Dr. Rajiv Kumar, MCh
Cardiothoracic & Orthopaedic Surgery Advisor
Dr. Rajiv Kumar is a senior cardiothoracic surgeon with over 5,400 documented surgical cases and a member of InterHealthTour's Medical Advisory Board. He contributes directly to cardiac, orthopaedic, and spinal surgery content, reviewing it for clinical accuracy and ensuring risk information reflects genuine current surgical practice.
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk / Pexels · illustrative, not a photo of the physician
Full Biography
Dr. Rajiv Kumar is a cardiothoracic and spinal surgeon who has performed over 5,400 procedures across his career, primarily at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute and affiliated centres in New Delhi, India. His practice spans coronary artery bypass grafting, valve repair and replacement, and spinal decompression and fusion surgery — an unusually broad dual specialisation that reflects his early surgical training across both fields before subspecialising.
He holds an MCh (Master of Chirurgiae, the Indian surgical specialty qualification) in Cardiothoracic Surgery, and has contributed to training programmes for junior cardiothoracic surgeons at Fortis-affiliated teaching hospitals, with particular emphasis on risk-scoring discipline and conservative surgical candidacy assessment as core components of surgical training rather than optional extras.
Clinical Philosophy
Dr. Kumar has publicly stated that roughly one in five international patients referred to him for bypass surgery are ultimately better served by optimised medical management or angioplasty — and that recommending against surgery, when surgery is not the best option, is "the harder and more important skill" relative to performing the operation itself. This philosophy extends to his spinal surgery practice, where a similar proportion of international enquiries are redirected toward structured physiotherapy rather than surgical intervention.
Role at InterHealthTour
Dr. Kumar contributes clinical review to InterHealthTour's cardiac and spinal surgery content, with specific focus on ensuring published complication rates and surgical candidacy criteria reflect genuine clinical evidence rather than optimistic marketing framing. He has advocated within Indian cardiac surgery circles for standardised, publicly reported outcomes data — a transparency standard he applies to his review of content on this platform.
Editorial Standards Applied
Content reviewed by Dr. Kumar follows InterHealthTour's standard verification process, with particular attention in his subject areas to ensuring surgical risk is presented using validated scoring tools (EuroSCORE II for cardiac cases) rather than vague reassurance, and that non-surgical alternatives are given genuine consideration in treatment guides rather than token mention. See our verification methodology for the complete editorial process.
Approach to Clinical Content Review
Patients researching cardiac or spinal surgery abroad who encounter content reviewed by Dr. Kumar benefit from his consistently conservative approach to surgical candidacy — a principle he applies as rigorously to editorial review as to his own surgical practice. Having personally declined to operate on a meaningful share of the international patients referred to him, in favour of medical management or physiotherapy, he brings direct experience distinguishing cases that genuinely require surgery from cases where non-surgical alternatives deserve equal consideration.
His review process for cardiac content checks that surgical risk is presented using validated scoring tools rather than vague reassurance, that alternatives to surgery are given genuine rather than token discussion, and that published outcomes data reflects actual centre-specific results rather than generic industry averages that may not represent any single facility's real performance.
Why This Matters for International Patients
Cardiac and spinal surgery carry among the highest stakes of any medical tourism category, and the commercial incentives in this space can create pressure toward surgical recommendation even where evidence is more equivocal. Dr. Kumar's involvement in reviewing InterHealthTour's content in these categories is intended to counterbalance that pressure, ensuring patients researching treatment through this platform encounter genuinely balanced information about when surgery is — and is not — the right path.
Independent Verification
Readers are encouraged to independently verify current credentials rather than relying solely on this summary. Registration and standing can be checked directly with the National Board of Examinations, India (for his MCh qualification), and professional affiliation confirmed through Fortis Escorts Heart Institute (publicly searchable at fortisescorts.in). Additional verification is possible through Fortis Escorts' published surgeon credentials and his documented case volume across cardiothoracic and spinal procedures. InterHealthTour reviews these credentials periodically as part of our ongoing partner verification process, but we encourage patients to conduct their own independent check before making treatment decisions based on any specialist's involvement with content on this platform.