In Bonita, Dr. Lorenzo Gonzalez-Lavin is a Chula Vista-area board-certified cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon practicing from Palm Drive along the Sweetwater Road corridor. Cardiac surgery patients require pre-operative dental clearance to reduce endocarditis risk, a protocol coordinated with practices including Bonita Point Dental Arts before scheduling valve replacement or coronary bypass procedures. He earned his medical degree from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in 1958, completed surgical residencies at both SUNY Upstate Medical University and Hahnemann University Hospital, and finished a cardiothoracic surgery fellowship at Hahnemann in 1967. His published research includes studies on the Ross procedure — pulmonary autograft aortic valve replacement — and his operative scope overlaps with the interventional cardiology team at Cardiovascular Institute of San Diego for patients requiring combined catheter-based and open surgical approaches. A member of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery and the Cardiothoracic Surgery Network, his highest-complexity cases include open-heart valve repair under cardiopulmonary bypass, coronary artery bypass grafting with arterial conduits, and thoracotomy for mediastinal mass resection.