Guest Blog: How Blood Flows Through Your Heart Valves & Your Body
Written By: Adam Pick, Patient Advocate, Author & Website Founder
Published: April 15, 2025
The patients and family members in our community never cease to amaze me.
This time, John Berner, did something quite amazing. To help educate himself, his wife (a heart valve patient), and our community, John took it upon himself to create a diagram that answers the very important question, “How does blood flow through your heart valves and your body?”
In John’s Words…
Here is what John wrote to me in an email that accompanied the diagram above:
Greeting Adam, I am a retired (mostly) Registered Professional Engineer (PE-Ret). As such, I still perform limited expert or forensic services for various legal offices, plus manufacturing and insurance organizations – but only if they’re of interest to me. As result of my wife’s recent heart issue, I decided I had to understand how the human heart functions. Also, one of the problems with heart issues is that most people don’t understand how the human heart and its four valves function. Many times, this amounts to people not even knowing enough about the subject to ask meaningful questions. This included me.
Therefore, I decided to see if I couldn’t come up with a diagram to help me more clearly understand the heart’s function. The above attachment is the result of this effort. This is one mechanical-industrial engineer’s view of the human heart.
I’m for helping every possible person to understand the, basically simple, concepts of this extremely well-designed pump and system.
Best regards,
John M. Berner
Professional Engineer
Written by Adam Pick
- Patient & Website Founder
