By Frederick Halley

VALENTINE’S Day is celebrated in Guyana and the world over mostly for love and chocolates, if not love of chocolates, but not if Dr Vivian Rambihar, a Guyanese cardiologist in Toronto, has his way.

He is trying to change this to make Valentine’s a day for health and heart health, and to continue it year-round. He invites everyone to be part of this change and to think heart and think health every day, with Valentine’s Day being a day to celebrate and remind us of this.

He says, what better day to think of heart health than Valentine’s Day, when you think and see heart images everywhere and hear songs of the heart played all day?

Dr Rambihar is a 1969 Guyana Scholar who attended and taught mathematics at Queen’s College before studying medicine at the revolutionary new McMaster University Medical School in Canada, graduating 50 years ago. He specialised in cardiology at McMaster and the University of Toronto, and was in Guyana in 2025 to share his experience and attend a QC Reunion.

Dr Rambihar has looked after many Guyanese who emigrated to Canada and recognised high rates of heart disease and premature heart disease among them, especially in the Indian community. He did research on this, followed by community outreach for health promotion.

He recognised the complex and changing dynamics that lead to health and disease, and developed this approach to advocate for change in favour of better health, with a holistic, all-of-society approach. This included recognising and addressing factors outside the usual practice of medicine that cause heart disease, such as advertising, systems, policies, access to care, culture, and customs, and the need to work on these to achieve change for improved health.

Because of this, he went outside his office to churches, temples, schools, and community centres in Canada and the Caribbean to promote health, trying to understand people in their communities and environments, and to overcome barriers to health at the personal, community, system, and policy levels.

This is why he started Valentine’s Day for Heart Health in 1983 as community outreach, with an inspirational interdisciplinary team at the Scarborough General Hospital, running for over 25 years, and why he hopes everyone would join him in this, here and globally. The team included his daughter, Toronto cardiologist Dr Sherryn Rambihar; Toronto paediatric cardiologist Dr Joe Jagdeo, who grew up in Guyana and attended Queen’s College; and many other health professionals.

Together with this team, Dr Rambihar extended this concept beyond heart health to a Global Heart concept, launched at a Valentine’s Day for Heart Health event in 2005. This was just after the devastating South Asian tsunami of December 2004 that took 250,000 lives, one of the worst natural disasters ever.

This idea is described in his book Tsunami Chaos Global Heart: Using Complexity Science to Rethink and Make a Better World, available free online by searching the title, with sections on preventing heart disease and on chaos, complexity, and complex systems in medicine and health.

Global Heart was also launched at the University of Toronto Medical School by his daughter Dr Vanessa Rambihar, a Toronto family doctor and a U of T medical student at the time, who volunteered in Sri Lanka for a month soon after the tsunami. Also instrumental in this initiative was U of T medical school student adviser Diana Alli D’Souza, a community activist and honorary Guyanese who lived and worked in Guyana, and who was featured in a recent Guyana Chronicle Pepperpot magazine article for one of many awards she received for her community work.

Dr Rambihar is part of the continuing effort by many to improve the health and heart health of Guyanese at home and abroad. He gave a well-received talk in Guyana in March 2025 on heart health, along with two of his daughters, cardiologist Dr Sherryn Rambihar and physiatrist and sports medicine specialist Dr Nadira Rambihar. The conference was opened by Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony, with speakers from Guyana, including Dr Gaitri Satram, Dr Karishma Jeeboo, and Tarlika Persaud, manager of conference sponsor Chirosyn Inc.

Dr Rambihar also gave a Zoom talk for the Indo-Caribbean Cultural Centre (ICCC) during Christmas 2025 on Health and Wellness During the Holidays, sharing a virtual podium with Dr M Raizada (US), Dr M Bahall (Trinidad and Tobago), and Dr Sawan Jagnarain, a well-known doctor and public health advocate in Guyana.

Dr Rambihar followed this with another Zoom talk for the ICCC to start off 2026 on heart health and diabetes in general, and across the Indian diaspora, together with Dr Mahendra Carpen, a Toronto-trained and well-known Guyanese cardiologist and electrophysiologist and adviser to the President of Guyana, as well as cardiologists Dr V Kapadia from Fiji and Australia, and Dr P Narayan from Fiji and New Zealand.

They discussed the global trend of increasing heart disease, diabetes, and other illnesses and risks, including mental health, smoking, vaping, alcohol, substance abuse, and increasing premature heart disease, heart attacks, and diabetes in Guyanese, especially among Indians, and hypertension and diabetes are also increasing in other ethnic groups.

The reasons for these were discussed, including biological, social, environmental, commercial, and other determinants, such as increasing obesity, fast-food restaurants, screen time with reduced physical activity, and more, which are predicted to become even more challenging with rapid development in Guyana.

Recommendations for changing this and creating health across Guyana, all ethnic groups, and globally were discussed, requiring change from many directions, levels, and approaches, with a holistic and complex systems approach, in addition to community and individual change.

The speakers all recognised the tremendous efforts being made locally and globally for health, including awareness and prevention programmes, vaccinations, community strategies for creating health, such as more physical activity, healthy eating, and school programmes for fitness and health, the opening of hospitals, the use of technology and AI, volunteerism, and much more.

In the spirit of this transformational effort in Guyana and the world, to create health and a culture of health as part of Guyana’s development, Dr Rambihar invites everyone, on Valentine’s Day and after, here and globally, to think heart and think health.

And to take it even further, to think Global Heart—caring for each other, humanity, and the planet, and what that can achieve—but that’s a story for another day.