Heart Disease – Prevention

Transcript

“We do some things that help reduce plaque by rotor rooter. We pulverize it with laser. We have laser technology. But my recommendation to people is everybody always come to me and ask me questions about how do you remove plaque? You know, how do you deal with the complications? But I feel, and I’ve always felt, and this is why I’m participating with Doctorpedia, is that prevention is more important than cure. Preventing heart disease is way better than dealing with it after it occurs, right? So, you know, patients want the best treatment for a heart attack. I won the national award for my treatment of heart attacks. But I spent more time in my office every day, telling patients, these are the ways to prevent this from happening again. Because I don’t want to be there awake at 3:00 AM, doing CPR, doing measures and trying to salvage people.

I want to be there keeping them from having that happen in the first place. So this is why it’s really important to focus on fencing the cliff than investing in the ambulance in the valley. What American healthcare has done traditionally, because we’re a business oriented, you know, healthcare system, is that we’ve invested a lot in technology, a lot in treatments, but we haven’t invested enough in prevention. And if we put more effort in prevention, we can actually save a lot of money because you know, it’s much easier to get somebody to quit smoking than to put stents in their carotids and their coronaries and their legs and throughout their body, or, you know, one heart attack is so expensive that if you prevented that one heart attack, you could spend that money and getting a whole city to quit smoking. And I think we should put more of our interests in prevention than in technologies to try to make plaque go away or make plaque dissolve, or, you know, the things that I do in the middle of the night, sucking out clot, putting in balloons and stents, pumps that keep people alive during a cardiogenic shock episode.

These are all technologies that we have and they work very well. But I feel like if we could do a little bit more upstream in preventing heart disease, we make a big difference for people in the longterm.”