it was not a cardiologist.
In 1964, he had a patient, an elderly female with very bad diseased legs, you know, blood vessels all blocked, had a gangrenous foot.
He passed a series of progressively larger-sized catheters through the narrowed artery in the leg, essentially forcing the blood vessel to open mechanically.
He just pushed it through and through a small one, a slightly bigger one, a slightly bigger one, and just like stretched out the blood vessel.
And even though it sounds really, really crude, and a lot of his colleagues thought he was absolutely reckless, you know, his nickname became Crazy Charlie.
And that's a well-known story that surgeons wrote and, you know, and try to be just visualize things.
So they would say angiography only, just visualize, don't treat because they were very worried that crazy Charlie would do something crazy to their patients.
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