"Narratives for the Discerning Connoisseur of Deep Dialogue"

Listen/view program. Original Broadcast September 29, 30 & October 1, 2010. Dr. Irving Dardik is a true maverick and a thinker of vast proportions. His background includes an illustrious career as a vascular surgeon, almost a decade of work with the U.S. Olympic  Committee’s Sports Medicine Council (which he founded), an award-winning career as an amateur sprinter, and the culmination of all of this – Dardik’s formulation of SuperWave Theory. A competitive sprinter throughout high school and college, Dardik decided to forgo ambitions of becoming an Olympic sprinter and instead attended Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, following his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania – where he had been Captain of the track team. Dr. Dardik spent two years as a resident at Morrisania Hospital in East Harlem, New York and did his surgical residency at the Montifiore Medical Center in New York City.

In 1972, early in his medical career and while in private practice as a vascular surgeon, Dr. Dardik invented the Dardik Biograft™, a vascular bypass graft that uses tissue from the umbilical cord. Told by his superiors that this would never work, Dardik persisted and within years the procedure was being performed by surgeons around the world and, to date, has helped tens of thousands of people. This innovative technique earned Dr. Dardik the American Medical Association’s most prestigious award for research, the Hektoen Gold Medal, in 1977.

Throughout his medical career, Dr. Dardik held professorial positions at the Montefiore College of Medicine (New York), Albert Einstein College of Medicine (New York) and at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.  Dardik was also a Senior Research Scientist at New York University’s LEMSIP laboratory. He has been published in a wide variety of medical journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of Surgery, the American Journal of Gastroenterology, Archives of Surgery, the Journal of Medical Primatology, Annals of Surgery, American Surgeon, and the International Journal of Cardiovascular Surgery.
Dardik’s passion for athletics coupled with his medical experience, led him to return to the world of sports in 1978 – this time as the Founding Chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s Sports Medicine Council. Through his experiences with the Olympics and Olympic athletes over the next seven years, Dr. Dardik would continue to make observations that led to his formulation of SuperWave Theory. However, the triggering event on this front was the unexpected exercise-induced death of his close friend, Jack Kelly, a former Olympic athlete and President of the U.S. Olympic Committee. Dardik was determined to figure out why his friend had died and to discover the relationship between exercise and sudden death. Mr. Kelly’s death came shortly after the well-known runner, Jim Fixx, had also died under similar circumstances. Dr. Dardik resigned from the Olympic Committee and his surgical practice, and devoted his time to studying the body’s physiological variability.

And so began years of intensive interdisciplinary research – the result of which was Dardik’s SuperWave principle and his related LifeWaves program, which uses exercise and passive recovery as a means of increasing heart rate variability. During this time, and as Dr. Dardik continued to refine and disseminate his ideas, he received attention and interest from health care professionals and researchers who offered assistance in the testing and delivery of Dr. Dardik’s LifeWaves program.
In March of 1991, New York Magazine featured a cover story on Dr. Dardik entitled “Making Waves: Can Dr. Irv Dardik’s Radical Exercise Therapy Really Work Miracles?” At the time, Dardik had refined his LifeWaves program and had been using it successfully with people with a variety of disorders. The New York Magazine article reported some success stories, including that of a patient with multiple sclerosis. Dardik received thousands of inquiries as a result of this story, including one from a woman who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and told by her doctors that she would never walk again. In less than a year on Dardik’s program she did indeed walk again – an event that was so remarkable that it received press coverage. However, after she discontinued participation in Dardik’s program her progress reversed, an event which led her to take Dr. Dardik to the New York State Board of Medical Conduct, which ultimately revoked Dardik’s license for failure to keep proper medical records and for allegedly promising a “cure.” This was despite the fact that all of Dardik’s clients on the program had signed an agreement that explicitly stated that there was no guarantee of a cure and that the program was still experimental.

Despite setbacks, Dr. Dardik has persisted and preserved and is singularly committed to creating awareness of SuperWave Theory. Dardik and his ideas are gaining currency once again with numerous prestigious laboratories around the world, not to mention multi-billion dollar companies, researching and testing specific applications of SuperWave Theory. Participants in Dardik’s LifeWaves program are growing by the day, with private clients as well as interest from corporate clients. Dr. Dardik’s theory and ideas are revolutionary and paradigm-shifting in their content and implication. As a result, ‘maintstream’ attention and recognition continues to be a challenge — a challenge that Dr. Dardik meets with calm assuredness as he continues his commitment and dedication to bringing SuperWave Theory to the world.