Artificial heart valve Artificial heart valve An artificial heart valve is a device implanted in the heart of a patient with valvular heart disease. When one of the four heart valves malfunctions, the medical choice may be to replace the natural valve with an artificial valve. This requires open-heart surgery. Valves are integral to the normal physiological functioning of the human heart. Natural heart valves are evolved to forms that perform the functional requirement of inducing unidirectional blood flow through the valve structure from one chamber of the heart to another. Natural heart valves become dysfunctional for a variety of pathological causes. Some
Comparison of MD and DO in the United States modest research programs compared to MD schools, and fewer DO schools are part of universities that own a hospital. Osteopathic medical schools tend to have a stronger focus on primary care medicine than MD schools. DO schools have developed various strategies to encourage their graduates to pursue primary care, such as offering accelerated 3-year programs for primary care, focusing clinical education in community health centers, and selecting rural or under-served urban areas for the location of new campuses. Many authors note the most obvious difference between the curricula of DO and MD schools is osteopathic manipulative medicine (OMM), a form