Dr. Vivian Rambihar, a globally renowned Toronto cardiologist, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, author and global community activist for close to 50 years was inducted into the Scarborough Walk of Fame 2024 for Health and Science on April 10, 2024.
He is one of the foremost global thinkers today, with pioneering contributions in medicine, science and society with global impact.
Dr. Rambihar grew attended and taught math at Queen’s College. He migrated to Canada in 1970, after winning the Guyana Scholarship and studied medicine at McMaster University after a BSc at the University of Toronto, then trained in cardiology at McMaster University and the University of Toronto.
He started cardiology practice in Scarborough in 1980 and began community engagement and health promotion, advocating for system and policy change to address the high rates of premature heart disease and diabetes, especially in the immigrant and South Asian community.
He is a pioneer in chaos and complexity science, teaching health professionals and using it for health promotion for 30 years, and advocates its use in medicine and health, and for complex global crises, an idea validated by the 2021 Physics Nobel Prize as the science of climate change.
His book “Tsunami Chaos Global Heart – using complexity science to rethink and make a better world,” written after the tsunami of 2004 and made available free online, is called “a work of visionary intensity” by BW Powe, author of “A Canada of Light.” He rewrote medicine from a chaos and complexity perspective, with his “Chaos 2000 Making a New Medicine” book, responding to James Gleick’s 1987 book “Chaos Making a new Science.”
Dr. Rambihar is a pioneer in Diversity and Health, with global contribution since the 1990s. As the first South Asian community cardiologist in the emerging diversity of Toronto in 1980, with a large SA community, he identified and addressed significant disparities in health.
He was among the first in Canada to do research confirming and reporting such disparities in heart health and to start advocacy and health promotion in Scarborough, across GTA and nationally for 3 decades, helping to establish Immigrant Health, Ethnicity and Health and gender differences as important in the changing demographics and emerging diversity of Toronto and Canada, and written Editorials on Diversity and Health.
The Guyanese scholar has brought these two ideas together, for even possibly a greater impact in the future, proposing chaos and complexity thinking to transform DEI and community engagement as well as medicine and health, with an emerging literature. DEI is complex and dynamic, with disparities amplified during the Covid pandemic and worse expected with climate change and other global crises.
Dr. Rambihar taps into his 30 years of experience using chaos and complexity for medicine, health, society, and Diversity and Health, to propose using it for global crises, for DEI and community engagement.
He advocates using this 21st century science for global crises in many posts to the BMJ, with his 2023 BMJ Letter to the Editor proposing that all medical schools should teach chaos and complexity.
There is increasing validation of this, such as the Editorial in Jan 2024 Can. J. Family Medicine “Family Medicine is Complexity Medicine” and Dr. Rambihar’s previous Letter to the Editor “Age of Complexity,” and his books on the subject.
