ABOUT ME

 I am presently completing four decades of practice as a Cardiologist. The experience has been both gratifying and edifying. The challenge remains to distill out the precious lessons of the past and combine them with the best important new innovations.

I completed medical school in my hometown at the University of Toronto and then came to Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx to complete my training in Medicine and Cardiology. I have been in private practice since then peppered with occasional part-time positions as an ECG lab participant, a nuclear stress lab director and as a cardiac catheterization laboratory director.  Inevitably all these roles would compete with the office care and were permitted to whither.  Finally in 2010 even regular hospital work interfered with providing efficient office care and quite regrettably I had to start referring the hospital care of my patients to the fulltime hospital based cardiologists. 

The wide range of patients who visit the office require being prepared for well individuals whose symptoms are unrelated to any serious heart disease as well as veteran patients with complex longstanding issues. 

Many of these patients lead busy lives and value a practice efficiency that reduces the number of trips to different offices. Initially I equipped the office with echocardiography, Holter monitors and stress testing.  Times change and there are many types of monitors and stress tests so that I rarely use these.  Patients are better served by newer types of monitors and newer types of stress tests and stress test  surrogates.

In the opposite direction echocardiography has become a much more vital part of the practice.  By continually upgrading the equipment   I endeavor to bring the most up to date ultrasound and Doppler techniques into the practice.  This accelerate the process of resolving the patients' issues. Instead of simply reading other laboratory reports, I get  the opportunity to perform and interpret the images myself. 

Along the way I realized that vascular problems were largely being handled by surgeons and therefore their care was being divorced from cardiology and the rest of medical practice. Since 1995 I have made a point of making myself available for the medical care and followup medical issues concerning the arteries and veins because frequently the solution is not a surgical procedure but meticulous medical nonsurgical care. 

The Covid experience has given me the longest vacation of my career.  More importantly it taught it  me the possibility and value of telemedicine. This new skill will survive past the epidemic and become a precious addition to a speciality that never stops evolving