Most of us think that the heart pumps blood, and this pumping is the way blood moves through the body.
It is thought that with some help from one-way valves in our veins and the contraction of skeletal muscle, the human heart can contract with enough force to pump blood through our arteries, all the way to the tips of our toes, back through the veins, and to our heart again. This is the conventional wisdom, and it is taught in medical schools all over the world. But what if it's not correct?
In the mid-1800s, a German physician and researcher named Johann Thudichum doubted the ability of the heart to move the blood through the entire body and declared, “If there were no other force promoting circulation than the heart, the heart of a whale would be required in the human chest, to affect even a very slow and languid circulation.”1
Another German physician, E. H. Weber, constructed a model of the vascular system using a section of small intestines and a pressure-propulsion pump for a heart. He found that no matter how forcefully the pump operated, he could not maintain pressure in the venous side of his model.
He concluded that “the mean pressure does not depend on the action of the heart, but on the amount of fluid in the model.”2
In addition to these early doubters, some modern research also questions our Understanding of the heart as the main mover of the blood through the body. For example, in 2003, researchers studied the efficiency of heart cardiac muscle. When
