Heart Talks

Heart Disease is Preventable

Although Benjamin Franklin was referring to fire safety in his famous saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” these words certainly apply for heart disease. When I was a resident in Internal Medicine, I distinctly remember taking care of a 45-year-old man who was admitted to the hospital for his 7th heart procedure to fix blocked arteries. I couldn’t help but wonder how he developed such malignant coronary artery disease and thought that there must be a better way to keep him from having these recurrent [...]

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Twenty five years ago, I found myself at a professional crossroads, choosing between two very different subspecialties of internal medicine—cardiology and oncology. At that time, there was very little overlap between the two fields. There were only a few cancer treatments that affected the heart, and almost no interaction between specialists in the two fields. Several years later, a professional mentor developed advanced congestive heart failure as a result of his cancer treatment, and I was struck by the irony that a life-saving treatment came with such a marked cost in quality of [...]

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