By Scott Hensley

Everyone’s been pointing out lately that Robert Jarvik, the doctor who is the face of Pfizer’s Lipitor ads, has never practiced medicine. So what does the guy do? O.H. “Bud” Frazier, a big-time surgeon at the Texas Heart Institute explains in the video below, which comes to us courtesy of the Healthcare Channel.

Jarvik is an inventor who has created devices to assist or replace failing hearts.

“Rob is a lot of things,” Frazier says in the video. “He’s pretty good on TV, it looks like. He’s a pretty good actor. But he’s also a very good machinist.”

Frazier calls Jarvik “a wonderful, talented person” and says he has made some key advances in the field. Patients who receive Jarvik’s devices tend to fare relatively well, provided they survive their hospital stay, according to Frazier.

But Jarvik faces competition from Thoratec, a company that also makes devices for patients with failing hearts. Frazier notes that a Thoratec device called Heartmate II is likely to be approved by the FDA any day now, while a pump made by Jarvik has much further to go before it passes FDA muster.