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How Does Blood Flow 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?"

Blood Flow Through Heart Valves & Body Diagram

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

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Written by Adam Pick - Patient & Website Founder

Adam Pick is a heart valve patient and author of The Patient's Guide To Heart Valve Surgery. In 2006, Adam founded HeartValveSurgery.com to educate and empower patients. This award-winning website has helped over 10 million people fight heart valve disease. Adam has been featured by the American Heart Association and Medical News Today.

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